Corporate Indoctrination and the “Yes” vote.

Anyone with recent exposure to Corporate Australia would know just how thickly Employers are currently laying on the Indigenous program at the moment. It has exploded, in no small part due to the toxic effects of ESG policies that are applied at the board level and impact the CEO’s KPI’s – how many women are employed, how many people of colour, how many indigenous. All of these KPI’s are measured in different ways, with different signals given as to the CEO’s obedience to the current ideology – one of the favoured means of signaling obedience is through corporate training programs.

The other driver of this explosion in Corporate Vegemite programming has been the upcoming Referendum. The near universal adoption of “Yes” principals by Corporate Australia backfired earlier this year, as instead of triggering ‘unity and momentum’ it instead triggered intense skepticism in the public for the purpose and motivations behind this referendums.

Consequently Corporate Australia has backed off the more overt support it was giving to “The Voice” that it was giving earlier this year. Instead what they have done is pivot more to celebrating indigenous culture at every opportunity – barely a week goes by without a new screen saver appearing on my computer with some other day of indigenous celebration. NADOC, Indigenous Child education, Sorry Week (month, year?).

One of the common methods of promoting radical indigenous ideology is the Purity statements that I have written about before, i.e ‘Welcome to Country Statements’ in effect statements to our betters that our country doesn’t really belong to us.

Despite being low on agreeableness I’ve generally gotten past without making a big fuss about these things. Although they affect my mood and happiness with my employer, I have found a way around this – simply by avoiding those meeting where these pledges are made, or turning up late to them. At worst I have to passively observe them, they don’t require me to make the pledge myself.

However with a recent training module I could no longer take this approach. The training module contained statements that I fundamentally disagreed with, but in order to complete the training I had to select from a variety of answers that forced me to acknowledge the principals and validity of statements I had issue with.

Long and the short of it is that I refused to complete the training. For anyone with experience of corporate training, especially in regards to training within the Financial industry this is a huge issue – because not only is your bonus tied to completing the training, but the bonuses of senior management are also tied to getting their employees to complete this training.

This was just not true – the collapse of indigenous culture, particularly in the south east of Australia following introduced diseases such as smallpox and measles meant that much of the land that colonists moved to was already empty.

I could have shut my eyes and done it, saved everyone a whole lot of headache, but honestly I think it is about time that I have to start walking the talk. A social movement will continue to move through society for as long as it doesn’t meet any resistance or back pressure – I think it is about time Australians, especially legacy Australians, start to stand up and apply some back pressure.

Initially I was outraged when I read the training material – I was actually so livid I had to log off immediately. After a couple days I thought I had calmed down enough to file my initial complaint, which even then was still very emotionally laden:

The purpose of training and development is to equip staff members with the knowledge and training needed to both ensure they are able to perform their work safely and in accordance with statutory and regulatory obligations. It is not to impart political ideology and debatable one sided social view on employees over maters unrelated to work.

While I am very sympathetic to the plight of Australia’s indigenous communities, and indeed have a small amount of indigenous ancestry myself – a not uncommon occurrence for multi-generational Australians who built our nation, the current training as it stands has the appearance of promoting a ‘black arm band’ view of Australia’s history with regards to indigenous Australian relations and the rest of the country. Even among indigenous Australians the views of this module are not universally accepted.

It is my honest opinion that this module is politically one sided, this can easily be argued given the available answers to the stated questions in the module offer no opportunity to select or disagree with the stated assertions. The plight of our indigenous people rests on a complex number of factors, and explaining the differences in life outcome purely through the lens of discrimination is offensive and wrong. There can be no truth telling when it is one sided – that is lecturing and indoctrination.

As a proud Australian who in our now MultiCultural society identifies as of Colonial Australian ancestry, the training material as it currently stands is offensive to my identity. I cannot in good faith bring myself to even select a response to the first question in the module…. it is offensive to me, my history, my family and my identity.

Stewie in indignant mode

This was all well and good, but the reality of what I’d done kicked in a couple days later. I’m dealing with Corporate types and while writing a bunch of populist, jingoistic opinion might go down well in echo chambers like EZFKA, I needed my complaint to be much more focused and professionally presented. Basically I needed to do a Corporate style presentation; outline facts, outline impact, call for action.

In terms of outlining facts while I started with a 5 page thesis I managed to edit it down my final complaint submission to just a page and a half, broadly just 6 points, of which I will spare you all but 3 of them:

1. The lack of Context
   Stripping the facts of valid context, eliminates the possibility that an uninformed reader will come to a more balanced view as to true events, conditions and motivations that motivated settlers and authorities to attempt to intervene.
   
   The module made no mention of the appalling level of violence and brutality, especially against indigenous women and children, that was present in indigenous culture and camps and is well documented in settler accounts and archeological remains (which I have also written about here).
   
   
2. Suggestions of deliberate genocide by the training
   This is a political statement that is only possible to make through the most extreme and hostile interpretation of our history:

   

   
   
   It is only possible to come to that conclusion by cherry picking laws and rules, stripping them of context – for example the enormous infant mortality rates in these camps, and then offering this as evidence in support of the genocide assertion.
   
   It is an extremist political viewpoint that is made by suppressing context and ignoring ample counter evidence, as well as and many Australians who worked tirelessly, both as volunteers and as public servants trying to implement these rules, in order to try and avert that possible outcome.
   
   “to wipe out the indigenous race and culture” i.e. intentional genocide is an outrageous slur against the majority of early Australian settlers, many of whom worked tirelessly for the wellbeing and benefit of our indigenous people.“
   
   
3. Impact on uniformed
   I am well informed about my combined history, and know when messaging is inaccurate and one sided. But what really concerns me is that this training is probably the first and only bit of history that new migrants will ever be exposed to about early Australia.
   
