You’ve got to have a country before worrying about a national day
Via The Guardian, the Fake Left’s political sheet:
Melbourne’s Invasion Day rally begins on the steps of Parliament House on Spring Street, 500 metres from where the city council has blocked off the route of the official Australia Day parade.
The events start at the same time, and until a few years ago only one was accommodated. Before 2015, the Invasion Day rally was seen as just a group of hardcore activists; they didn’t register in the minds of the flag-waving crowd that turned out to watch the official proceedings.
That was then. On Friday, when the Invasion Day march reached the barricades that had been pushed aside after the parade moved on, it significantly outnumbered the Australia Day event.
Crowd estimates were between 40,000 and 60,000 people. It stretched the length of four city blocks, picking up stragglers and people who were on the street only because they had watched the official parade.
The Fake Left piled in:
Senator Di Natale said Australians had much to celebrate, but they should be doing it on a different day.
“We’re one of the most successful multicultural nations on earth. We’ve just seen some of the world’s leading scientists being awarded honours, we’re great in the sporting arena, we’ve achieved so much through the arts. I mean we’ve got a lot to celebrate,” he said.
“We’re such a successful young nation. So let’s have that day, but let’s just not do it on a day that causes so much hurt and suffering to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. For so many people this represents a day that their land was stolen, that marked the beginning of a genocide where cultures were decimated, where families were torn apart, where children were taken from their mothers.
And Labor:
Anthony Albanese has called for referendums on the republic and indigenous constitutional recognition to be held on a January 26, as a way of creating a national “platform of unity’’ and ending divisions over the date of Australia Day.
Mr Albanese, who was deputy prime minister in the second Rudd government and rival to Bill Shorten for the Labor leadership after the party lost power in 2013, used a speech at a citizenship ceremony in his Sydney electorate of Grayndler to suggest how January 26 could be kept as Australia Day, with the support of indigenous people, by holding ballots on two major issues confronting that national identity.
Millions of Australians around the nation, including about 500,000 people at Circular Quay in Sydney, yesterday celebrated the landing of the First Fleet at Sydney Cove in 1788. But marches were held in Sydney and Melbourne to protest against the date of Australia Day, and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander flags were lowered to half-mast at Queensland’s Parliament House, contrary to official protocol.
To be clear, I support much more aggressive Reconciliation including constitutional recognition, a treaty and fixed Parliamentary representation. I would move Australia Day and am an ardent republican. Noel Pearson’s suggestion is a good one:
The observance of Australia Day could commence on January 25 — the eve of the proclamation of British sovereignty over the east coast of the continent — and continue into January 26. This would straddle two sovereignties: the sovereignty of the First Nations that possessed this continent since time immemorial, and the crown’s sovereignty that commenced when the British flag was raised at Sydney Cove on January 26, 1788.
The announcement of Australian of the Year is already made on the evening of January 25.
Let me make the case for this linkage of January 25 and 26.
…My fellow white Australians: the blackfellas were here on January 25, 1788, they were here for 65,000 years prior, they remained here on January 26 and have survived to this day. We can recognise and honour this.
My fellow black Australians: Captain Cook claimed possession in 1770, the whitefellas arrived in Botany Bay between January 18 and 20, and they asserted sovereignty on January 26, 1788 on behalf of the British crown. The whitefellas then created a commonwealth under a Constitution that excluded blackfellas in 1901. The whitefellas are not going to return to England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland. They are here to stay. We can recognise and honour this.
However, what concerns me is not the address of important symbolic issues but what that focus is saying about our ability to address deeper national interest challenges.
There has been a great dragging of the anchor on all ideologies. The Left has shifted radically towards the globalist Right while only pretending to care about its old constituency of downtrodden classes, including workers, youth and minority groups. The Right has shifted from liberalism to social conservatism while bashing anyone not measuring up to its narrow meritocracy and oligarchy. With the politics of economics, class and freedom relegated to quaint history, all that remains for political parties to define themselves by is social issues. Moreover, and this is the key point, the symbolic politics of the Fakes Left and Right is coming not as a compliment to traditional power politics but at the price of it.
