Harper Nielsen: A child of nine should not be girt by braying mobs

Harper Nielsen, 9. Picture: Annette Dew

Advance Australia Fair is a bad song and not in a good way. The lyrics are terrible, and the only time anyone cries is when somebody who can’t sing has a go and we’re all wincing.

Anyway, this week some people — yes, of course, they’re mostly on Twitter — are saying the horribleness of the anthem reflects the horribleness of Australia, but that’s silly.

We don’t live in a horrible country. We live in a terrible world. What other conclusion can we reach about a planet on which a protest by a nine-year-old can become a flashpoint in a culture war?

“I tell you what, I’d give her a kick up the backside,” Pauline Hanson said of the kid in question. “She’s a real little brat.” Really Pauline? Again, for emphasis: the child is nine.

But let’s go back a step. Who is this kid and what has she done?

Her name is Harper Nielsen, she’s in year four at Kenmore South State School in Brisbane, and she is refusing to stand for the Australian anthem at school assembly. Why? Oh, go on, take a guess. Yes, you got it. “The reason why I don’t sing it or stand is because Advance Australia Fair means advance White Australia,” Harper told Brisbane’s The Courier-Mail. “When it says we are young it completely ignores the fact that indigenous culture was here for over 50,000 years before colonisation.”

You won’t, I suspect, be entirely surprised to hear that Harper’s parents have offered their daughter their complete support. By chance, her views precisely mirror their own! You also may be able to see why others in the Kenmore South community have got the hump: if this pure and driven nine-year-old’s stand — err, sit? — is morally worthy, then everyone else’s kid, by definition, is weak, blind, stupid and probably racist.

The school has told Harper that it won’t stand for her sitting: she can get up and sing or leave the assembly space. She refused to do either, and now she’s all over the newspapers and the TV, with her really rather pleased-with-himself father right by her side.

You yourself once might have got away with rolling your eyes in a good-natured way, but not any more. Today, the views of a nine-year-old are considered fair game in the bitterly and apparently endless argument about national identity, and I’m not taking sides here: the unctuous Left on this issue has been as rotten as the bumptious Right.

Mark Nielsen and Yvette Miller with their daughter Harper. Picture: Annette Dew

On Twitter, it’s all hands on bleeding hearts, with women of a certain age saying things like: “Je suis Harper! I too was a rebellious girl!” #StandWithHarper has become a thing.

Others are saying Harper should “take a knee” like Colin Kaepernick, the former San Francisco 49ers quarterback who knelt during the US national anthem. Yes, let’s be more like the US! Except I’m confused: doesn’t this lot normally loathe the US?

On the Right, you’ve got Hanson, and former politician Mark Latham saying Harper should be kicked out of school; and you’ve got Queensland’s opposition education spokesman Jarrod Bleijie saying Harper’s action disrespects our country and our veterans … again, she’s nine.

Truly, it should be possible to celebrate the immense contribution of the British — the high-quality, free, secular, coedu­cational schooling that Harper is receiving at the Kenmore South State School being the first example — and indigenous history in the same national anthem. They manage it in New Zealand.

But forget all that. The only real point is this: Harper is a child. She deserves better than being hoisted like a mascot in a social media war, better from everyone.

In days gone by, Harper’s protest would have been a problem for the school, which would have done its best to protect her, as would her folks. The principal would have called the lot of them in for a bit of a chat.

Which is not to say that no school rule must ever be challenged. Just this year, we’ve seen effective action by parents who backed the right of girls to wear shorts, for example.

That’s not what’s happening here. This is braying mobs at opposing ends of an ideological argument using a child as a cudgel, and that’s really not kosher. Think your argument is a winning one? Then you don’t need a nine-year-old to make it.