Australians governments are spending fortunes on domestic security while brazenly allowing threats to increase, says Fred Pawle.

Wominjeka to ADH!

I hope I got that right. Apologies to any fluent Wurundjeri speakers if I didn’t.

The word belongs to the Aboriginal tribe that once roamed the area that we now know as Melbourne.

Its simplest translation is “welcome”, although whether I’ve phrased it correctly is anybody’s guess.

Also, it is probably an obscure word, even by Wurundjeri standards.

As the memoir of William Buckley, the convict escapee who ran with an Aboriginal tribe round those parts for 32 years during the early days of the colony, reminds us, “wominjeka” was probably not uttered quite as often back then as whatever the Wurundjeri word is for, “Get lost or I’ll stick a spear in your leg” whenever members of other tribes were encountered.

Be that as it may, some committee of virtue-signallers has decided to plaster the word across the turnstiles of the MCG, which is mildly amusing now that the MCG has been forced, by the wokeness of the times, to be, like the Wurundjeri were before white settlement, not as wominjeka-ing as they’d like.

The stadium has announced that from this AFL season it will have “AI-powered weapons detectors”, similar to ones used in the United States, at every gate of the venue, the first in the southern hemisphere to do so.

It will also speed up the turnstiles themselves, with technology that reads tickets in a smartphone’s wallet without having to call up a barcode. This will ensure long queues don’t form outside the venue, where they are vulnerable to attacks from, well, other tribes.

MCC chief executive Stuart Fox, who’s English is slightly more nuanced than his Wurundjeri, said the investments in security were necessary because: “We want everyone to have the best experience possible when they come to the ‘G.”

By “best experience”, he means he wants people who come to the MCG to simply enjoy a footy match - and maybe eat a crappy pie and drink a schooner of beer from a plastic cup - without being killed by a terrorist.

The irony of this sails right over the heads of people blinded by wokeness.

For decades, Australian leaders have, in their quest for inclusiveness, allowed in tens or hundreds of thousands of migrants who don’t share our values and have little or no interest in becoming part of our community.

And now, as a result, we need to install ridiculously expensive security devices at football matches. The faux multicultural vibe of the wominjeka sign is laughably cancelled by the presence of sophisticated security devices checking whether some people entering the stadium have come not to watch a game of footy but to blow up innocent bystanders.

The fear of an attack at the MCG is not paranoid, either. Radical self-proclaimed Muslim cleric Abdul Nacer Benbrika was convicted in 2008 of planning to detonate a bomb at the MCG during the 2005 AFL grand final.

Nobody has divulged what this MCG security upgrade cost, by the way, although it was predicted in 2016 to be worth a lazy billion dollars.

Remember the good old days when we just went to the football without all this security and pandering to disinterested minorities, when the worst, and vanishingly rare, incident of violence was between drunken fans of opposing teams?

These security precautions are installed without a second thought towards the obvious alternative, which would be to reduce the threat of terror in the first place. Because that, of course, would be not inclusive.

The evidence that inclusiveness is absurd increases by the day.

Naracoorte Lucindale Council, in South Australia, recently ditched the Aboriginal “Welcome to country” in favour of the more inclusive welcome to “everyone to build our future together”.

You can’t get much more inclusive than that. But that wasn’t good enough for the government-funded NGO Reconciliation SA, which said the change would “diminish the importance of First Nations in our country’s 65,000-plus year history.”

This is the true outcome of “inclusiveness”: victim groups fighting for inclusive status. Being equally inclusive just doesn’t cut it.

But that is the least worry. Inclusiveness doesn’t work anyway.

Recently I saw a video on X of two British Muslims discussing whether they could tolerate living in a western democracy.

“Our hatred for the non-Muslims... doesn’t stop us from co-existing with them,” one says, his heart overflowing with generous ambivalence towards his countrymen.

The other replies that “British values” are imposed on Muslims, and if you reject those values they you are a “foreigner”.

AFL fans know how he feels. They are welcomed to their own stadium in an unfamiliar language, and scanned for weapons that only foreigners are inclined to carry.

But hey, wominjeka anyway, suckers.