Hospital renaming saga reveals serious limits in the politics of ‘colonialism’ and Labor as a ‘party of racist policy’

Keep your eyes open for a bargain, Car CI-ty
— traditional Australian song

Well, a day is a long time in cultural politics. Yesterday your correspondent was convinced that Dan Andrews’ decision to rename the to-be-rebuilt Maroondah Hospital as the “Queen Elizabeth II” was a double whammy: score some points with older, Anglo, working-class voters — grumpy enough to vote Liberal for the naming itself — and score more points by getting yelled at by First Nations peoples, the Greens etc, and be seen to be the scourge of the progressives.

This appears to be very much the Labor style these days. At the federal level, Labor, having abandoned ground to the Greens, is going out of its way to gain their opprobrium. Had state Labor decided, rather brutally, that it wanted to be seen to be on the wrong side of First Nations peoples? Had it decided that the state Labor “rainbow bulldozer” was looking too progressive and needed a bit of the paint off?

That is now looking less likely. It seems it was not a truly ruthless plan to step back from being over-identified with First Nations’ stuff — at a time when some mainstream voters are getting a little weary of it — but something of a stuff-up. Victorian Labor is a bunch of gum-chewing goombahs for the most part, who wandered into this First Nations’ stuff because the state is the Sweden of the south and really only has half an idea of the depth of feeling involved.

Andrews’ tetchy comment that an Indigenous representative body should stick to treaty drafting shows he really doesn’t get it. Here we are trying to give these people treaties over the land they still won’t get back, and here they are having views about what should be done with it! The nerve! What did Elizabeth II ever do to them?

The implicit question shows a lack of understanding of the concept of “colonialism”, which underpins the treaty-making process and the wider notion that racist structures of dispossession are directly inherent in present events. But there is also a mildly absurd element to it. The plain fact is that Maroondah is one of those words you simply forget is a First Nations’ term. It is as echt suburbia as you get, most famous to other Melburnians for Car City, a car yard known by its annoying/compelling jingle on late-night TV, and the fact that it had its own cafe.

Maroondah Hospital was so named because it was… in Maroondah, and may as well have been called “Hospital No. 6”. Had it been announced that the rebuilt unit was to be called “Victor Chang Hospital” or “John Cade Hospital”, one presumes no one would have objected. Had it been done some other time, everyone might have groaned and moved on. But it wouldn’t have been done thus at any other time. And what this time has stirred makes it impossible for First Nations peoples to resist.

That points to instability in the political-cultural system, which has been coming for some time and centres on questions of colonialism, legitimacy, whose land it is, etc. The whole cultural-political system within progressivism that sustains this is organised hypocrisy, one Labor is happy to partake of when it suits it. From the 1960s onwards, the left and progressives began to acknowledge that 1788 was an invasion and an occupation, not a settlement with a few regrettable misunderstandings, and to recognise and circulate the slogan “You are on Aboriginal land”.

But that slogan and idea occurred as part of a wider socialist movement, and the notion that we would take back the country — including, especially, the resources leases, given to foreigners for peanuts — for all of us. First Nations peoples would then get something like a separate sovereignty, dual sovereignty, separate ownership and control. Pre-Mabo entities such as the Northern Land Council are orphans of those much more optimistic days.

With the slipping away of a socialist prospect, the language and understanding of Black-white relations have shifted somewhat. “You are on Aboriginal land” was a judgment made within a revolutionary Marxist framework. The “settler-colonial” thesis that replaced it is Marxist-influenced, but it has no conception of a radical transformation in which ownership per se will be abolished. So the notion has become one of “stolen land”, understood within liberal ideas of the legitimacy of property rights.

This is culturally and politically unsustainable. The rest of us can’t live as if we’re on stolen land, because if we really acknowledged it, we’d leave. And no one’s going anywhere. Instead, there has become a ridiculous lip service, whereby people who own a house and a holiday house put “living on unceded Gadigal land” in their Twitter bio, and then start looking around for an investment flat.

