It’s difficult to discern the extent this week’s policy proposal from Pauline Hanson’s One Nation regarding DNA tests for Aboriginality is a genuinely held belief or more political hokum from an increasingly weird party.
With the face of the proposal being assigned to the embattled party’s latest recruit in the failed former Labor Party leader Mark Latham, it really could go either way.
Regardless, Latham’s campaign for an upper-house seat in the March 23 New South Wales state election was provided with plenty of publicity when he announced One Nation would demand DNA testing of Aboriginal people claiming welfare payments.
The initial failure of our mainstream media to interrogate the policy after it was announced has also contributed to the “vocal” support it has since received on social media. Surprised? Well, by now you shouldn’t be.
Don’t forget the manoeuvre is from the same mob who put forward the “It’s Okay to Be White” motion in the federal Senate in October last year, that slogan – sourced directly from internet trolls and white supremacists – was only narrowly defeated 31-28, despite support from government senators.
The government’s leader in the upper house, Mathias Cormann, afterwards described the vote as “severely embarrassing” and attributed it to an “administrative error”, before a second Senate vote was held to save face.
It might be said that a similar “administrative error” gripped our traditional newspaper outlets and morning television programs earlier this week when they reported on the policy as a genuine proposal.
Perhaps the absurdity of the policy was both too ridiculous and sensational to warrant serious contemplation, or wilful disregard, or the latest display of white privilege.
Whatever the basis, it’s likely this precise effect – headlines everywhere for Latham – was desired both in the design of the policy and its announcement.
Never mind that a raft of information refuting the science supposedly underpinning the caper was readily available to these outlets.
So it was left to routinely minimised or regularly lambasted media outlets like NITV, Junkee and Pedestrian to provide, while numerous other larger news organisations chortled haughtily at the wheel.
We’ve observed this type of ambivalence before, most notably around Brexit and the 2016 US presidential election. Trump, much?
Meanwhile, the scarcity of critical expert appraisal of the lark bolstered its appeal to sections of the public beyond the usual spheres One Nation and other far-right and hard-right political agencies here and abroad strategically target. Go to the comment threads below the television segments and observe the bin fire for yourself.
In an interview aired on NITV’s The Point, reporter Brooke Fryer, a Cubbitch Barta woman, sat opposite One Nation NSW leader Mark Latham and asked who he would describe as a genuine Aboriginal person.
Latham explained that One Nation had settled on the acceptability benchmark of 25% Indigenous DNA by way of recognising “a minority heritage of a full grandparent equivalent” (insert noodle-scratcher emoji here).
“I just think with the technology available now, that it’s good to know who’s Indigenous and who’s not,” he continues.
“It takes away the whole argument that’s out there in the suburbs and the regions of the nation that you’ve got all these blonde-haired, blue-eyed Indigenous, and they’re not valid, they’re not genuine. And it just puts it all on a scientific, truthful, knowledge, evidence base.”
Fryer – who is Indigenous and blonde-haired and blue-eyed – later asks what Latham would say to somebody like her.
“I’d say do the DNA testing and we’ll find out and I wish you well but the scientific basis, you can’t argue with that can you,” he replies.
Well, yes. There are, in fact, well known, strong arguments on record made by DNA experts like Misty Jenkins, who heads the Division of Immunology lab at the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research in Melbourne.
“When DNA is examined to determine ancestry, the DNA is compared to a ‘reference’ genome. An Australian Aboriginal genome does not exist and therefore to even propose that a test is possible is scientifically inaccurate,” writes Jenkins.
“The two companies which currently offer this ‘service’ use sections of DNA called single tandem repeats (STRs) that vary in the number of copies each person has. This approach is utilised in forensic cases and paternity testing but are not appropriate for genetic genealogy.”
Jenkins also rightlysays the proposed testing is a breach of privacy, extremely racist and makes all sorts of assumptions about Aboriginal people.
As recently as 2016, in response to a television documentary titled DNA Nation, Jenkins and Prof Emma Kowal pointed out “that there is not, and never will be, a genetic test for Aboriginality”.
In their essay for The Conversation they further explain that while Indigenous ancestry is part of Indigenous identity, there are simultaneously other key aspects involved – far beyond the reach of genetics – including cultural knowledge, community acceptance and connection to country.
The anthropologist, Marcia Langton, who is the Foundation Chair of Australian Indigenous Studies at the University of Melbourne, provides further clarity.
“This is in fact the meaning of the High Court decision which has become administrative practice, as would be obvious to anyone with a smidgin of knowledge, in all native title claims,” she says.
Professor Bronwyn Carlson who heads the department of Indigenous Studies at Sydney’s Macquarie University, and who authored the book, The Politics of Identity: Who Counts as Aboriginal Today? points out how subverting the integrity of Indigenous identity could even be viewed as a tilt at undermining Native Title legislation.
“The grading of Aboriginality for the purposes of denying some one the right to ‘be Aboriginal’ is a colonial tool,” she says.
“One that is deployed to continue the well-documented goal of ridding the country of our very presence.”
Jack Latimore is a Guardian Australia columnist
