The Byron shire voted ‘Yes’ and I love that about my home town. Even though I now live in the Tweed Shire owing to limited housing in Mullum I still call the Shire home. It has my heart. In a world where fear rules, Mullum has always had more heart. Yes it’s changing a lot, and every day there seems to be some violent outburst in town, which is very worrying and perhaps should be a separate letter all on its own, but the heart is smart in the Byron Shire. It’s not ruled by fear. It has wholistic logic and a profound understanding of what gives life meaning.
You can see on the census data that the level of education in the Byron Shire is higher than the Australian average, and it shows. I don’t want to call the average Australian a racist dummy – I think we’re generally better than that. Perhaps fear isn’t racism. Perhaps racism is fear but it’s not necessarily the other way around. I just wonder sometimes, being of very average intelligence myself, how on Earth so many people were thinking that somehow the government was going to pull something over their eyes with this vote for an Indigenous Voice. The obvious antidote to thinking this was the blatant fact that the Liberals were screaming ‘No’ from the rooftops.
The Liberal party doesn’t get much more ‘government’ than that. And by ‘government’ I mean what we all hate about the government, which is the way it often tends to be run by a group of individuals who behave like anarchists who make up their own rules, scratch each other’s backs when they’re itchy, and do whatever they feel like on the tax payer dollar. These are the naughty things that many governments do that give them a bad name.
The Liberals are Australia’s best ones. They don’t give a hoot about things like the environment – those pesky Aboriginals would just get in the way of their mining plans if they were to have any say in the matter. They have money to make, quickly before the world burns down, like in the next 20 years. We can’t let anything get in their way or they won’t be able to pillage what’s left to sell so they can make squillions and do God knows what while the world burns down around them. Human rights and justice are just not even on their radar.
What is it, I wonder, that this underprivileged 1 per cent of Australians who are the original caretakers of this land, and who cared for her for over 65,000, have done to look like such a threat to so many? Australians seem to know very little about Indigenous Australians. Trying to explain to ‘normal’ people that on average, colonisers live 10 years longer than original Aussies doesn’t seem to register. ‘They already get what we get’ I hear. ‘Don’t divide the nation’ I hear. No, they don’t, and it already is. Where are people getting their info? I’m not saying the average Australian is not smart, but maybe this is where the government needs to start. At school, with proper education.
For four decades The Echo has printed the stories some people loved, some people hated, and some pretended not to read. If you want us to keep telling the truth, the real truth, not the sugar-coated version. We’ll need your support to keep the presses rolling. 
