And so the annual whingefest begins

THE first airings of Meat and Livestock Australia’s brilliant new ad campaign had ­barely faded before an army of harrumphers had cracked open their PCs.

MAYBE it’s climate change, but it seems as if the hot takes and think ­pieces slamming Australia Day and everything that goes along with it as the worst thing ever come earlier every year.

This month the first airings of Meat and Livestock Australia’s brilliant new ad campaign depicting commandos rescuing diaspora Australians from a lambless holiday, torching a loft-sleeping vegan’s coffee table for good measure, had ­barely faded to black before an army of keyboard-stabbing harrumphers had cracked open their laptops to ­return fire.

The brilliant casting of SBS newsreader Lee Lin Chin as the co-ordinator of Operation Boomerang rightly placed both lamb and Australia Day as things everyone in our multiethnic society can enjoy, ­instantly shutting down complaints the promotion was all about white bread “Anglo” Australia. Thus one grump was left to complain of the “lamb jingoism” indulged in by Big Meat to create a false consciousness around our national dish.

At the Guardian Australia another fellow went further, fretting for nearly 2000 words that the ads represented “the militarisation of Australian nationalism”, which is apparently a bipartisan phenomenon.

According to this particular commentator, Operation Boomerang “captures the spirit of Labor’s version of the new nationalism, with its evocation of hi-tech terror raids and coercive jingoism presided over by a feisty woman of Asian descent”.

So, uh, you like your chops ­medium-rare then, mate?

In any event these attacks were supported by 600 freelance guerillas or so who took the initiative to write to advertising regulators complaining the ad was so offensive it should be scrubbed from the airwaves.

You can imagine how much fun these people must be at parties, or barbecues, for that matter. To repurpose an old joke: “How many lefties does it take to change a light globe?”

“THAT’S NOT FUNNY!”

While there are still a few days left to run and many Invasion Day arguments to be rebooted, it may be that a piece by one Joff Lelliott, writing in this paper’s sister publication, Queensland’s Courier-Mail, takes the cake for the oddest complaint about what should be an innocuous national day.

Immediately branding all his ­opponents as “right wing”, Lelliott makes the bizarre case that Australian citizenship is a divisive ­institution that hurts social cohesion because people with Australian passports can vote. Thus Australia Day, he claims, “magnifies the line ­between citizens and non-citizens”. Perhaps we should cancel all citizenship ceremonies on the day, then.

Wouldn’t want anyone to feel ­excluded.

So terrible, so hard is it to obtain Australian citizenship, according to Lelliott, that the institution has ­become an “impregnable fortress”.

In fact, in the 2013-14 more than 163,000 individuals from about 190 countries were naturalised as Australians citizens.

Operation Boomerang ... Lee Lin Chin in the Australia Day lamb ad.

According to Lelliott (part of the socialist think tank Australian Fabians, whose unofficial motto may as well be: “It’ll work this time, we promise!”), the problem with all this is our supposedly too-restrictive citizenship rules make it harder for some people to obtain benefits and thus, one presumes, vote for pollies who promise more of them.

But more welfare and looser controls on citizenship are what on Yes, Minister used to be called very brave arguments. Especially given the horror stories emerging from Europe, where a top-down strategy to “evolve” beyond ­nation states with their pesky borders and local cultures and hard-to-remember capitals in favour of open-slather immigration has resulted in disasters both social (the cover-ups of sexual abuse everywhere from Rotherham to Cologne) and economic (France’s socialist president has just declared a “state of economic emergency”).

Ultimately, this year’s crop of complaints is just the latest effort in what has become an annual Pamplona of the po-faced whose participants run not with bulls but their less-pleasant byproducts.

It is not necessarily nationalism in general but rather Australian nationhood in particular that sticks in these people’s craw. After all, it is hard to imagine such perpetually offended types having an issue with, say, Palestinian nationalism which is probably a good deal more “militarised” against other religions, ethnic groups, women, and gays than any fevered worry about an ad for meat could ever be.

It may be that deep down they suffer from an uneasiness about the Australian project, born from the progressive’s instinct to kick over institutions without ever pondering why they are there. Thus even something like Australia Day, a national day marked not by tanks rolling past stern-faced dictators as in some countries, but a barbecue or a picnic or just a simple day off, is seen not as harmless fun but a roadblock to revolution.

But all of this is to forget ours is a nation that for all its faults and injustices did start with a few hundred misfits, convicts, and overseers sailing at great risk to the other side of the world, planting the seeds of what would become one of the most prosperous and — nanny-state lockouts and busybody councils aside — free nations on Earth.