Flag issue fails to fly

TO the utter chagrin of self-described progressives, Australia Day was celebrated uneventfully around the nation.

At ceremonies and festive gatherings in towns and cities, on beaches and in parks from the coast, the Australian flag was flown and flapped flagrantly without provoking riots or orgies of nationalistic mayhem. Given the advance warnings of the catalytic effect the flag can have on savage youths issued by the politically correct, ranging from Green politicians to Ken West, the organiser of Sydney's Big Day Out concert, this was a near improbability. Tolerance of the flag was equated to tolerating gang colours. But on digging a little deeper, it was not so much the stars of the Southern Cross that were likely to cause the picnicking mob to explode, it was the presence of the Union Jack in the corner that was of real concern. The attacks on the flag were really thinly disguised arguments against one of the symbols of modern Australia's undeniable heritage, its early beginnings as a British colony and its rich debt to British law, language and civility. Australia is, however, a distinctly different nation from Britain and most Australians are mature enough to understand that. Australia is also a nation which, until recent times, has a history of successfully integrating migrants (more akin to the United States experience than Britain), though some Australians are still doing their determined best to rip apart the fabric that unites its people and foster separate cultural identities in the name of multiculturalism. NSW Opposition leader Peter Debnam upset Premier Morris Iemma and petty Liberal pecksniff David Redmond, the mayor of Sutherland, when he defied the council's ban on mentioning multiculturalism in the course of his address at an Australia Day citizenship ceremony. Debnam was cheered when he told his audience that becoming an Australian citizen did not mean that people could recreate their old country in the new. He outlined a plan to introduce an Australian Values and Civics Test for Year 6 students based on the federal Government's new test for new citizens and said the existing "English as a Second Language'' program would be renamed "Teaching English as First Language''. Given the hysterical inability of the notorious Lakemba-based Mufti Sheik Taj Eldeen Alhilaly to speak English or find a translator who doesn't reduce his poetical Arabic into virulent hate speech in praise of suicide bombers and opposed to Western culture, this should be welcomed. Debnam also proposed a new free civics and citizenship course to be run through community colleges, which should be a winner with the former students of Granville Boys High School responsible for making the disgustingly violent video posted recently on YouTube. Reclaiming multiculturalism for mainstream Australians who believe that it should be a policy for inclusion, not exclusion, is straightforward enough. Multiculturalism must be a policy for integration not separation. As Debnam said, it must be a policy that shows respect for our different cultural backgrounds, including indigenous Australians, but focuses on Australian values and an Australian way of life that we share as a first priority. His commonsense suggestions were, however, opposed by Iemma, who said it was "ill-advised'' to make such comments on Australia Day, and the Federal Liberal MP for Cook, Bruce Baird, who distanced himself from Debnam, saying: "They were his words, you ask him about them. I certainly know in this community we appreciate the various countries people come from and we celebrate that.'' The notion that all cultures are equal and have a place in Australia is sheer humbug. Subscribers to this belief should ask the doctors and nurses treating women who have suffered genital mutilation for cultural reasons whether they agree. Writing for the signandsight website, Pascal Bruckner recently called multiculturalism the "racism of the anti-racists''. He illustrated his argument by noting that Job Cohen, the mayor of Amsterdam, had demanded that the Dutch accept "the conscious discrimination of women by certain groups of orthodox Muslims'' on the basis that a "new glue'' was needed to "hold society together''. "In the name of social cohesion, we are invited to give our roaring applause for the intolerance that these groups show for our laws,'' he wrote. He could have been writing about Australia's politically correct politicians who defend the ghettoisation of (principally Muslim) migrants on the grounds that their culture demands their women remain segregated by clothing and custom from the mainstream. There may be some irony in the fact that the so-called progressives who want to see archaic and barbaric customs perpetuated in the name of tolerance and multiculturalism also hopefully predicted that a display of national pride would lead to intolerance and violence. The reality is that their misguided calls for tolerance are only providing platforms to be exploited by the purveyors of hate.