There are many scandals involving Indigenous people raging around Australia today. From the continual and increasing number of children being removed from their families, Black deaths in custody, third world life expectancy, an epidemic of suicides and many more. All of these deserve front page coverage across the nation, but that’s not the case. The only scandal involving Indigenous people receiving that kind of attention is the one started by the NT News about Senator Nova Peris.
Why was Peris targeted by the NT News, and then smacked about by the News Corp stable? I’ll get to that in a moment.
As reported in Guardian Australia, the Australian Sports Commission has said “an independent audit of the $445,000 given to Athletics Australia for a program at the centre of allegations against Peris found no misuse of the money”. No misuse of money, no suggestion Peris had done anything wrong, no rorting of the taxpayer.
Peris revealed more reasons as to why the emails should never have been published when she told the Senate chamber, “The publications of these emails is part of a long-running and very difficult, long-running child access and financial estate dispute ... The release and publication of these emails is an attempt to extract money, and embarrass me and my family”.
She also revealed that the NT News was aware of this ongoing dispute before they published the leaked emails. So all we have left in the emails is the sex or at least talk of sex which, frankly, is nobody’s business and certainly doesn’t pass the public interest test. It’s simply grubby – the reporting, that is.
It’s also prudent to point out that the other individual at the centre of all this, Olympic star Ato Boldon, has said the report by the NT News included “gross fabrications”. New Matilda alleges Peris’ claims of “blackmail” are in doubt; for her part, the senator stands by her account.
So why was she targeted? We get an insight from another News Corp paper, Sydney’s Daily Telegraph and their sports reporter Rebecca Wilson. Writing on Peris and Cathy Freeman, Wilson stated:
Sadly, these two very, very different Aboriginal women are not friends, and have never been close. While Freeman occupies a special place in our hearts, Peris has created controversy, bitter rivalries and is now at the centre of a sex scandal that threatens her career.
Aboriginal women can be very different – what a startling piece of insight! Did Wilson, a journalist of decades, pick up the phone to the Sports Commission to ascertain the veracity of the claims against Peris? Of course not! For her, “The bottom line is that we loved Cathy and we were not so sure about Nova”.
To my mind, what Wilson is really suggesting is that mainstream Australia is ok with Aboriginal women if they are shy and make us feel warm and fuzzy inside. But if you try to be an Aboriginal woman who’s successful, outspoken – and now political – well that’s just a little too suspicious, uppity and we ain’t having that. Freeman and Peris are both hugely successful women, friends, whose differences should remind all that Indigenous Australians are not a homogenous group.
But that’s not what Wilson sees, concluding “Nova Peris faces the battle of her life to win back the trust of the Australian people, something Cathy Freeman can take as a given for generations to come.” Apparently, Peris being an Olympic and Commonwealth Games gold medallist, Medal of the Order of Australia recipient, first Indigenous woman elected to federal parliament and having been the Young Australian of the Year doesn’t hold much weight.
Meanwhile in Melbourne, fellow News Corp employee Andrew Bolt finished reading the NT News report only to announce “I feel queasy”. Apparently it was Peris making him feel this way, not a newspaper publishing private and intimate emails.
Bolt of course spends a great deal of his time writing about Indigenous Australians. One such article was described by Justice Mordecai Bromberg in the federal court as containing untruthful facts and the distortion of the truth, derisive tone, provocative and inflammatory language and the inclusion of gratuitous asides.
That article too was about Indigenous Australians who seem to have become a little too successful for Bolt’s liking. But in that case and this, just like his News Corp colleagues Wilson and the NT News, Bolt never picked up the phone to find out the truth.
The message from News Corp papers to Indigenous Australia this week is, to me at least, clear: we only like you if your success is non-threatening to our rigid stereotypes of who you are. If they’re not, prepare to be torn down, even if that means abandoning the truth. To Peris and all other Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples I say reach for the stars, be as Deadly as we know you are and I’ll have your back the next time a few journalists decide your success rattles their questionable stereotypes.