Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton has slammed cancel culture following the removal of Chris Lilley’s programmes on Netflix and look, sounds about right.
Dutton, who was literally a cop for nine years, isn’t particularly fond of the cancel culture that has followed the anti-police brutality protests and Black Lives Matter movement. In other truly groundbreaking news, water is wet.
In an interview with The Today Show, the controversial minister condemned Netflix for removing the programmes
“I don’t think ripping pages out of history books and brushing over parts of history you don’t agree with or you don’t like is really something the Australian public is going to embrace,” Dutton told Nine. “There are good and bad parts of our history. You learn from that.”
PARTS. OF. HISTORY. YOU. DONT. AGREE. WITH.
Our Home Affairs Minister is really out here treating years of systemic racism and black deaths in custody as just a little something we don’t really like and not a huge issue that needs to be addressed at a government level.
In Dutton’s (very weak) defence, he did clarify that we should be sitting down with our kids to discuss why slavery was bad, which is really ironic considering Scott Morrison just claimed slavery wasn’t a thing in Australia.
“You sit down with your kids, looking at some of these videos, explaining that slavery was a horrible period in the United States.”
But if you thought he was on the right track, think again because he then went on to say that removing the content from Netflix doesn’t “make any sense.”
“Removing that sort of content from online or from our television sets, I just don’t think it makes any sense,” he said, as if blackface isn’t offensive.
It’s important to note that Lilley’s work is still available on DVD and other places on the internet if you feel so inclined to watch it. However, Netflix has decided that these programs that feature racially-charged jokes are no longer welcome on the platform. A decision in which they are well within their rights as a company to make.
As a white person, it’s pretty difficult to really grasp how blackface or other racially-charged “jokes” actually feel. ButIndigenous writer and performer Nakkiah Lui perfectly summed up the offensive content vs censorship debate in a recent interview with SMH.
“You don’t want to police other people’s art, because that could so easily be flipped around on you,” she told SMH. “But this isn’t about censorship, it’s about a private company deciding what it wants to put up to reflect its own values. I think they have a right, especially at this time, to decide they don’t want to endorse material that has blackface. They have a right to practise their company values.”
Following Netflix’s decision to axe Lilley’s programmes from the service, the ABC (who was the commissioning broadcaster behind five of Chris Lilley’s shows) has been prompted to undertake a “harm and offence” audit of both past and current programmes.
“We are reviewing our content to ensure it meets current community standards and reflects our editorial policies on harm and offence,” an ABC spokesperson said on Thursday.
Dutton’s comments come after We Can Be Heroes, Summer Heights High, Angry Boys, and Jonah From Tonga were all scratched from the service. Lilley’s other shows Ja’mie Private School Girl and his Netflix series Lunatics are both still available on the platform.