   Without additional context there is a high degree of likelihood they will accept this most extreme interpretation of our history as the truth, and exit from the training hostile to my heritage, and in their eyes, delegitimize my own ancestor’s significant achievements and contributions to our nation.

The other three that I included in my complaint but won’t bother with here were the possible framing of mixed race Australians universally being a result of a power imbalance and/or sexual abuse (reality was most rape was committed by rival tribes who worked with the colonists), the Framing around Coloniser and indigenous Australians as being universally hostile and without redemption (something Jacinta Price made a point about a few weeks later), and the Treatment of indigenous Children i.e. the stolen generation. Each of these could have an article of their own written about them.

I then wrote as to how this training module impacted me i.e. outline impact.

These issues surround the narrative of early Australian settlers and their interaction with indigenous Australians is important to me, as it directly affects my own identity. I am a 7th generation Australian on my Father’s side. The closest I have to an immigrant relative was my great grandmother on my mother’s side. All my relatives are Australian, I don’t identify with any foreign heritage – not Irish, not English, not Scottish or not Italian.

My heritage is of Colonial Australia, and they are arguably responsible for more of what we enjoy today, than any other group before or since. Frankly I am fed up with having all their achievements other than the slur of genocide unquestioningly stripped from them. This especially the case when the accusations are one sided, biased and stripped of context.

It deeply concerns me that this module, with its extreme political viewpoints that contains no counterfactual evidence opposing these statements, and it is being presented as the definitive truth to people, many of whom as new Australians are not as aware of the problems and context that many of these claims were attempting to deal with.

Without this it is my honest opinion that this training will likely lead to the uniformed user of this module walking away with views hostile as to my own heritage, when the reality is that these issues are far more complex that the extreme political viewpoints given

– Stewie on the war path

Finally I had to outline my call to action:

…for the reasons I have outline above I cannot complete the module. To do so would implicitly signal my agreement or consent with the political speech and ideological statements.

In particular I cannot signal any agreement within the module that Colonial Australians universally and intentionally pursued policies of genocide against indigenous Australians “to wipe out the indigenous race and culture”, as this module claims.

It is for these reasons that I kindly request to be excused from completing this course.

– principled Stewie

So what happened? How did this pan out? What were my take aways?

Initially not so well. Virtually everyone I spoke to initially about my concerns said “Why?” Not that they saw issues with my argument or position, but that it was threatening to ‘rock the boat‘ and after nearly 12 months of the employment cycle could impact bonuses. When I approached a senior manager in my immediate management line he actually initially suggested that I consider my place within the organisation, as the employer ‘had chosen to go down this path, and saw it as a worthy cause‘. So I ended up filing my complaint by myself without any supporters.

So while my complaint was filed and noted well advance of the training deadline, and despite seeking an outcome well prior to it closure, it wasn’t until the start of the very last week of the deadline when I received notice that my request had been denied. Whether this was a strategy to force me to do it, by leaving little time to respond or through apathy I don’t know.

By this stage I’d also conducted additional research and with the furor around the fact that ‘Uluru Statement from the heart’ wasn’t actually a one page statement, but a 26 page document of political grievance. I’d taken it upon myself to read the statement and realised that virtually all the training I objected to had been lifted, nearly verbatim, straight from the Uluru Statement that forms the basis of the Voice. Effectively my employer was using Corporate Training as a backdoor means to support the “Yes” vote.

Finally I went to the department head and had a discussion with him, expressing all my concerns. I didn’t hold out much hope, as he was an agreeable, progressive and fairly young professional – someone who I would have expected to by a typical “Yes” voter. After considering it to my great surprise he actually supported my claim, and on appeal my request not to complete that particular training module was eventually granted.

I am under no illusions as to where my win came from. It wasn’t anything I’d personally argued, it wasn’t any of my logic or words or anything I had written, it was the fact this very senior leader chose to lend his significant levels of personal and social capital, within a very woke organisation, to support my claim.

The argument that actually swung his opinion into my support, was my claim around the module effectively training employees, especially immigrants, in a manner where it is possible that they could walk away with views hostile to my own history and heritage. Especially the claims:

That Colonial Australians universally and intentionally pursued policies of genocide against indigenous Australians “to wipe out the indigenous race and culture”, and that without additional context the uniformed user of this module could walk away with hostile views as to my own heritage.

So my take away is that it is possible to influence and apply back pressure to these social manias. It requires determination on the part of those making the complaint not to back down. Also it requires allies, I was fortunate in that my leader (who is a great leader and bloke in all respects) was open minded enough to see and consider my arguments, and to extend his own significant social capital to my cause.

In order to win over Allies the argument can’t just rest on jingoistic outrage, as in this environment that would just burn any supporters social capital, and which my original submission made the mistake of doing. Rather you need to come at it by appealing to the principals of tolerance, diversity and inclusion, i.e. within the framework that the existing regime demands.

While my success in this small act of defiance has pleased me, at the same time it is disappointing to realise that in an organisation with literally tens of thousands of employees, I was the only one to raise a complaint.

Given the polling around the ‘Voice’ it is likely that a sizable percentage of the total employees probably shared my views and concerns to some degree. But such was the hold of social mania, the demands of agreeableness, and the threats of non-adherence via financial penalties, i.e. bonus outcomes, I was the only employee in the tens of thousands of employees at this company, to make a complaint and object to the assertions made within it.

It is time that people who disagree with this sort of social programming need to speak up. Damn the consequences and personal risk, because history is being re-written right before our eyes, and we’re be deliberately recast as the villain in order to delegitimize our own claims to Australia.