From Daily Mail Australia

Former footy great Sam Newman has launched another extraordinary attack on First Nations people and the AFL over ‘welcome to country’ speeches before matches.

Most Cairns News readers would agree with Sam Newman’s call to Boo smoking ceremonies which are not genuine Aboriginal cultural heritage, rather a stunt cooked up by indigenous TV personality Ernie Dingo 30 years ago.

Newman urged Australians to boo the traditional ceremony at not only this year’s AFL grand final, but anywhere it is publicly performed.

‘If we are at all serious about the welcome to country and the nonsense that has suddenly taken over in the last 20 years from a completely harmless introduction by Ernie Dingo some years ago and people have latched onto it,’ he said.

Sam Newman has a major gripe with the AFL over its inclusion of the welcome to country ceremony before games

Newman told Australians to boo the traditional ceremony not just at the grand final, but any time it is performed

Newman doubled down when he was challenged by podcast You Cannot Be Serious co-host Don Scott.

‘Because we don’t want to put up with it. We are not going to be patronised,’ he said.

‘Of course it’s being rude, and so who is forcing this nonsense onto us? Who is telling us that we should be welcomed to [the] country that we live in, that we try and cohabitate, cohabit with all the people that have come here – particularly the indigenous people.’

Newman said there were many First Nations Australians share his views on the ceremony.

‘There’s so many people who say it and I keep saying it’s just a push for reparation and financial power. It is, and I’m saying, the next time you go to a football game, a final, and they trot this nonsense out just start booing and that’ll stop (it),’ he said.

‘The AFL should be absolutely horse whipped for whipping people into a frenzy about it. Patronising their whiteness by thinking they can virtuously cast off all their sins on us.

‘Honestly and truly, it’s got to stop because this has divided the country more than anything. We want to be one group of people living together and respecting one another, Don. Start booing or slow hand clapping or something.’

It is not the first time Newman has taken aim at the AFL over its public recognition of First Nations people.

Just days after last year’s AFL grand final, he took a swipe at eulogy at the match for indigenous icon Uncle Jack Charles, branding him a ‘heroin-addicted indigenous felon’.

In a long-winded rant, Newman attacked the league for what he described as ‘virtuous, patronising nonsense’, even taking time to insult former North Melbourne coach Dani Laidley.

‘We had the indigenous show of just nonsense. And then, the only thing they didn’t have is maybe they could have put Dani Laidley in an open car and driven her around at half time in the back of a Jeep or something. I mean, seriously,’ Newman moaned last year.

‘The grand final day was marred by two things … this patronising nonsense about us welcoming the original landowners to this country.

‘Absolutely we admire and we respect and we give thanks to the traditional land owners for where the game is to be played and we acknowledge that.

‘But the virtuous, patronising nonsense that the AFL go on with – a patronising campaign to foster this feigned indignation to divert from their own paranoid white privilege – all they do is drive a wedge between the footballing public, yet we see through it.’

Newman slammed the AFL for forcing football fans to watch not one, but two welcome to country speeches before the ball was even bounced.

‘We had a man with a beard came out and told us… about where the boundaries of all the various tribes and things go. Just an absolute propaganda chat about nothing,’ he said.

‘And then, if that wasn’t enough… then the CEO’s brother gave us welcome to country.’

For the record: Ernie Dingo invented the ‘welcome to country as an adaption from US Indians Public Relations campaign. It is an insult to everyone having this phoney tradition shoved at us and expecting us to tolerate the bunkum — Boo loudly.

Who called the fire brigade?

Indigenous entertainers Ernie Dingo and Richard Whalley, of the Middar Aboriginal Theatre, invented the “welcome to country” in 1976 because two pairs of Maori visitors from NZ and the Cook Islands wanted an equivalent of their own traditional ceremony before they would dance at the Perth International Arts Festival.

This fact is admitted by Ernie Dingo and supported by a press statement from aboriginal Bess Price, Former NT Minister for Community Services.

Editor: We who live among Aborigines in the north recoil in horror every time we see the Canberra mandarins stoking up green eucalyptus leaves in the foyer of new Parliament House. We could forever hope this Freemasonic edifice might burn down.