Don’t rip up our proud history, says John Howard

John Howard has rebuffed calls to ‘rewrite history’ by downgrading and even eliminating key British symbols.

John Howard has dismissed calls to start correcting inscriptions on statues from the colonial era.

John Howard has rebuffed calls to “rewrite history” by downgrading and even eliminating key British symbols in Australian cultural life, saying they should remain and be accepted as representing the time when they were created.

Dismissing calls to change the date of Australia Day or start correcting inscriptions on statues from the colonial era, the former Liberal prime minister said British settlement had been “undeniably very good for Australia”.

• RICHARDSON: So where on earth will history start?

While emphasising he did not mean to be offensive or convey a sense of triumphalism, Mr Howard said colonisation of Australia’s land mass was inevitable, and British settlement was a far better outcome than other possibilities.

He told The Australian that colonisation had transferred the best of British things such as the English language, rule of law, a free press and Western civilisation with a certain sense of humour.

“Their settlement policies, their colonial policies, were not without fault, but they were infinitely better than the alternatives from around the time,” Mr Howard said. Other “bad” parts of British life, notably class divisions and the aristocracy, were explicitly rejected, and Australia could have turned out very differently under a different colonial power, he said.

Mr Howard weighed into debate over how to reconcile colonial and indigenous history yesterday as the Greens escalated a campaign to move Australia Day from January 26. He dismissed the behaviour of some local councils voting to stop celebrations and citizenship ceremonies on the day as “a Green-inspired, left-wing ­exercise in gesture politics”.

Known in office for rejecting a “black-armband” view of the ­nation’s history, Mr Howard also disagreed with calls by ABC indigenous editor Stan Grant to amend an inscription on the base of a Captain Cook statue in Sydney’s Hyde Park that says Cook “discovered this territory”.

Declaring “context is everything”, Mr Howard said he ­concurred with Aboriginal leader Warren Mundine that “if you start mucking around with statues then you might as well start tearing down the pyramids”.

“I thought that was a good way of putting it because if you look at all the figures of history, if you go back sufficiently in time, you will find people on both sides of politics advocating what would now be seen as racial immigration policies,” Mr Howard said.

He said one argument he had used as prime minister against apologising to the Aboriginal people was that attitudes and standards of today could not be applied to earlier generations. “In some circumstances the behaviour is undeniably evil and unacceptable. But you can’t do that, you have to think of the context of the time.”

When it came to teaching history, Mr Howard said his longstanding view was that school curriculums had tended to see the British contribution “written out”.

“I don’t know how to advance the position of the First Australians by diminishing the benefits of our British heritage,” he said.

Emeritus Professor Ken Wiltshire, who helped conduct the 2014 curriculum review, said Canberra needed to “lock down” the content of history classes. While the content of various curriculum units was sound, too many choices for teachers and students had often left big knowledge gaps, later seen among university students.

“That gets pretty serious when you start to think about people who do not know about the Anzacs, and you still get a lot of kids who think the Holocaust didn’t happen,” Professor Wiltshire said.