I don’t agree with much that Paul Kelly says these days he but summed up the fakes well on the weekend:
Australia Day is getting bigger, brighter, more celebratory and stained by the rising tide of culture war hostility. The transformation of January 26 from a sleepy public holiday two generations ago into a boisterous party and civic commemoration has provoked a political backlash conceived in two different sentiments — grievance and exploitation.
The debate is not just about our national day. It’s really about who we are, what symbols we honour and, ultimately, the legitimacy of our civilisation. This debate can break one of two ways: robust differences can generate a better understanding of Australia and its national day or the upshot can be a destructive orgy of self-interested identity politics leading to a diminished and divided country.
The progressive crusade to remove January 26 as Australia Day has won fresh momentum for a movement bent upon imposing its views on the nation. Nobody should be surprised.
The volatility of social media, the power of negative politics and the emotional manipulation around “invasion day” constitutes sufficient warning that things could go badly wrong.
A nation ignorant of its history or simply unable to handle its history is heading for trouble in the present age of populist and cheapjack disruption.
Those pledged to “change the day” underestimate the popularity of the late January public holiday before the kids return to school, when barbecues abound in parks and backyards, fireworks make a spectacular night, the Australian flag adorns cars and front verandas, the sense of community is tangible, and civic and citizenship ceremonies at the local level testify to a beating patriotism.
In every such event there are tributes to the first Australians. This is embedded in our civic culture. More indigenous peoples are participating and being recognised on Australia Day, with its official emphasis on multiculturalism and diversity. Since governor Lachlan Macquarie nominated the public holiday in 1818, the day has seen enormous and essential reinterpretation.
Beware, however, the emerging malaise — a culture war between the green-identity, politics-progressive left determined to destroy the current day and the hopelessly unpersuasive conservatives who defend the status quo, speak and listen only to one another and lose every battle because they cannot find a language to appeal to a diverse mainstream.
Beneath this malaise the truth of economics and power politics is unchanged. We see it everywhere in increasing wealth and income inequality across the world and environmental destruction. That’s the anger beneath the surface everywhere, in the UK, Europe, the US and here. The modern lumpenproletariat is increasingly confused and infuriated at the political misdirection as living standards and identities erode. Pepe Escober at Davos sums the charade darkly:
Davos is essentially double-dip land. On one side, we have ‘Bad for Labor’, with millions in the West thrown into an unemployment hell or suffering from a wages freeze. On the other side, we have ‘Good for Capital’, with companies flush with cash.
Yet the result is uncertainty, all over again. Quite simply, more “robust” companies are just not investing. Why? Because there is no demand. That is the “price” of the austerity mantra, and there is no evidence that the business, financial and government suits in Davos will address the drama.
After all, since the 1990s, the summit has always been about hardcore globalization and its prime spin-off – the absolute marketization of everything in life.
To get to the bottom of it, CEOs, bankers and techno-bureaucrats would have to engage in an in-depth discussion of hardcore neoliberalism.
They would have to hold global banking to account. They would also have to consign austerity to the dustbin of history, and level the playing field between capital and labor. Of course, that will not happen.
Still, this year’s Davos theme is “Resilient Dynamism.” As a definition of the current woes of turbo-capitalism, a five-year-old in a favela, or slum, in Rio could come up with something more meaningful.
But then, Davos is a one-trick pony. “Resilience” remains a euphemism for the ever-expanding markets and low pay for workers syndrome. In a nutshell, globalization driven by huge multinational corporations.
We should scrap “Resilience” as the name of their game is “Inequality.” Davos, of course, does not do “inequality.”
…Still, the question Davos refuses to ask remains: Why is it easier to imagine the total destruction of mankind, from nuclear war to a climate catastrophe, than to work on changing the system of relations spawned by capitalism?
The absurdity of the Australia Day and Republic debate is obvious. Australian sovereignty has never been more weak, it’s values never more diminished. Oligarchy, class war, mass immigration, sectional interests, energy and environmental failure plus foreign power corruption are the substance of a political class uniformly wedded to open borders globalisation. There is no serious policy discussion to get ahead of any of it in the national interest.
Political symbolists of the Fakes Left and Right be warned that whomsoever addresses this basic disjunction will win the hearts of minds of the people, as has already happened in the UK, US and New Zealand.
