AFL legend Sam Newman has blasted the inclusion of a “welcome to country” ceremony in the Anzac Day Dawn Service at Melbourne’s Shrine of Remembrance last week that sparked booing from the crowd.
In an episode of his You Cannot Be Serious podcast recorded on April 25 but released on YouTube on Thursday, the ex-Footy Show presenter said that while he was against the heckling he thought there was no place for the indigenous ceremonies on Anzac Day.
Newman began by telling guest Greg Evans the dawn service “welcome to country” was the “most disgraceful display of stupidity I’ve ever seen” and declared that “people who run this state and events should be hung, drawn and quartered”.
Aussies boo the “welcome to country” humiliation ritual at the Anzac Day Dawn Service at Melbourne’s Shrine of Remembrance this morning.
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“If you can degrade a solemn occasion, at the Shrine, why don’t you get some people to put up a gratuitous display, a charade, of ‘welcome to country’ and have many of the people in the audience think ‘what is this about?’,” he said.
“It’s not relevant, it’s insulting to the people who have been here, who came here, and we all want to be one Australian nation together, we don’t want to be divisive, and to put that nonsense up at the start of the dawn service and have people wonder ‘what the hell is this about?’ is a disgrace.”
“I do not condone the booing, or the jeers, I do not condone that at all,” he added, and when Evans described the hecklers as “far right”, responded: “I think there was a few others that joined in.”
Newman and Evans then discussed the origins of “welcome to country” ceremonies, with Evans calling them an ancient tradition and Newman saying they were a modern invention that began with Ernie Dingo.
“It’s sheer folly and it’s been perpetrated on us to make us feel guilty about being here,” Newman said.
There’s a time and a place for Welcome to Country and ANZAC Day is NOT one of them. pic.twitter.com/S2YFxNoefa
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Evan responded that he was more upset at the “far-right hecklers”, to which Newman referred to the National Socialist Network’s Australia Day rally and his subsequent interview with Thomas Sewell and Blair Cottrell and repeated that he condemns the far right.
He repeated that he thought the booing was a “disgrace” but asked why there had to be a “welcome to country” included in the first place, calling it “mindblowingly stupid”.
“I think we should degrade ‘welcome to country’ at most events because it’s just not necessary, but not that event, because it takes off the focus of what that event is about,” he said.
The booing at the dawn service sparked condemnation from the corporate media and the leaders of both major parties after it emerged that nationalist activist Jacob Hersant was among those who shouted out from the crowd.
But after overwhelming public support for the heckling and the largest-ever poll conducted on the topic showing 68% of Australians want “welcome to countries” stopped completely, Opposition leader Peter Dutton backflipped on his initial position and said they should not be a part of Anzac Day ceremonies.
Header image: Sam Newman (You Cannot Be Serious – YouTube).
