Separating fiction from fact
THE information age was meant to make us better informed than ever before. And, yet some falsehoods continue to be regurgitated despite being comprehensively and repeatedly debunked.
“A lie told often enough becomes the truth” is a line most commonly attributed to Nazi Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels or Russian communist revolutionary Vladimir Lenin.
That seems to be the case with the lie that Aboriginal people were once considered fauna under the flora and fauna Act and were not classified as humans until the 1967 referendum.
The truth is that Aborigines were never considered fauna and no such Act existed.
It is an urban myth, pure fiction that continues to be spread far and wide despite many professors, constitutional law experts and researchers setting the record straight.
Disappointingly, those complicit in spreading this “fake fact” are often highly educated members of the media, academia and political class, including Labor MP Linda Burney, ABC-TV host Charlie Pickering and, most recently, actor Aaron Pedersen.
In a wideranging interview with News Corp, Pedersen made the bogus flora and fauna claim which was reWhy ported uncritically as follows:
“People talk about the Stolen Generation, we’re the children of the Stolen Generation. Our mothers and fathers were ‘flora and fauna’. I mean, people have got to understand how that makes us feel,” Pedersen said.
“You can’t go round calling us flora and fauna for 170-odd years and then make us citizens and make us humans. We were humans before that.”
Pedersen knows history will take care of the men who dreamt up the “flora and fauna” policy — “history makes fools of people” — so he fixes his eyes on the future.
“This country can only get smarter by increasing the think-tank.”
This country can only get smarter by calling out fallacious and mendacious crap that is reiterated by those who should know better.
spread tall tales, discredited long ago, when there are plenty of real instances of Aborigines being mistreated after white settlement?
Pedersen is clearly passionate about indigenous affairs so how does he not know that this story spread about his people is rubbish?
If someone as interested as Pedersen can be so misinformed, then it doesn’t augur well for the average news consumer.
We’ve seen this flora and fauna fantasy promulgated in reputable mainstream media to fringe far-Left websites like New Matilda, which published this bile by editor Chris Graham on Anzac Day eve 2016:
“As a nation, we continue to gloss over the reality that the Aboriginal contribution to our various war efforts — and there were tens of thousands of blackfellas who served — was offered at a time when First Nations people were literally classed as ‘flora and fauna’, under an act of Parliament that considered them no more valuable to the nation than scrub and wildlife,” he wrote in a piece headlined “Anzac Day: We’ve Already Said Thanks, It’s Time To Move On”.
I’m not sure what’s more risible: the fact that an editor doesn’t know the meaning of the word “literally” or that he’s so painfully ignorant, despite working as the managing editor of the National Indigenous Times, to publish such a fantasy.
Even the ABC debunked the fauna fallacy this year after Warren Mundine requested they fact check the following statement made by Aboriginal actor Shareena Clanton on Q&A: “My mother was born in 1965 and she was not considered a human being until the referendum came through from the flora and fauna Act in 1967.”
To its credit, the RMIT ABC Fact Check investigation was thorough and its clear-cut finding was: “Ms Clanton’s claim is a myth. Aboriginal people in Australia have never been covered by a flora and fauna Act, either under federal or state law.”
In the past three years, The Australian and SBS have also published comprehensive fact-checking pieces to dispel myths about the 1967 referendum, including the bogus flora and fauna story.
Activist journalists who allow their ideology to override their objectivity continue to damage the media’s credibility. You are entitled to your opinion but you cannot peddle fake facts to suit your narrative.