James Morrow: Left’s Australia Day culture war claims are undermining Australia
The fight over Woolworth’s treatment of Australia Day is important but distracts us from the bigger problem of those who undermine our national unity at every turn, writes James Morrow.
Opinion
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Have you ever noticed how those who claim to be the most keen to stop culture wars are also the most enthusiastic about starting them?
By now the pattern should be obvious.
Some beloved tradition, institution, or establishment exists.
Progressives decide they want to undermine, redefine, politicise or otherwise ruin it in service of their agenda. Conservatives and just plain normal folk raise the alarm and say, “hands off!”
And the left turns around and screams at them … culture warriors!
To see this phenomenon in action, look no further than Exhibit A, Anthony Albanese, who has run this playbook to the letter over Australia Day.
Hailing from Labor’s socialist left faction, it can be safely assumed that the prime minister is no fan of celebrating the arrival of the British First Fleet and the founding of modern Australia on January 26 – or any other day, for that matter.
In the past he has said that “the starting point of Australian identity” is not our British and Anglo-Saxon cultural and political traditions, but “our Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander heritage.”
Since becoming PM, Albanese has worked to not so subtly undermine Australia Day, changing the rules back in 2022 to allow local councils to move their Australia Day citizenship ceremonies away from January 26.
This was a brilliantly cynical move that not only downgraded the date (81 LGAs and counting have taken him up on the offer) but also, in future, ensures countless migrants no longer associate the date with the day they officially joined the Australian family.
So, with this record, what does the prime minister do when opposition leader Peter Dutton slammed Woolworth’s for taking Australia Day merchandise off the shelves?
He accuses Dutton of “always looking for a culture war”.
Sorry, but who is trying to change the culture again? It’s a time honoured tactic of the PM, and indeed the left more generally, which uses this rhetoric to reassure its base that their wrecking puts them on the side of the angels while portraying those who might like to celebrate our prosperous successful democracy as fringe dwelling nutters.
Recall the prime minister and his team attempting to shut down legitimate questions about what would eventually be the resoundingly defeated proposal for an Aboriginal Voice to parliament by attacking opponents as “culture warriors”.
The problem for the right, then, is that even when the left loses, the cycle of outrage they generate takes its toll. Similar majorities support keeping Australia Day where it is as voted “no” to the Voice, but for a left that plays a long game, immediate wins are not necessarily as much the goal as reframing how people think with the aim of longer term victory.
It is why the left is so keen to keep control over the education system and as many media outlets as they can (and to jam through puritanical “misinformation” regimes to make sure no one is exposed to conservative heresies).
It is also why the left gets so uncomfortable when the discussion about immigration turns to values, a question that came into sharp focus when members of some Middle Eastern communities took to the streets to celebrate Hamas’s October 7 rape and murder spree against Israel. And its why those on the right, be they Peter Dutton or the “culture warriors” of Anthony Albanese’s imagination, need to play a game that is similarly large and long.
So yes, this means calling out a big supermarket chain for making a decision that was surely as influenced by politics as by profit. One has to wonder how many Woolies are holding Australia Day BBQs on the 26th, after all.
Every party’s internal polling is telling them there is little love for big corporates that use their positions of power to advocate for left-wing agendas (recall how many went all in on the Voice).
But, also, it means looking at the bigger picture.
This is looking to be an increasingly crucial moment for Australia when we are beset by internal tensions including a housing affordability fight that is threatening to tear the generations apart and faced with the greatest external threats since World War II. Articulating that this is a place worth believing in and fighting for is becoming more than just an academic parlour game.
In recent years the left has had the upper hand when it comes to talking about Australia’s national story, and framed it in terms of theft and dispossession and illegitimacy.
These are undergraduate obsessions that do a great injustice to a modern nation, flawed like all nations, but with a remarkable story of success and prosperity and freedom and tolerance.
In his last book before he died, American diplomat Henry Kissinger studied six 20th century leaders and spoke of their ability to “relate (their nations’) purpose to a meaningful tradition.”
Peter Dutton and those who disagree with the left’s constant running down of Australia need to think on these terms – not just to avoid being called mere culture warriors, but to be ready if other sorts of warriors are needed as well.
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