Australia Day should be changed to the anniversary of the day Australians voted against the Voice
If Labor can’t celebrate on January 26, then switch Australia Day to the only other day that makes sense – the day we voted to go on together as one people, united and equal.
Andrew Bolt
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We’ve had two flashing signs in the past week that Australians have had it with dividing us by race, even if Labor still doesn’t get that its game is up.
The latest is the decision by the Melbourne Storm NRL club to drop regular Welcome to Country ceremonies for being exactly what they are – too divisive.
Treating non-Aboriginal Australians as strangers in their own country was always a racist and idiotically destructive idea.
The last welcome I heard, at a Telstra event last month, was by a guy as white as me who even babbled about his Scottish ancestry before having the hide to tell us an Aboriginal maxim he’d imagined – for whites to “go away, come back another day”.
This politics of racial division is so obviously dumb and unpopular that last week Opposition Leader Peter Dutton said no to Australia being a three-flag nation.
That was the other sign: Dutton declaring he’d stand in front of just the Australian flag, and not the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander ones as well.
Yet Labor still doesn’t get what even the wokest corporates have learnt the hard way – that playing the race card is now likely to get you a hard smack from Australians sick of being disparaged and divided in a country that seems to be splintering into ethnic tribes.
On Sunday, for instance, Victoria’s Socialist Left Labor government confirmed it had killed off the traditional Australia Day parade as too – ha! – divisive, just when it’s needed more than ever.
Meanwhile, ministers of the Socialist Left Albanese government abused Dutton for saying we should fly just one flag to unite us, rather than three to divide.
“Peter Dutton is once again proving himself unfit to be prime minister,” sneered Indigenous Affairs Minister Malarndirri McCarthy.
Dutton was “looking for division”, snapped Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, a hypocrite who’d bitterly divided Australians with his referendum on the Voice – his thankfully defeated plan to divide us by race in the Constitution and create an Aboriginal-only advisory parliament.
The leftist Sydney Morning Herald even ranted that “Dutton has shown callous disregard for community harmony”, accusing him of “disgusting, divisive short-term politics”.
Note the Newspeak. Dutton opposes Labor’s divisive race-politics, yet is branded “divisive”. Dutton wants us to unite behind our national flag, yet is accused of attacking “community harmony”.
Talk about the Left projecting. And talk about Labor forgetting a government’s duty is to stress what unites, not encourage what divides.
That’s even more so when we’re now importing half a million strangers a year, many from cultures at odds with our own, and at a time when many of us are financially struggling.
No wonder a lot of Australians are nervous, telling pollsters we’re heading in the wrong direction.
We’ve got Muslim radicals preaching Jew hatred, a synagogue firebombed, Aboriginal extremists torching the Old Parliament House and demanding “sovereignty”, and about 180 councils so ignorantly ashamed of our past that they won’t hold Australia Day citizenship ceremonies.
Hasn’t Labor read the room? Last year Australians voted against its Voice. They then smashed Woolworths with a consumer boycott when it banned Australia Day merchandise. And two weeks ago they took less than 24 hours to crush the slow-to-learn Australian Venue Co when it likewise tried to ban Australia Day celebrations at its pubs.
This is now Labor’s fatal weakness. It will go the way of Woolies if it does not drop its politics of racial division.
Take the Victorian government’s ban on Melbourne’s Australia Day parade.
“January 26 means different things to different people,” a spokesman wittered.
But so what if some activists claim to be distraught by the day?
Why should this government trash our national day and our nation just for them?
Yes, it’s trashing our nation, too, and here’s the test.
If it’s so upset to hold Australia Day on January 26, anniversary of the landing of the first white convict settlers, then let Labor name the alternative date that would have it celebrate this great nation under just one flag.
It never does. But let me suggest one. If Labor can’t celebrate on January 26, then switch Australia Day to the only other day that makes sense: October 14.
That’s the anniversary of the day Australians voted against the Voice. The day we voted to go on together as one people, united and equal.
Isn’t that worth celebrating? More than that: isn’t that something we badly need to?
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Originally published as Australia Day should be changed to the anniversary of the day Australians voted against the Voice
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