This won’t change history. But it will ensure we never learn its lessons

NITWIT local councillors have jumped on the latest left-wing bandwagon to erase history — by banning Australia Day, writes Miranda Devine.

NITWIT local councillors have jumped on the latest left-wing bandwagon to erase history — by banning Australia Day.

But if you think this is just another bout of empty virtue-signalling, watch out for those, like broadcaster Stan Grant, who are coming after statues of Captain Cook.

Lismore and Byron councils are the latest to consider axing or moving our national day, which they claim insults indigenous Australians.

They want to hold want citizenship ceremonies at more “culturally appropriate” times. Well, the federal government will probably strip their right to hold a citizenship ceremonies at all, if they keep it up.

That’s what has happened to Melbourne’s Yarra Council when it decided to replace Australia Day with a “culturally appropriate event”.

They were followed by Darebin council in north Melbourne whose dopey Mayor Kim Le Cerf says if Australians were better educated they would “feel ashamed to be celebrating on January 26”.

Sydney Lord Mayor Clover Moore, who always bags Australia Day as a “day of invasion”, can’t be far off.

And in Campbelltown, Greens councillor Ben Moroney also has been trashing Australia Day, claiming it can “never be an inclusive celebration of community”. With the Greens, that’s a self-fulfilling prophecy.

There have been calls to remove the inscription on the Captain Cook statue at Hyde Park in Sydney. (Pic: News Corp)

The dissident councils will no longer refer to Australia Day, just “January 26” — or perhaps “February 1 minus 6”.

That was the form Chinese dissidents had to use when referring to the June 4, 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre: the “35th day of May”, they called it, before being rounded up and imprisoned. When you throw history down the memory hole, you have to know you’re on your way to totalitarianism.

We see the same urge to delete history from the alt-left in the US, who behave like the Taliban, tearing down statues commemorating heroes of the Civil War.

Local authorities in Democrat towns have taken to quietly removing statues in the dead of night.

Inspired by the American disruption, Grant this week called for the removal of an inscription on a Captain Cook statue in Hyde Park that reads: “Discovered this territory in 1770.”

“Americans are tearing down the monuments to hate, but we remain oblivious to ours,” he wrote on the ABC website.

He also questioned place names such as the Coxs River, named after pioneer William Cox, who he smears as being involved in the massacre of Aborigines.

So here we go. But deleting our national day, or pulling down statues won’t change history.

It just ensures we never learn its lessons.