A one-word change to Australia’s national anthem, announced by Prime Minister Scott Morrison at the turn of the year, is a symbol of progress towards reconciliation. A new anthem that recognises prior Indigenous occupation of the continent would be worthy in its own right, while also starting the engine to take us to more fulsome reconciliation.
Credit should be given where it is due: Morrison’s initiative is welcome because it ends the fiction in Advance Australia Fair that ours is a young country when Indigenous people were here at least 60,000 years ago.
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Craig Emerson is managing director of Emerson Economics. He is a distinguished fellow at the ANU, director of the Australian APEC Study Centre at RMIT and adjunct professor at Victoria University’s College of Business.
