Free the Flag activists are ignoring key facts

A LOT has been said about the Aboriginal flag over the past few days and much of it is off the mark. It can’t be flown, we’re told, unless a non-Indigenous company is paid a fee. Wrong. Anyone can fly the flag. It’s only commercial use that requires a fee and only because the flag’s Indigenous designer sold the copyright years ago and has been making money off his design since.

I can understand why people think it’s odd this weekend’s AFL Indigenous round has gone ahead without any use of the Aboriginal flag. But before the Prime Minister forks out the $25 million-plus we’re told the flag might be worth commercially, to “Free the Flag” as activists demand, it’s worth learning a few facts. Because, as I discovered working on protocol matters in government, things are not as they might seem when it comes to this flag.

Since proclamation by the Keating government back in 1995, the Aboriginal flag has had official status under the Flags Act as “the Australian Aboriginal Flag”. It’s not a national flag; it’s an “official flag”. There’s a difference because a nation has only one “national” flag, and that’s how it should be.

Despite it being freely flown and used as an activist flag before being made “official” in 1997, a Luritja man, Aboriginal artist Harold Thomas, took an action to the Federal Court to assert copyright over the flag he said he designed, back in 1971. He won, and while he’s granted permission for the flag to be flown, any commercial use requires permission and a fee.

Thomas has entered into a number of commercial licensing agreements and organisations like the AFL have to pay the licensing company to use the flag on things like footy merchandise, while Thomas gets royalties from the licensing company.

It seems it’s one of these commercial licensing agreements — in this case with WAM Clothing — that’s led to the flag’s banishment from this year’s round.

An Indigenous man commercialising his own copyright, and now taxpayers must pay it out? See? It’s not as simple as you’ve been told.

Many Aboriginal people — wrongly, in my view, but passionately — argue their country has been stolen from them. How can we be sure they won’t see any government acquisition of “their” flag as just another expropriation, of what’s theirs? And if taxpayers buy the Aboriginal flag, won’t this just be then used as an argument to try to make it a “national flag”, not just an “official” one? And won’t it put more pressure on governments to fly the Aboriginal flag, jointly with the national flag, everywhere, all the time? I support the Aboriginal flag flying high on days of special significance, like Sorry Day or NAIDOC week, but not all the time, because only one flag represents us all.

Where important symbols are concerned, we should be very careful about change, however well-intentioned.

Surely the flag should be bought by an Aboriginal entity: if Indigenous people want to be more in charge of their own destiny then taking ownership of their flag might be a good way to start.