Cheap Laughs, Deep Fault Lines: Power, Fragility and the Work of Change

Every now and then, something cuts through the noise and exposes where we really are in the modern day Australian story.

The recent circulation of a video mocking Aboriginal people leaning into degrading stereotypes for attention is not just offensive content. It is symptomatic. It reflects an enduring logic about who gets to be diminished, and who gets to do the diminishing.

This is not about one individual. It is about a hierarchy that continues to shape how we see each other.

The Direction of the Punchline: Humour, Power and Permission

Humour is rarely neutral.

From buffoonery and Vaudeville through to modern algorithm-driven platforms, comedy has often relied on exaggeration and caricature. But the consistent pattern is this: the punchline travels downward.

It lands on those perceived to be less powerful, less protected, less able to respond.

When First Nations people are reduced to stereotypes, particularly those that draw on histories of marginalisation, the joke is doing more than seeking laughter. It is reinforcing a social order. It is signalling that some identities remain acceptable targets of reduction.

And importantly, this pattern is inherited. It reflects who has historically controlled the narrative and who has not.

The moment the lens turns upward, however, something shifts.

When humour interrogates dominant groups, whiteness, privilege, structural advantage, the tolerance changes. What was once dismissed as “just a joke” becomes uncomfortable, contested, even unacceptable.

That asymmetry reveals the truth: this has never been about humour alone. It has always been about power and permission.

Fragility, Threat and the Myth of Inherited Position

The discomfort that surfaces in these moments often gets labelled in simplistic ways. But it is worth understanding more precisely.

What we are seeing is a form of fragility, not as insult, but as a condition. A low tolerance for discomfort when long-held assumptions are challenged.

When conversations move toward:

• systemic inequality
• historical injustice
• or diversity and inclusion

They disrupt an older belief system grounded in colonial foundations: the idea that status, place and entitlement are inherited.

That belief is increasingly under pressure.

Across contemporary Australia, new migrant communities continue to demonstrate something different, a strong orientation to hard work, education, persistence, and long-term aspiration. Many take on work others avoid, invest in opportunity, and build their position incrementally. This contrast is confronting.

It exposes the fragility of the idea that status is a birthright. What is often perceived as “losing ground” is, in reality, the erosion of assumed advantage particularly when measured against effort and determination.

This is where fear begins to take shape. Not necessarily fear of others, but fear of losing position in a system that was once more predictable. Let’s not confuse the gift wrapping of this present.

Misreading Change: From Inclusion to Resistance

We are currently living through a period often described as divisive. But much of this division is produced by a misreading of change itself.

Inclusion is read as exclusion.
Equity is framed as disadvantage.
Recognition is interpreted as loss.

This defensive lens shuts down engagement before it begins. And in that vacuum, ridicule becomes a shortcut. Reducing something to a joke avoids having to understand it. It protects comfort.

This is where conversations around DEI often falter, not because they lack substance, but because they are met with resistance rooted in discomfort rather than inquiry. Just think about how Welcome to Country is under pressure from this fragile grouping, and the noise that’s created for their one minute of discomfort and how their loves will never be the same.

The Real Mechanism: Why We Resist Change

To properly understand what is happening here, we need to move beyond social commentary and look at the mechanics of change itself.

Ironically, I was speaking to a friend yesterday who we both completed Leadership Victoria’s Williamson Program together. In his line of work with emergency services and a newer role of managing people which trying to merge two organisations, he is also struck at how hard change is, what people anchor to and how much energy it requires from yourself, meaning how do we manage through change. I floated my wonderings from our daily work at DACC which take daily reminders to clients about change, the ebb and flow and the energy transfer, the resistance to change, and the path of least resistance. It takes me back to my uni days studying a Master of Education (Primary), and to Jean Piaget’s framework which I think offers not only a powerful lens but is the missing piece to change itself if we are to understand it, call it out and scaffold the support needed for the journey itself.

At its core is a tension between equilibrium and disequilibrium:

• Equilibrium is cognitive comfort where our existing schemas, our mental models, make sense of the world and how we interact with it.
• Disequilibrium occurs when new information cannot be explained by those schemas, creating psychological discomfort.

When people encounter ideas that challenge their worldview and schema whether that is acknowledging systemic inequity or engaging with First Nations perspectives, they experience disequilibrium. This discomfort is not failure. It is the engine of development. It becomes a fight and flight response. But it presents a choice.

People can:

• Assimilate: reject or reshape new information to fit existing beliefs, often through dismissal or ridicule
• Accommodate: adjust their schemas, which requires effort, humility, and a willingness to let go of certainty

Accommodation is hard work. It involves cognitive reorganisation rethinking how the world is structured, how identity operates, and how histories are understood. It also asks us to realise those groupings we live in and operate in, our communities and our sense of belonging.

Assimilation, by contrast, protects comfort.

This is why humour, dismissiveness, and defensiveness often appear at exactly the moment where learning is possible. They are not random, they are protective responses to disequilibrium.

Australia carries a long history of assimilationist thinking, formally embedded through government policy from the late 1930s through to the mid‑1960s. This sat alongside, and was deeply connected to, the White Australia Policy, both frameworks grounded in a belief system that privileged European identity as the cultural and social standard.

A telling example sits in a 1947 remark by Arthur Calwell, Australia’s first Minister for Immigration, who defended the White Australia Policy using the phrase, “two Wongs don’t make a white.” The comment, a racially charged distortion of the familiar saying “two wrongs don’t make a right”, captured the underlying logic of the time: that whiteness was not only the norm, but the benchmark to be preserved.

That mindset was not subtle. It was explicit. And for many, those beliefs persist in different forms to this day. It’s the historical hangover, the headache that many of us wake up with and must do the hard work of untangling this legacy, understanding where it lives, how it shows up today, and how it continues to shape the way we think, behave and relate to one another. That starts by sitting in the discomfort of it, recognising where our thinking no longer holds, and being prepared to rebuild how we see the world.