Peta Credlin: Anthony Albanese must make up his mind about Australia Day
Opposition Leader Anthony Albanese has placed the same each-way bet on changing our Australia Day date for years but he should say what he really thinks, Peta Credlin writes.
Opinion
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As we come out of our Australia Day week, and head into an election year, it’s worth asking this question: how can someone lead the country if he doesn’t know – or won’t say – what he really thinks about our national day and our national symbols?
Last week, Opposition Leader Anthony Albanese said that “Australia Day is an important day for us to recognise our history, good and bad” and that he didn’t want to change the date. Only last year he did, flagging a referendum where he said “we need to work out ways (to) … avoid the divisive debate that has occurred every year … about the choice of date to have our national day”.
So what’s it to be: change the date or not? The alternative prime minister said “no” this year but “maybe” last year; and to my mind that’s typical of someone who won’t be straight with the Australian public.
(Or has a secret plan that we will only find out about after the election?)
Albanese has placed the same each-way bet on our flag: he supports it, but he doesn’t. His recent statement on Flag Day declared that we should be “able to take pride in our flag while acknowledging that the situation is not so straightforward for many First Nations people”.
Again, what’s it to be: fly the flag or not; keep it or change it?
Of course, our history – like all countries’ history – has episodes that we’d rather forget or that we wouldn’t accept today; but remembering our challenges must always be balanced with cherishing our successes.
There are now six federal MPs who identify as Indigenous, or about the same proportion as in the general population. Nearly a third of us were born overseas – the highest proportion of any country in the Western world – and we are an incredibly tolerant and cohesive immigrant nation.
We are one of only a handful of countries that permanently resettle refugees, and for all the disdain some elites have for our British colonial past, being settled from there gave us the rule of law, parliamentary democracy and legal equality.
Who owns the past? As the saying goes, the past is a foreign country to those alive today and while our history should be acknowledged, of course, it should never dominate our present or pre-program our future.
That’s my problem with the endless debates about changing the date, changing the flag, and changing the constitution. In the US, for example, the whole nation comes together on the Fourth of July to celebrate the Declaration of Independence, even though the war that brought it about displaced Native Americans and did nothing to free the black Americans held in chains as slaves; yet, the people come together as one.
In the long story of our island continent, January 26, 1788 is by far the most significant date so far. It marked the coming of modernity to an ancient land. It is no disrespect to Aboriginal people and to their achievements as stewards of the land to declare that, in the long run, the British settlement of Australia has been to the benefit of everyone because you would hardly find a fairer, freer and more prosperous nation on earth.
In any event, the reality of British settlement is a fact that can’t be altered and should be accepted, with its many upsides appreciated, even as the far fewer downsides are acknowledged.
If January 26 is not to be our national day, what’s the alternative? January 1, Federation Day, also largely excluded Aboriginal people (and women who did not yet have the vote) and, in any event, was not epochal in the way that January 26 clearly is; and April 25, Anzac Day, for all its significance, recalls a lost military campaign rather than the coming of a new civilisation to an ancient continent.
This “Invasion Day” push is as much about the activist left’s hatred of who we are, and our place in the world, as it anything to do with any proper assessment of Australia’s history; just like those idiots who vandalised the Captain Cook statue in Melbourne, demonstrating they don’t know their Arthur Phillip from their elbow!
Part of the issue here yet again is the dumbing down of our curriculum and the shift away from a fact-based chronological teaching of history to something built on a one-sided political narrative (if it is even taught at all).
One thing’s for sure: the navel-gazing and soul-searching will only intensify if there’s a change of government.
Not only does Anthony Albanese want a referendum on an Indigenous “voice” as a way of reducing dissent about Australia Day (even though a race-based election for an Indigenous quasi-parliament is hardly going to be unifying) but he’s also committed to turning Australia into a republic despite the complete lack of agreement on what that might be.
Labor officially believes we can never be an authentic independent nation while the Queen remains in our constitution, even though that’s exactly what we’ve been for the best part of a century. And no republican has resolved the conundrum of preserving the existing checks and balances while moving from a governor-general representing the Queen to a president who will either be a flunkey or a rival of the prime minister.
Under the Australian Republican Movement’s latest proposal, each state and territory parliament would put forward one nominee for president; and the federal parliament three. Australians would then vote on these eleven candidates to determine a head of state who will have less formal power than the governor-general but more moral authority than the prime minister, whose position may rest on a tenuous parliamentary majority.
The proposed process is reminiscent of how we currently pick the Australian of the Year and would probably have similar mixed results. That’s why it’s been panned even by committed republicans like Paul Keating and Bob Carr.
Two hundred and thirty-four years on from the arrival of the First Fleet, I am not one of those who is ashamed of our country; and, if the polls are to be believed, the majority of Australians share this view despite the left-media and elites trying their level best yet again to generate division.
To me, Australia Day is a rare day where we can stop and give thanks for living in the greatest country on earth and to remember with gratitude all those who have gone before us; born here, or newly arrived, who have built everything we love today.
Watch Peta Credlin on Sky News, weeknights at 6pm
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