CLANCY OVERELL | Editor | CONTACT
As the Indigenous Voice Referendum campaign heats up, it has come as a surprise to no one that some of the loudest opponents of constitutionally recognising the existence and self-determination of Indigenous people, are the same cohort of grey-haired voters that have had the easiest lives out of other generation of Australians.
The same demographic that have valiantly campaigned for our natural environment being destroyed by the accelerated burning of fossil fuels due to their dislike of the scary and disruptive thing known as ‘renewable energy’ – and has been directly catered to by both major political classes and the Australian media for the best part of the century.
This particular generation – also known as ‘The Baby Boomers’ – have been heavily criticised over the last thirty years for their inability to look past their own retirement, which many of them believe should have been the day they turned 55, until they turned 55 and realised golf wasn’t actually that fun.
Despite their sense of entitlement, many refuse to leave their high-powered positions in the corporate sector and free up the crowded housing market by selling their unnecessarily large 5 bedroom homes and fucking off to the coast or country like the generation before them did.
Instead, they are staying put in the city, crowding our healthcare systems and pricing young families out of the housing market that they have actively manipulated to pay unsustainable dividends while trapping the younger generations into a life eternally renting from them.
One of these proud opponents to the Indigenous Voice is vocal Betoota-based Baby Boomer, Graham Fox (67), who is starting to get excited by all of the racist vitriol on social media and in the Murdoch newspapers that remind him that this is indeed a world that is tailored to benefit him and only him.
“Why should the Indigenous get special treatment?” asks Graham, whose university fees were paid for by Prime Minister Gough Whitlam, a man he cheered out of office before successive Liberal governments squirrelled millions of public dollars into his pockets through franking credits and negative gearing tax perks that have fool-proofed his decadent property portfolio.
According to Graham, and the town halls full of people who look exactly like him that have rallied to prevent any form of positive change in the lives of our most disadvantaged First Nations communities who were still classified as flora and fauna when he was getting his drivers license for free with a lap around the block with a local copper, the Indigenous Voice is unfair.
“I never got special treatment” says a man who sat at home and watched the entire nation stop working or socialising for three years to protect him from a virus that he was first to get immunised against.
