Are the “Four Pillars” of Australia Day rooted?
On Australia Day we need to celebrate friendship, equality, freedom and prosperity. But what if these “pillars” of Australia are legendary? Andrew Gardiner reports.
Every year around this time, academics, activists (and sometimes, quite by chance, supermarket chains) They raise “inconvenient truths” about what they call misconceptions about Australia Day. And every year regularly other Australians spit out the dummy because they hate being reminded of it.
“Supermarket chains?” sensor. I’m talking, of course, about the Great Woolies Betrayal of 2024; Without a single word of condemnation for Australia and its big day, the retail giant has quietly scrapped products like Australian-themed hats, napkins and (no joke). inflatable lilo thong.
Hey wool people!
From where? Woolies won’t say, but if you say it’s cheap, dirty, foreign-made dross that isn’t sold and belongs to Smokemart, you won’t be far off the mark.
So was Woolies calling Australia “cheap and dirty”? Shock jocks and right-wing talkers didn’t bother to find out and jumped straight into demands to boycott the retailer on the grounds that they weren’t patriotic enough.
Woolworths later backtracked and promised: bring it all backbut not before chauvinist vandals coated “Aussie Oi Oi Woolies f— u” out of chain Teneriffe (Brisbane) store.
History my friend
There is also the endless debate about holding Australia Day on January 26, the day the First Fleet arrived in Sydney Cove 138 years ago this Monday.
“Asking indigenous people to celebrate (that day) is like asking them to celebrate. dance on the graves of their ancestors,” said Karen Mundine of Reconciliation Australia, noting: January 26, “invasion day”, is an infamous day for many indigenous Australians and their supporters.
If the purpose of Australia Day is to be united in celebration, why do the ‘history preserving’ crowd treat a group of citizens with such contempt? Their expletive-laced ‘rebuttal’ suggests it’s “because we’re sensitive snowflakes.”
Pauline Hanson said the quiet part out loud: “Changing Australia Day, ‘chips’ on their shoulders. It was not invaded; The country has calmed down.” Then there was Peta Credlin, the Abbott Government’s svengali and head-scorer: “The left wants us to stay I’m ashamed of who we are”.
RWNJs v Woke
There are few convincing arguments in favor of keeping January 26, and even fewer attempts to address the pain and division inherent in January 26. Instead there is a chorus that might be phrased as ‘Shut up you woke, Australia-hating leftists, we don’t want to hear this’.
It seems most of us go crazy when Australia’s faults, foibles and past inhumanities are dragged out of the subconscious by a loud-mouthed leftist. To paraphrase Peta Credlin, it’s as if they’re “ashamed of who they are.”
The four pillars of the Aussie cult
according to official, government lineAustralia Day is “a time to reflect on what it means to be Australian, to celebrate our diverse, contemporary nation (and) to respect the survival and resilience of (First Nations) Peoples.” Those who reside somewhere to the right of this have no problem with the celebration part, but retreat when the dark past is mentioned.
“Modern Australia emerging from British settlement…in balance is something we can all be proud of”, in question former Prime Minister Tony Abbott studiously ignores those who came before him.
The mainstream handles our national day by adhering to a common template friendship, egalitarianism, freedom and prosperity (‘Lucky Country’). The right, with the Herculean support of the mainstream media, has appropriated all four of these cultural ‘pillars’, meaning that its “forget the bad parts; let’s celebrate” approach has rails running down the racetrack. public opinion.
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Early in his tenure as Prime Minister, John Howard redefined friendship, a concept once synonymous with egalitarianism, in market-friendly terms.
“(Friendship) is Australia’s great capacity work together “He’s in distress,” the former Prime Minister said, quoting a prisoner of war who “could not remember a single Australian dying alone.” “It was an expression of our friendship that he always had someone to look after him in some way.”
Howard’s fiction is more about the shores of Gallipoli than the idyllic frontiers of the Darling Downs, where historians say rural egalitarianism is the order of the day: “Jack as good as as its master.”
