Changing Australia Day will not satisfy activists
THE notion that changing the date will cease the attacks on Australia Day is at best naive. The assault against our national day has little to do with the date and everything to do with delegitimising modern Australia.
Changing Australia Day from January 26 will only embolden the activists, not satisfy them.
It will do little to change the illfeeling of the malignant left nor its determination to falsely paint this country as one that is rooted in racism and genocide.
The view that this “always was and always will be” Aboriginal land is deeply xenophobic. It denotes that those who do not have the right ancestry are unwelcome interlopers and not entitled to think of this land as their own.
As I wrote some years ago it’s a politically correct way of saying “go back to where you came from”. Little wonder so many migrants find the attacks against Australia Day particularly egregious.
Polls show an overwhelming majority of migrants feel positively towards Australia Day.
Sadly, among young people the anti-Australia Day propaganda, led by media, academia, celebrities and increasingly corporates, is having a real impact. Of course this campaign doesn’t operate in isolation but together with a plethora of messaging rooted in grievance and race obsessions.
As it stands, a significant majority of Australians, about two in three, support Australia Day remaining on January 26, according to a number of polls including by Roy Morgan, CoreData and Deakin University.
But that majority view is not reflected in the media coverage nor campaigns run by corporates from the ABC to Telstra to the Australian Open. The media’s fatwa against the national holiday was under way even when polls showed that more than 90 per cent of Australians supported the national holiday and fewer than one in three Indigenous people felt negatively towards the day.
A poll commissioned by far left publication The Guardian in 2017 revealed that only 6 per cent of Australians felt negatively towards Australia Day and only 15 per cent favoured changing it from January 26. Among migrants the number was even lower.
Nowadays some self-loathing white folks, including inner-city dwelling CEOs and ABC hosts, cannot even bring themselves to say Australia Day – they simply say January 26.
How long before they join Greens senator Lidia Thorpe in the “pay the rent” campaign requiring Australians to pay weekly rent to Indigenous people for “using their land”? If you think the two issues are unconnected, you are not paying attention.
Wouldn’t it be wonderful if the loud minority would stop stoking racial divisions and instead, on this Australia Day, reflect on just how blessed we all are to be living in this corner of the world in a country that is peaceful, prosperous and where anyone regardless of class, colour or creed can achieve amazing things?
What makes a great Australian is not your ancestry but your contribution to the country.
THE real legacy of Jacinda Ardern, not the sugar-coated media fantasy, is one of incompetence, hypocrisy and division. She leaves New Zealand in a terrible state with increasing rates of inequality, homelessness and a crippling cost-of-living crisis. Who would’ve thought shutting down the whole country over a single case of Covid-19 was going to have grave economic and social consequences?
Along with Canada’s Justin Trudeau, no modern leader better exemplifies the phrase “style over substance” than the outgoing Kiwi prime minister. Ardern’s virtue signalling and claims about kindness and compassion were too often nothing more than empty moral posturing. As author Douglas Murray expressed so beautifully, Ardern was the queen of “performative caring”.
That was enough to impress the media and she enjoyed one of the longest political honeymoons in modern politics. But finally New Zealanders woke up. Facing what looked like certain defeat at the polls, Ardern decided to jump before she was pushed. Labour’s numbers have dropped to their lowest level since 2017 with only 33 per cent backing the party, according to polling last month.
Ardern’s failures extend well beyond her government’s cruel Covid-era policies that saw the supposed champion of women ban vulnerable pregnant New Zealanders from returning home to their families but granted permission to celebrity DJs to enter the country.
Ardern was weak on China, implemented divisive race-based policies and her KiwiBuild scheme to construct 100,000 homes by 2028 will be lucky to complete a 10th of that. But the broken promises and failures was ignored by fanboys and girls in the media as well as leftist activists and politicians. The gushing in the past week has been nauseating and comically divorced from reality.