‘NO REASONABLE CASE TO CHANGE AUST DAY DATE’
The assistant immigration minister, Alex Hawke, says he has not heard a “reasonable argument” to support changing the date of Australia Day, saying the national day should not be moved “just because we have some elements of our history that we’re not proud of”. He rejected a suggestion that January 26 was just the anniversary of the arrival of white people, because “I don’t think in that way and I don’t think of identifying people by their race.” In the past year Mr Hawke has written warning letters to several local councils who voted to move their celebrations and citizenship ceremony from the contentious date.
Speaking on Radio National yesterday, he said the “change the date” campaign was “a very top-down push” by the Greens, “not a bottom-up revolution of people saying they want to change the date”. “I think if we did not have the Greens pushing that agenda, we would literally be hearing very little about this,” he said.
Mr Hawke said moving Australia Day from January 26, the day the first fleet of convict transports, escorted by the British navy, sailed into what was later called Sydney Cove, would be a denial of history.
He rejected RN Breakfast host Hamish Macdonald’s suggestion that commemorating the arrival of the first fleet was just commemorating the arrival of white people.
“It wasn’t an invasion, a planned invasion, it was colonisation by Britain,” Mr Hawke said.
“It had implications for Aboriginal Australians, there’s no doubt about it.”
The first recorded massacre of Aboriginal people occurred in 1794, according to a massacre mapping project by the University of Newcastle.