The other pillars of Australiana, prosperity and freedom, are a sort of conventional wisdom among the public. Australians (no matter how difficult our economy is) and often right-leaning institutions This feeds our ‘we are free’ atmosphere. Freedom has long been bread and butter for the private enterprise crowd, whose definitional dogma combines economic freedom with civil liberties and is rarely challenged by today’s free-market Labor Party.
This burnishes the right’s carefully crafted credentials. better economic managers (i.e. best bet for prosperity). This reputation exploded last year, in a belated reality check.
With today’s Labor Party largely withdrawing for Australia Day, it is left to a handful of voices to propose an alternative approach. Among them was the late John Pilger (1939-2023), a journalist, author and documentary filmmaker of 60 years whose work continues to resonate until recently.
A classless society?
Pilger dismissed friendship as a now-mythical concept that in recent years had morphed into something beyond the boundaries of ordinary Australians: nepotism among powerful, favor-exchanging elites, what he called “the order of wives.”
This shattered the illusion that Australia was an egalitarian, “classless society”, Pilger wrote.
“In the 1960s, Australia had the fairest distribution of personal income in the world,” he wrote in a 1993 update of his study: A Secret Country. But Pilger insisted that this situation was reversed two decades later when “the bottom-up transfer of wealth became epic.”
Critics say the other two pillars, freedom and prosperity, are a thing of the past for many Australians. Welfare groups complain about growing wealth inequality (which they say “threatens the public”) exacerbate On the subject of civil liberties, Muslims, advocates, and activists have raised a big red flag over our new hate crime laws passed last week.
“By giving broad powers to ministers, reducing legal thresholds and creating unspecified offences, the Act puts at risk fundamental freedoms, including the right to practice religion, associate with others and speak freely,” Muslim leaders said. in question. The Greens agreed and said the new laws “cooling effect on political debate, protest (and) civil rights.”
The myth of egalitarianism
Such voices are often ignored or condemned by the corporate media, which has agenda-setting power. somehow it continues. But the question remains: Are they right?
The figures clearly show that egalitarianism is essentially a myth these days, with prosperity reaching too few Australians. The concentration of wealth at the top is now a permanent feature of our economy; top 10 percent of households 46 percent While it will constitute 10 percent of total wealth by 2022, poverty is also hitting one seventh The number of Australians (3.7 million people) is up from one in eight five years ago at the last census.
There are no statistics on friendship, but if egalitarianism is inherent then it is long gone. Even by Howard’s summary definition of ‘being there for each other no matter who you are’, the signs are bleak: anti-Muslim bias “systemic”, LGBTQ sexual harassment widespread Discrimination against Indigenous Australians and risingamong other problems.
The curse of xenophobia
If the number of “fuck it, we’ve had enough” car stickers is any guide, friendship has well and truly been usurped by “every bum for himself.”
Two of the major, respected indexes ranking Australia’s freedom relative to the freedom of other countries present contrasting images. The Freedom House index (political rights and civil liberties) gives Australia an impressive score of 95 out of 100, but that was before the hate speech law was passed on Tuesday. criminalize criticism leaders like war criminal Benjamin Netanyahu or word-of-mouth opposition and even cutting comments.
Meanwhile, the World Press Freedom Index ranks Australia at just 29thhe in the world, disabled by the world second worst concentration of media ownership (which is “limits diversity Number of voices represented in the news”). Former Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull said: “The most powerful political actor in Australia is not the Liberal Party or the Labor Party, but the News Corporation.” in question.
The four ‘pillars’ on which Monday’s Australia Day celebrations are based have been revealed to be made of hollow plasterboard. If Australians insist on forgetting the past, they could at least take a hard look at the present.
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An Adelaide-based Media Studies graduate with an MA in Social Policy, I was an editor covering current affairs, local government and sport for a variety of publications before deciding to change careers in 2002.
