cont'd ...

As I understand it - the use of the flag is free.
It's only when financial gain is involved that
copyright comes into play - such as the selling of
products with the flag design on it that
compensation is required. Which seems only fair.

I don't like sport being commandeered for social justice purposes.

Look at the soccer teams in England.
Half of those players came from Africa and probably weren't even born in England, but yet they represent some region there.
The locals are supposed to go watch and say look 'They're one of us', but really they're not.

If sport is about social justice, promoting political agendas and maintaining year on year profits via sponsorships, tv rights and other corporate partnerships and if there's barely any links between the players and the places they play for then whats point?

'I was born in Melbourne so I'll go play for Sydney because they're offering the most money.'

It's the reason why State of Origin is popular, because the players actually have to come from there.

All sport mainly is then is a platform to promote social justice and political agendas and keep people occupied and looking in a different direction than what is really going on in the country and the world.

Idiots in Melbourne would've had their brains completely disrupted just because the AFL wasn't on and they have no idea what they were supposed to do with themselves.

Wave your flag or don't wave your flag,
I don't really care who is or isn't getting paid.

None of this grandstanding of the 'bending of the knee stuff' or attacking those indigenous who don't want to part of it is going to create any sense of white guilt within me.

10+ generations ago, my distant paternal relative was sent here as a convict, it wasn't his choice.
My forefathers fought in this nations foreign wars, married indigenous women, and those distant relatives fought in the Frontier wars against the British.
My forefathers already earned my right to have a say.
I'm not responsible for things that happened before I was born.

I bet there will be some divisive racial knee bending.
I wouldn't pay good money to go just to have white guilt shoved down my neck.
I wish the best for indigenous people the same as I do anyone else.

Harold Thomas has said many times that the purpose of the Flag, in his view, was to bring Indigenous people together all over Australia under a common banner. Strictly speaking, unity for the first time in eighty thousand years.

I didn't realise at the time how crucial this could be: that Indigenous groups across Australia had always been very parochial and disparate - that there had never been anything remotely like unity AND how vital that was in the modern era.

Not only that the thousands of clans and family groups had each claimed their own country and guarded it fiercely for eons, but that after 1788, the colonial system necessarily kept Indigenous people apart across the country in their six separate colonial states with the Northern Territory under South Australian jurisdiction (through the Commissioner [Minister] for Education).

Mission societies also perhaps unintentionally divided up their patches and thereby also kept Indigenous groups separated.

Post-War, and until the formation of the Aboriginal Affairs Board in 1967 or so, then the Department of Aboriginal Affairs around 1972 under McMahon, Aboriginal people were still locked into their own parochial preoccupations.

So in many ways, the Flag was one of the first - and perhaps the most striking - symbols and mechanisms for the unity of all Indigenous people all over the country - urban, rural and remote; 'full-blood', yella-fella or whatever; traditional-oriented or very much integrated into contemporary society.

I notice that the Dutch Community Hall occasionally flies a Dutch flag; that Serbs and Croats and Italians and Greeks fly their country's flags at sporting events. It doesn't mean that the Dutch or Croats etc. are claiming any particular bit of Australia - their flags represent their cultural attachments to their countries of origin, perhaps to their languages, and of course their attachments to each other. And I don't see anything much wrong with that.

After all, we're all hyphenated-Australians :)

Joe

The ABBAriginal flag, like the whole 'Welcome to Country' malarkey, is all about commerce and selling things (some) people want.

I've got no problem with that. If people want to buy crystals because of their healing power or bottles of water because its better than rain or want to invest a piece of clothe with special reverence or think that a dance contrived 50 years ago is actually millennia old, and someone makes money out of that ignorance, well good luck to them.

But let's not dress it up as some sort of moral or principled issue.

The guy deserves payment just in recognition or his smarts in hoodwinking a generation.

Dear mhaze,

Settling aside your usual lack of charity on issue like this the point about commercialisation stand to a degree.

One only has to read the history of the ANZAC day match of the AFL to see how money has played such a large part.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anzac_Day_match

However the fact that it has been incorporated by shiesters doesn't negate the power of the ANZAC symbolism.

At least the creator of the flag has curbed the commercialisation to a degree and for that we should probably be grateful.

The options are to design a new flag or continue to allow the rent seeking.