For the Australia Day week, Qantas made an inflight safety video nine and a half minutes long. As the current custom dictates, the video begins with an Aboriginal matriarch welcoming the viewer into her magic place. It is about magic places all around the world.
If you pay attention just for the next one and a half minutes, you will see that yes, it is an inflight safety video. How to fasten your seatbelt (from an American convertible in Hollywood). That you should not smoke (represented by Korean women holding incense). That you should read the card in front of you (as shown by Lachlan, who lives in Lapland).
You bet that the flyers are not impressed. The video is too long. No, Qantas’ social admin said. The inflight version will be condensed. No, the flyer responded. You said yourself this is the in-flight video.
And what’s wrong with that? Just rich white men mad at ‘woke’. No, the flyers said. First, the video does not show the airplane's interior at all. We don’t need to see what Noosa or Hollywood looks like, we need the airplane’s interior. Second, with diversity and all, don’t you think the video is too confusing for ESL (English as a Secondary Language) viewers?
Replies told Qantas to learn from Asian airlines like Singapore Airlines and Japan Airlines to make concise safety videos, as JAL proved itself with the total evacuation of almost 400 passengers and crews from a burning plane. This is very ironic since about 20 years ago, Asian students learned that Australians were effective and straight-talking communicators. And yet, now it’s Australia and other Western nations that waste time talking.
&
I’ve anticipated Qantas’ reasoning. A standard safety video would be boring for regular flyers. This “magic places” video shows destinations interesting enough for flyers, including those not serviced by Qantas, like Finland, where Lapland is. By portraying cabin crews (actual cabin crews, right? Not actors) as fellow holidaymakers, viewers will not feel instructed by an authority figure. In short, every reminder, from fastening the seatbelt to evacuating the plane, will come naturally and unconsciously. Qantas, meanwhile, said that the video shows its employees as fellow travellers and explorers too even when the Flight Attendants Union of Australia disagreed.
Overall, the video, as well as equally abstract videos made by competitors, show the worldviews of the creative class. We are borderless people since we are recruited from all over the world. We always look forward to inspiring and being inspired. We don’t take instructions well. We love extravagance and expect to be rewarded for our vision.
On Australia Day weekend 2024, these same creative people (not necessarily the same people, of course), joined the Invasion Day marches by waving…Palestinian flags. When Captain James Cook landed on Botany Bay, Palestine was a part of the Ottoman Empire, but there was never a gripe about Ottoman imperialism, only Britain’s.
Aboriginal activists were also divided with their “day of mourning” colonised by outsiders, by settler colonists coming from Palestine, Lebanon, and even Turkey (one was likelier to see a Turkish flag instead of a Kurdish one), and especially by whitefellas mixing Indigenous liberation with Palestinian liberation.
Pardon me, it’s all just my far-right talk. All liberation comes together and there’s no contradicting one. Aboriginal Australians must be happy to chant “Intifada now!”, and Indonesian Islamists must be happy to march under a Morning Star flag. After all, the Anglo-Irish non-binary folks supported everything over that weekend.
Most Australians could enjoy the Australia Day weekend. Viewers of the Australian Open finals. Suburbanites on the beaches and in the parks. Weekenders on the bushes and the outback. The only people who couldn’t enjoy their weekends were just business owners and staff of CBD premises, who had to deal with regular demonstrations. Just like in other Western cities, many of them are immigrants and working-class Australians making ends meet. Just like in other cities, many of the protesters have undergraduate degrees and never have to worry about visa validity and converting savings into Australian dollars.
&
Australian supermarkets like Woolworths created a controversy by saying that they would not stock Australia Day goods for two reasons. First, these goods don’t feel right for consumers, and for the team members. Second, the demand for these cheap goods is low, anyway. It’s just business.
Even twenty years ago, I’ve been given the idea, in university, that the flag of Australia is tacky. It belongs to blonde bimbos (who got paid for the body paint or the bikini), overweight yobbos, Islamophobic racists, and the awful men who led the Coalition. If you’re a true Melburnian, you fly a different flag. The rainbow flag, the Aboriginal flag, the Ireland flag. There were East Timor and Tibet flags too, but they are out of fashion now. Fashionable now are both the Palestinian flag and the trans flag. Corporates go ahead with the Progress Pride flag.
In short, it’s a class flag. Sure, Palestinian flags and trans flags are equally made in China just like Aussie “flags and flip-flops”, but the former flags show that you’re a uni graduate and you don’t have to work a shift on Saturday. Woolworths even entertained the idea of flying Aboriginal flags at its stores before withdrawing them to offices. The corporation has Aboriginal workforces, but the people who feel inspired by the flag are likelier to be European Australians who vote for the Greens.
&
It's February now and the Australia Day is behind us. A handful of people have become Australian citizens while many more will spend the year trying, and a handful of them will fail. Meanwhile, many, many more Australian citizens will struggle to make ends meet, pay bills, and keep their jobs.
Supermarkets and other retailers are now on the Lunar New Year campaign, and Coles, Woolworths’ rivals who pledged to keep selling Australia Day merchandise, had allocated more spaces for its Lunar New Year products since they made better sales, they were the more expensive “Made in China” goods, and they were politically halal.
More Chinese citizens will come to Australia as students, tourists, and workers. The students sustain the universities and their far-left student unions. The tourists might or might not be used to weekend protests, but that’s not their business. The workers, bless them, can spend years living without caring about Australian life outside their spheres.
Many educated Australians, on the other hand, have learned to ignore the presence of Chinese people, Australians or otherwise, and take them as mere extras. Perhaps, all the inspiring videos, all the corporate messages, and all the protests are merely resistances against this growing presence of Chinese capitals. If it’s racist, or at least tacky (too “kung-flu”), to complain about the Chinese, at least you can complain about the Zionist colonial settlers and feel classy about it.