Practically no one non-Indigenous who blurts this stuff tithes themselves, which they should: pay 5% or 10% of the value of a property they’ve bought to a First Nations charity or fund, or the same on any profit on its sale. Nor do First Nations groups appear to have set up any such fund specifically dedicated to property value. I suspect if they did, a lot of the “living on X land” stuff would melt away immediately.

Most such acknowledgment by whites is the appropriation of the rich meaning of someone else’s culture, by a culture that doesn’t have much of its own, and by a class that rejects such meaning as is supplied from our own culture — such as the tradition, mystery and continuity of the queen’s funeral. White progressives go to First Nations culture to give them something to get through. Why? Because without something like royalist beliefs, all we’ve got is Car City on the Maroondah Highway.

But this ever-extended notion of “living colonialism” has had its contradictions on the other side too. No one can deny its validity — and if today’s allegations against Hawthorn Football Club as to its treatment of First Nations players check out, we’ll have a pretty stunning, utterly atrocious example of it.

But the all-encompassing nature of the idea, and the hopelessness of radical change by political action it suggests, is creating a politics of victimhood, trauma and a sort of “gotcha” process — the mark of codependency rather than a liberation narrative. Let’s be a bit real here: the Maroondah Hospital was surely not, of itself, a much-loved and venerated artefact of First Nations culture. It’s a crappy thing to name it after Queen Elizabeth II, if you’re also doing treaty, or 80 of them, at the same time. But will it really render the new hospital “culturally unsafe” for First Nations people, or induce trauma, as suggested by some? It’s more likely to if it’s bigged up as a place to make a stand.

First Nations peoples feel, understandably, that the process of confronting colonialism has barely begun. Of the other 97% of people on this continent, a significant slice feels it’s becoming a process eating away at the cultural ground required to live everyday life. Even when you screen out the explicit racists, there are still a lot of people who feel that way. Not as anything much more than an irritation, but it’s there. That is the mark of a revolution, of sorts, but revolutions can quickly get overextended. For progressives, the question of colonialism has become the central agon, a cosmic struggle, of their lives. For most others, it has nothing like this presence.

That’s why it seemed like Victorian Labor was making some sort of statement on the limits of its commitment to these discourses, with the hospital renaming. There has been a wondering out loud if the Andrews government really has a commitment to decolonisation with the treaty-making process. Of course it doesn’t. The Djab Wurrung trees stoush showed that: a stretch of asphalt over what was clearly a historical, sacred place.

Eighty treaties? Labor can’t believe its luck. With 80 groups recognised, it’ll always be able to find one outfit in any region of the state to say “yes” to anything it wants. It has just taken the process it uses in the upper house — with a crossbench that yields any combination of votes required for any measure — and projected it on to treaty negotiation.

So the politics of all this is now divided. The overextension of the colonialist/stolen land framing invites the pushback that we live here too — whatever ghastly process made that happen — and we might want to name a hospital after someone who meant a lot to a lot of people. Might be Queen Elizabeth II, might be John Curtin, under whom colonialist and genocidal processes continued too. We can’t abandon the whole of our history, and the continued suggestion from elite media and others that we should will produce a systemic and organised backlash.

But at the same time it’s now undeniable that Labor is now a party of racist policy, channelling its white-skin privilege to run a Black child gulag in the Northern Territory, introducing indefinite detention laws for non-violent crimes in WA — aimed at First Nations peoples with repeated petty theft convictions — and in Victoria, creating a bail regime that locks up First Nations, Islander and African-Australian adults and youths at a furious rate.

The latter’s a doozy because it’s driven by the state’s violence-against-women campaign, and shows the increasingly explicit racism of white elite feminism. Personally, I’m going to resist the notion that our culture should be defined by a guilt drawn from an excessively moralistic notion of the cruel sweep of history. On the other hand, if some campaign wants me to lie in front of a Magistrates’ Court that’s become nothing more than a prison mill for Black bodies, just tell me where to be and when.

If nothing else from this whole process, if people had any doubt as to whether Labor will treat the Voice as a prop to gain some cheap advantage while also disdaining it when it requires, they are surely in no doubt now.

A day is a long time in cultural politics. Labor? It kept its eyes open for a bargain, and it’s shitty.