Steve Price: the campaign of self-loathing has led to death of Australia Day
No other nation experiences such endless demonising of its national day, with anyone under 30 encouraged to hate their country. This is why Steve Price has given up on January 26.
Opinion
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Australia Day is dead – we just can’t keep doing this.
I give up. The rabid left and ignorant brain-washed younger Australians who believe the activists fake news and baseless take on history have won.
The Australia Day debate and its endless demonising of the great nation we live in has worn me out. I don’t like being a quitter but let’s be clear Australia Day was always more of a Sydney thing anyway.
Sydney has the harbour where Arthur Phillip’s first fleet re-located to in 1788. After leaving Britain on May 13 in 1787 they took eight months at sea to get to Botany Bay to the south of Sydney Harbour before landing at Port Jackson.
January 26 is huge in Sydney with a first fleet re-enactment using renovated tall ships, a harbour ferry race from Manly to Circular Quay and a proper fire-works display. Melbourne is my only other direct comparison on what happens on Australia Day because growing up in Adelaide I don’t think we did anything but take a day off work and get set to go back to school.
Melbourne is the poor cousin to Sydney when it comes to Australia Day. We might have a major global sporting event on Jan 26 – The Australian Open - but the corporate types running Tennis Australia are too frightened to even utter the words Australia Day. Cricket joined in; the Gabba Test will be an Australia free day supported by skipper Pat Cummins who described the day as “uncomfortable.”
Pre-Covid Australia Day in Melbourne was centred around the Yarra River and St Kilda Rd precinct – hardly competes with the Opera House and Harbour Bridge for scenery. There used to be a parade that left Town Hall and wandered down St Kilda Rd to representing multi-cultural Melbourne. It was nice but a but little cringeworthy unless you were part of it.
Melbourne’s Australia Day highlight was a flyover of some military planes and a vintage car display along Linlithgow Avenue along with some food vans. What 1960’s classic Holden’s and hotdogs had to do with the establishment of modern Australia was always a bit of a mystery but there wasn’t much else to do.
I don’t remember exactly when the term invasion day was first used but the noisy minority quickly drowned out the happily celebrating majority. Australians were smashed over the head with a re-writing or exaggeration of colonial settlement. Listening to community radio station 3CR this week – don’t ask me why – as an example they were talking about Captain James Cook deliberately laying down a trail of smallpox to wipe out the indigenous population.
This went unchallenged and the lead up to Australia Day every year now is littered with words like massacre, genocide and slaughter. If you keep saying these things, they become a fact and anyone under the age of thirty is encouraged to hate their own country. I can’t think of any other nation on earth where there is such an active campaign of self- loathing and a demand, we all apologise for everything post- colonial settlement.
This un-hinged aggressive hate leads to criminal vandalism as we saw this week when a bunch of cowards in the middle of the night used an angle-grinder to cut down St Kilda’s Captain James Cook statue. A statue of Queen Victoria near the Botanical Gardens was hit with the same slogan “the colony will fall” but wasn’t further damaged.
These statues in recent years have been targets for spray paint attacks but the actual felling of Cook takes this crime to a new level.
Anti- Australia Day activism has ramped up year on year with this year’s bitterness finally convincing me it’s simply not worth keeping the 26th. Corporate boards dominated by career directors drawn from the law and major accounting firms, are more interested in being able to tell their like- minded friends at barbecues they don’t support “invasion day.”
Just think Woolworths, Aldi, Cricket Australia, Tennis Australia, the AFL, Telstra, KPMG and upwards of 80 local councils and plenty more corporates.
Supermarket giant Woolworths looked like a bumbling bunch of woke apologists with their dumping of Australia Day merchandise from their stores. By mid-week Woolies CEO Brad Banducci was monstered on breakfast TV and Woolworths took out full page newspapers advertisements insisting they were not anti-Australia Day. I suspect customer feedback at the checkouts influenced that decision.
So bad for Woolworths did it become that the Banducci appearance on the Today show included these weasel words – “we aren’t trying to cancel Australia Day Woolworths is extremely proud of our place in providing the fresh food that brings Australians together every day.”
This from a supermarket giant already accused of ripping off customers during a cost-of-living crisis.
Banducci must think Australians are stupid if he thinks linking cheaper sausages at his supermarkets to chuck on the barbecue will allow us to forgive his decision to cancel patriotic merchandise.
Being a quitter doesn’t rest easily with me so with Australia Day 2024 ambushed by the normal suspects with all the spitting venom and this year it’s ridiculous linking to the war in Gaza is there something we can do to hit back.
This might be simplistic- and open you up to anti- Australia Day vandals – but what about those of us proud of our country to next year stage a silent push back. From January 1 why not buy any size Australian flag you can afford. For the next 26 days display that flag in any way you can from a flag- pole, on a stick stuck in the front garden, a sticker on your fence or letter box or from an apartment window.
A sea of Australian flags across the suburbs of major cities and through regional and remote Australia would be a powerful symbol.
Let’s give it one last try.
LIKES
– Amateur golfer Nick Dunlap winning a PGA event for the first time since 1991.
– Ex-Prime Minister Scott Morrison finally vacating parliament after wasting everyone’s time since losing the election.
– Crown Casino continuing to use their gas fired riverbank towers despite the Allan Government demonising gas.
– Victoria Police finally move to break up a pro-Palestine picket line at Melbourne ports delaying thousands of containers.
DISLIKES
– Australian Open organisers unable to manage a schedule that avoid post-midnight finishes.
– Spread of confusing local council parking signs impossible to interpret.
– Prison guards ordered to consider human rights when handcuffing violent prisoners.
– Mad Australian Olympic Committee decision to evict our athletes from the village in Paris once they’ve competed.
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