Why I think we would miss Harmony Day

Our Human Right commissars puritanically intone that Harmony Day should be a miserable occasion of deep reflection and regret for the “systemic racism” that runs to this day through Australian society.

The best jokes always work by combining utterly implausible elements. In other words, they work because they don’t work.

So when someone tells you there’s a proposal to rename Harmony Day – the day Australians celebrate the peaceful coexistence of our multi-ethnic communities – to the Elimination of Racial Discrimination Day, you really have to laugh. But then the giggles die in your throat once you realise some lunatic, somewhere, actually is serious.

The de-harmonisation of Harmony Day is the solemn proposal of the Australian Human Rights Commission, a body that exists to promote civil rights and pay its commissioners and staff healthy remuneration.

Just taking its proposal semantically for the moment, the commission wants the name of our vicious festival of friendliness to reflect the technical title of the document that is its vague ancestor.

This is the ponderously named – but for leftie lawyers perennially remunerative – United Nations Declaration for the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination.

Trips off the tongue, doesn’t it? Particularly for six-year-olds at the local primary school who are trying to enjoy the customs of other communities by wearing papier mâché hats and costumes put together from paper bags and sticky tape.

Students at Marsden Road Public School celebrate Harmony Day.

There are real belly laughs imagining what the Commission for Silly Names might do with other popular celebrations.

Anzac Day would become The Australian and New Zealand Army Corps Landing in the Dardanelles (Probably a War Crime) Day. Your birthday will become a Gender-Neutral Gestational Emergence Day (culturally impeccable, but very hard to fit to the tune of Happy Birthday, or spell out in icing sugar on a sponge cake).

But things get a bit sinister when you understand the commission’s reasoning for turning Harmony Day into a jangle of politically correct jargon. The commission thinks Harmony Day is just too happy. No, really.

Our Human Right commissars puritanically intone that Harmony Day should be a miserable occasion of deep reflection and regret for the “systemic racism” that runs to this day through Australian society.

It will be a sort of secular Ash Wednesday, where we will anoint our foreheads with ash produced from burned copies of happy children’s books, while flagellating ourselves with ethically sourced whips.

Dissident children could be locked in a cupboard with a complete set of the commission’s voluminous, self-congratulatory reports. That will teach them, the rotten little incipient racists.

It gets worse. Much, much worse. It turns out that the specific campaign against Harmony Day, and happiness in general, is part of a master strategy. This is contained in the unnervingly named National Anti-Racism Framework: A Roadmap to Elimination of Racism in Australia, released by the commission in November. It is a title that could only have been dreamt up in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. Or possibly even by Joseph Stalin himself on a particularly sinister day.

Its thesis is that Australia is an intrinsically racist state. It persecutes just about everyone and everything. It should be deconstructed, now.

But we particularly persecute a few minorities officially approved by the commission. Go to its website and you will find the chief international, racist atrocities of the Australian people. Anti-Palestinian Racism, Anti-Arab Racism and Islamophobia. Shame on you, Australia. Boo. Hiss.

Admittedly, anti-Semitism gets a mention, but really only as a stage whisper. The commission’s focus is on the limited field of anti-Semitism at universities, which is like performing a major medical examination by probing a patient’s left foot.

Russian Communist Party supporter holds a portrait of late Soviet leader Joseph Stalin during a memorial ceremony. Picture: AFP

The commission also has an understandable focus on the difficult circumstances of Australia’s Indigenous people, but not in any way that’s remotely useful.

Its narrative is pure postmodernist settler theory. The already bloated school curriculum should be stuffed further with tendentious, divisive, ideological padding. Apparently, racism is to be defeated by stirring interracial resentment. Not one life will be saved, not one school built.

At heart, of course, the commission’s vast paper trail reveals little of principle. What it really does is show a lust for power that would make Napoleon feel a little self-involved.

The commission wants to conceive of Australia as a mere bucket of chromic human rights abuses. Politics and policy will consist almost entirely of remedying these disasters and punishing the wicked. Like those dreadful families celebrating Harmony Day.

Of course, such a massive program of rectification will require noble leaders. Who will they be? Blushingly, the Human Rights Commission steps forward. In a society consisting of nothing but abused rights, only heroic rights practitioners can rule.

This really is the same program that supporters of a Bill of Rights have had on sale for the past half century, but which no one has been silly enough to buy. Just turn Australia into a thicket of rights enforced by right-minded judges and all our problems will be over.

The fatal flaw in that argument was handing over ultimate power from an elected parliament to unelected, undemocratic judges.

But the Human Rights Commission can solve all this. We do not have to vote on a Bill of Rights. We need not worry about parliament or judges. Armed with a bible of correctitude, the commission itself and its woke allies will take charge of the soul of the commonwealth.

I think we will miss Harmony Day.

Greg Craven is a former vice-chancellor of the Australian Catholic University.