Adam Briggs Makes Short Work Of That Whole “Invasion” Debate On ‘The Weekly’
"Australia is the worst example of squatter's rights ever."
About this time last week, The Daily Telegraph catapulted much of the Australian media into an all-out tantrum over the idea of “invasion”. With a breathless and frankly rather confusing front page, they claimed history had been “whitewashed” by a (well-established) UNSW curriculum acknowledging the nation was invaded rather than settled. Kyle Sandilands then followed suit screaming about students being “wankers”. Alan Jones was invited on Sunrise to complain about it. Today debated the issue with their sports presenter. You know the drill by now.
But, for an issue which was so directly related to Indigenous Australians, there was a startling lack of them being given the platform to speak about it. Indigenous singer Thelma Plum noticed this and slammed Sunrise as “racist” before going after Jones himself. Even The Project failed to include an Indigenous perspective, instead having Waleed Aly speak to Steve ‘blackface is fine’ Price.
Luckily The Weekly has their new “indigenous correspondent” Adam Briggs. On last night’s show, with the distance of a full week giving sombre perspective to the whole mess, he laid it out in simple terms.
“It’s like the word ‘invasion’ just showed up on your shores and forced itself into your vocabulary,” he said. “Loaded words can hurt, though not as much as loaded muskets … Australia is the worst example of squatter’s rights ever. If history were A Current Affair, you’d be the tenants from hell.”
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