How can we expect any young Australians at all to risk their lives defending a country so publicly despised?

We’ve miraculously built a country that’s rich, free and peaceful, where everyone has a vote, a say, legal rights and a safety net. Check our Asian neighbours and see how rare that is.

This trashing of Australia Day by our governments, councils and woke corporations is now a danger to our national security.

A country that can’t take pride in itself can’t defend itself.

Aren’t we seeing this right now? Take these four signs of danger.

• The Albanese Government complains it can’t find enough soldiers willing to defend us, and may now hire mercenaries from the Pacific.;

• More Australian Muslims volunteered to fight for the Islamic State terrorists than volunteered for the Australian Defence Force that was fighting it;

Australian Muslims volunteered to fight for the Islamic State terrorists. Picture: Getty

• We’ve let in 540,000 migrants – 2 per cent of our population – in a single year, just when 81 local councils are telling newcomers Australia is so shameful that they’ve cancelled citizenship ceremonies on Australia Day; and

• Woolworths is so captured by this woke disgust of Australia that it’s banned Australia Day merchandise, but it’s so in love with every other culture that it celebrates the Muslim Ramadan and the Chinese Lunar New Year.

Consider that last point first.

Communist China is now threatening to invade Taiwan, which it falsely claims it should control.

If that war breaks out, Taiwan and the US will demand our help to defend a fellow democracy that, like Ukraine and Israel already, is under attack from the new alliance of tyrannies – China, Russia, Iran and North Korea.

Communist China is threatening to invade Taiwan. Picture: AFP

But we have 1.2 million Australians of Chinese descent, and the flag-waving Chinese dictatorship sponsors organisations here that tell them they owe loyalty to a Chinese motherland prouder than self-hating Australia.

If you think this blood-thicker-than-water appeal won’t work, remember this: many Chinese Australians punished the Liberals at the last federal election for standing up to the Chinese dictatorship’s threats and demands that we kow-tow.

The anti-Liberal swing in seats with at least one in five voters of Chinese background was more than 8 per cent – twice the national average.

The Albanese government got that message and has gone quiet on China’s attacks on the freedoms we thought defined Australia.

But how can we expect all Chinese Australians to defend our values when our own elites don’t praise them, or wallow in fake or exaggerated claims that Australia is founded on genocide, child-stealing and theft?

Our own elites don’t praise Australian values. Picture: Getty

How can we expect any young Australians at all to risk their lives defending a country so publicly despised?

That well-coached contempt for this country has sunk in with some migrant communities that we’ve already had trouble integrating into our culture and values such as tolerance and individualism, not tribalism.

Sydney’s Al Madina Dawah Centre, for instance, has had Muslim imams preach that Jews are “evil”, “wicked” and “bloodthirsty monsters”, and complain that “Western countries are arming … this criminal Israeli apartheid Nazi regime”.

One, “Brother Ismael”, said Australians had no right to support Israel’s fight against Iranian-backed Hamas terrorists: “To every individual who says Hamas is terrorist, did you really forget what your ancestors did to the country’s Indigenous people?”

Other Muslims groups use that same slander to justify the war on democratic Israel and – ominously – the fight of Aboriginal radicals against our own one-person-one-vote system of government.

Take the Lebanese Muslim Association, which demanded the Albanese government drop even its half-hearted support of Israel, arguing the way Australians treated Aboriginals was like the “persecution inflicted on the people of Palestine by Israel”.

Muslim groups are comparing the war in Gaza to the treatment of Aboriginals. Picture: AFP

Activists identifying as Aboriginal make that same inflammatory link.

Larissa Baldwin-Roberts, head of the left-wing GetUp lobby group, declared an “incredible solidarity” between Aborigines and the Palestinians now at war: “Our fights are connected.”

That linkage would look even sicker if our governments, academics and journalists stopped lying about our past.

No, white Australia did not commit “genocide”.

No, racist officials did not steal generations of children from their parents just because they were Aboriginal. Our courts haven’t found even one.

Nor is Australia riddled with racism.

And that other lie: that people who hate Australia Day just want to celebrate on another date. Bull: if they think Australia’s great crime is that European colonisation ended the stone-age Aboriginal culture, how can they celebrate this nation – the result of colonisation – on any day at all?

They won’t, and there’s the idiocy.

We’ve miraculously built a country that’s rich, free and peaceful, where everyone has a vote, a say, legal rights and a safety net. Check our Asian neighbours and see how rare that is.

But we’re losing the courage to defend our success and our values – first with words and increasingly with deeds. We must learn to praise Australia again, or else.

Originally published as How can we expect any young Australians at all to risk their lives defending a country so publicly despised?