Most days during the election campaign, millions of my fellow Sydneysiders and I commute past a big cartoon-yellow billboard for Clive Palmer’s Trumpet of Patriots, whose platform declares that “we don’t need to be welcomed to our own country”.
I cycle through a range of emotions while stuck in traffic: despair, anger and finally fatigue. As a Yuwaalaraay woman, I don’t need to be welcomed to my own country; my elders welcome visitors in an act of generosity and respect that is centuries old. This is all so familiar: another election campaign where punching down on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people for attention and votes is the default setting.
