Where will history start if we tear up past?

A view is seen of the Hall of Fame for Great Americans taken from outside Bronx Community College. Bronx Community College President Thomas Isekenegbe last week released a statement announcing that the school will remove the busts of Robert E. Lee and Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson from the Hall of Fame For Great Americans on its campus. Picture: AFP

The tragedy of the riots in Charlottesville in America is more than white extremists behaving badly or their opponents joining in, as claimed by Donald Trump. The real problem is trying to rewrite history and eradicate the existence of those who led the south in the American Civil War.

Through the educated eyes of our present state of human development, in the US there is a concerted movement to wipe out reference to historical figures such as Robert E Lee or Stonewall Jackson. It is impossible to believe that fighting for the south and the institution of slavery was evil.

Surely it is a fairly simple concept to accept that if you are born into a way of life, you mostly accept that what surrounds you is morally sustainable. Those plantation owners in the deep south did not invent slavery.

For thousands of years slaves were widely used. The Roman Empire, which basically controlled the whole of the then known world, had slaves. Romans loved to watch people being eaten by lions. Should we no longer acknowledge Caesar, Cicero, Octavian, Marcus Aurelius et al because they had slaves? To eradicate the Roman Empire, we will have to forget hundreds of years of history. Yet this is a natural consequence of the blind revisionism of the statue destroyers in the US.

Here in Australia the immediate revisionist target is celebrating Australia Day on January 26. Dark rumours are circulating that anything connected with the origins of British colonialism will be next on the list. Two crazy municipal councils in Melbourne have already ditched January 26 as Australia Day. The federal government has quite rightly stripped these councils of their right to confer citizenship. Statues and monuments to James Cook and Arthur Phillip are in the firing line too. Inscriptions etched into these monuments are also in considerable danger.

There can be no doubt that indigenous people were at times treated very poorly, but so were convicts and their skin was white. They were whipped and flogged and fed gruel while being forced to work long hours. I will not be made to feel guilty about either indigenous people or convicts. The social mores of one or two centuries ago do not hold today and surely Australia Day is as much a celebration of what a wonderful place to live Australia is today as it is a day to remember how we became what we are.

It is only a tick under 30 years since the 1988 bicentenary celebrations were held. Australia went wild at the opportunity. A million people crowded around the foreshores of Sydney Harbour, which itself was chock-a-block with boats, from the billionaires’ swank cruisers to the tinnies of the battlers. It was a rare feeling of collective euphoria and was one of the most memorable days of my life.

Am I now to chastise myself for taking part? Should Australians hang their heads in shame for ­daring to charge their glasses on our national day? I don’t think so.

At least this furore invented by the victims’ industry distracted us for a few moments from the mess in which our government finds ­itself. The attempts last week to create distractions was a total disaster. No less a personage than our Foreign Minister, Julie Bishop, firing off on the grand and evil conspiracy with New Zealand to bring down Barnaby Joyce set the tone.

It was met with such derision by both the press gallery and the opposition that it barely lasted 24 hours. For me it merely brought into sharper focus just how parlous the government’s situation really is. To see a class act like Bishop demean herself with this was truly sad. Perhaps it will be overlooked in the medium to long term as taking one for the team.

When both the leader and the deputy leader of the Nationals are languishing in the worst form of political limbo, the level of desperation rises every single day. Now the normally sensible and unflappable Matthias Corman has joined the ranks of the unhinged.

Ratcheting up the rhetoric is best left to the zealots and the obsessed, yet our Finance Minister tried to equate Bill Shorten and his economic policies with East Germany before the collapse of the Berlin Wall. The easy way he tried to equate communism and socialism was reminiscent of Bronwyn Bishop at her worst. Most people on the left will quickly tell you that Shorten bears no resemblance whatsoever to a socialist.

This is not to say that I approve of all that Labor is doing on the economic policy front. It wishes to do something with negative gearing, and I agree with that, but it is easy to see where it will tax and spend, while it is very difficult to see if it will have the stomach for the cuts needed to get the budget under control.

The impossibility of what Cormann is about is that in the four years the Liberals have been in power, they have outdone Labor. Debt is out of control and the last budget’s prediction that a surplus is just around the corner looks ­ludicrous, given that growth figures don’t match the budget’s optimistic fantasies.

Cormann would be on the right track if he had any budget runs on the board. Instead he and his mates seem capable of scoring only golden ducks.

And remember, the High Court looms like a guillotine hanging over the neck of the Prime Minister and his government.