Peta Credlin: Australia Day time to see our country through new migrants’ eyes
As we prepare to celebrate another Australia Day, remember a country with a quarter of its people born overseas must have much going for it, writes Peta Credlin.
Opinion
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To make the most of this new year, I reckon all of us should collectively make two resolutions: first, to count our blessings more; and second, to be less negative about our magnificent country.
Where I holiday, on the bay, just south of Geelong, there are lots of migrant families. Over summer, they were on the beach, usually three generations, and the one thing you almost never heard was whinging about Australia.
In fact, when you think about it, you hardly hear any of the usual complaints – that Australia is basically a racist, sexist and homophobic country – from anyone who’s a recent migrant. I guess that’s because they only came here because they could tell that the good far outweighed the bad. Certainly, there was enough good in this country, compared to their place of birth, to justify all the disruption involved in making a new life in a far way land.
Isn’t that worth thinking about as we prepare to celebrate another Australia Day: that a country with a quarter of its people born overseas – a higher percentage than any other – must have so much going for it when so many people are voting with their feet to get here?
No one has to come here. The fact that so many do, and are so glad to have won the lottery of life when they make it, should make all of us proud; even as we do our best to make a great country even better.
As usual, in the build-up to this Australia Day, there’s been the usual complaints about the date. We can’t celebrate Australia Day on January 26, it’s said, because that’s insensitive to the Aboriginal people who were here first.
Lots of woke public companies have told their staff that they can take-off a different day if they don’t regard January 26 as a day to celebrate. Others, like Kmart, have now banned the sale of Australia Day merchandise adorned with our national flag.
And while polling this week showed that more than twice as many Australians regard January 26 as Australia Day rather than “invasion day”, more people under 30 saw it as a day of shame, doubtless because of politically correct brainwashing in our schools.
Can you imagine Americans running the Fourth of July down like this?
For a long time, we celebrated Australia Day as a long weekend, not the actual day itself. But in 1994, all states and territories came together (quite rightly) to mark Australia Day on January 26 because, it was then thought, pride in our country demanded no less. How is it that only a couple of decades after reaffirming the importance of this day to our nation, we’ve got activists and elites pushing their agenda of shame rather than unity?
It’s true that British settlement ultimately meant doom for a hunter-gatherer way of life. And that there was violence on the frontier of settlement. And that many of the settlers looked down on Aboriginal people. This was the case with colonial settlements – French, British, Dutch, Belgian and others at this time – across the globe. Yet it’s also undeniable that
Governor Phillip’s official instructions from London were to “live in amity” with the original inhabitants and that white men were hanged for the murder of black people as early as 1838, after the notorious Myall Creek massacre, showing that justice was colourblind under our imported rule of law.
We can rethink history but we can’t change it. We certainly can’t undo the British settlement and the subsequent development of Australia; so the best way forward – surely – is to make the most of it, especially given that the country that’s evolved here is a magnet to people from all over the world.
When Governor Phillip raised the flag and toasted the king on January 26, 1788, it didn’t just mark the beginning of the dispossession of the original inhabitants as the haters would have us believe. It marked the arrival on this continent of a civilisation even then distinguished, however imperfectly, by the rule of law, respect for individual rights and the demand for representative government.
It was the beginning of a country that has so far transcended the racism and systemic brutality of those times that people identifying as Aboriginal have a greater representation in our parliament than they do in the population; and have been elected because their fellow Australians have regarded them as suitable, regardless of race. It’s another sign of how little race is held against anyone in modern Australia.
So whatever might be in need of improvement, let’s stop running down our country for something it’s not. And let’s stop quibbling about the date for celebrating our country, keep it on the day that modern Australia began and, if you ever need reminding about how good it is here, ask a new migrant.
Watch Peta on Credlin on Sky News, weeknights at 6pm
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