Andrew Bolt: Warped Australia Day ban will promote hatred
A MELBOURNE council’s misguided ban on Australia Day will create exactly the divisions Leftist activists claim to be fighting, writes Andrew Bolt.
YARRA council has showed how easy it is to ban Australia Day and create exactly the racial division our mad Left claims to be fighting. This Greens-led council voted unanimously on Tuesday to scrap January 26 as Australia Day and replace the usual citizenship celebrations with an Aboriginal smoking ceremony.
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So an important cultural ceremony for all Australians was replaced with a ceremony honouring the culture of just one “race” — a culture that is sadly dysfunctional.
Here’s how the council did it.
First, being of the bullying Left, it brazenly trampled over the wishes of the vast majority of Australians.
Even a McNair poll commissioned by the Left-leaning Guardian Australia last January found only 15 per cent of Australians wanted Australia Day shifted from January 26, the date the First Fleet arrived in 1788. Even 46 per cent per cent of Aboriginal Australians didn’t want it moved or didn’t care, despite years of nagging by activists and the ABC that January 26 marked “invasion day”.
So how did Yarra council’s hipster revolutionaries get around that embarrassment?
Easy done! It tricked up its own data. First, it stacked a survey of Aborigines. It held an online poll of members of activist organisations or “individual community members with whom council officers have existing relationships”.
Since the council is run by four Greens, two Labor members, two independents and a Socialist Alliance extremist, you can guess which Aboriginal “community members” the council has “relationships” with. Many, it turned out, did not even live in Yarra. Yet despite this shameless manipulation, the council still got only 88 responses from Aborigines around the state and only 72 wanted Australia Day moved.
Second, the council held a street survey, but this, too, was dodgy.
Which street did its pollsters go to? Who did they choose to approach? How were people badgered? And why did it poll only 281 of its 80,000 residents?
Despite all that, fewer than half — 45.9 per cent — said they’d back a campaign to have the date of Australia Day changed.
And on those rubbish polls, the council has now scrapped our national day? Here’s more proof the Left really is the home of bullies and authoritarians.
No wonder many residents are furious, which is a warning that the council is creating the divisions it claims it’s healing. The rhetoric it’s inspiring is becoming nasty. The co-chair of its indigenous advisory group, Annette Xiberras, yesterday absurdly claimed that having Aborigines celebrate Australia Day was like making “Jewish people celebrate Hitler’s birthday”.
Even as I type this the Leftist ABC is playing a song with a singer snarling: “The white man took everything.” Except, of course, for his guitar, microphone and royalties for his album.
Such extremist rhetoric is inevitable when our authorities promote and reward a culture of victimhood, with most power and money given to those who complain most. No concession will ever be enough, not even shifting Australia Day. Worse, this race-mongering will provoke an ugly reaction, just as dangerously race-based.
Let’s head this off. Let’s start by stating some blunt but healthy truths.
Many members of the Aboriginal community of Yarra are likely to have some connection to European ancestors. For them to reject Australia Day for its connection to the arrival of Europeans must surely be to reject part of their own ancestry and culture.
What’s more, it rejects that part of their culture — and ours — that allows them to live lives infinitely richer, freer and less painful thanks to British settlement.
While many Aborigines did suffer from colonisation, most descendants now have everything from secure food supplies and sturdy homes to dentistry and pain relief; from democracy to literacy. As Jack Medcraft, a councillor on Melbourne’s Hume city council, told me yesterday: “I am very proud of my Aboriginal history (but) if it hadn’t been for colonisation of Tasmania, I and many others would not be here today.”
Is this Australia not worth celebrating? Is this really to be replaced by an orgy of hatred, resentment and bullying as the Left destroy a part of our culture?
Sure, I’m not surprised that Yarra council is joining the Aboriginal grievance industry to attack Australia Day and privilege Aboriginal culture instead.
After all, the Greens and the Socialist Alliance are also in a revolt against the West and its freedoms.
So don’t believe them when they say they just want another date to celebrate Australia Day.
They don’t want to celebrate Australia at all.
Originally published as Andrew Bolt: Warped Australia Day ban will promote hatred