One thing that should have been of no surprise to anyone is that the right-wing trashmedia in this country, in their bid to defeat the upcoming First Peoples' Voice referendum, have employed a strategy of inventing rubbish and then wrapping it in layer upon layer of untruth. It is like playing the worst game of pass the parcel ever. One of the layers of irrelevant wrapping paper that has been wrapped around the parcel containing the central dog poo of lies, is that The Voice will act as a third chamber and then start blocking legislation (this is untrue). The layer of untruth that really appears to get the people who want to wave the flag in lieu of actual thinking, is the lie that The Voice will take away Australia Day. Shock horror!
I like games. I like playing stupid games. If you play stupid games, you win stupid prizes. I am prepared to play pass the parcel here. Rather, the music has stopped and I am now in possession of the parcel wrapped in decades' old news. Allow me to set fire to this strawman of an argument. Sure, it has nothing to do with The Voice at all but it still seems like a fun place to play in.
As far as I can make out, Australia Day in its current form exists as a summer holiday that serves no other purpose than for racists to drape themselves in the flag and pretend that they are Captain Cook, Captain Philip, Captain America, or Captain Kirk. Australia Day is red, white and blue cosplay day with a bit of sport, beer drinking, domestic violence and pretend patriotism. Australia Day currently exists for no other purpose than to give people a public holiday and for conservative people to "own the libs"; thus proving that we're so under the cultural thumb of the United States, that we don't even use words properly.
What would we actually lose if we abandoned Australia Day and instated a public holiday on some other day? Nothing as far as I can tell. I note that the same right-wing trashmedia in this country who are grunting in favour or Australia Day like a pack wolves, will just as easily bark at all the public institutions of the country and hope to tear them to pieces. It seems like a very strange disconnect to me to on one hand call for patriotism and on the other hand actively tear that same nation down.
Australia Day isn't even the day that Australia became a nation. Fine details aside, it is the day of the beginning of the prison colony of New South Wales. Quite likely, literally everyone who was there on 26th January 1788 was deeply unhappy about this. The convicts weren't happy about having spent several months on a ship, only to be dumped on the other side of the world. The officers of the Royal Navy in their diaries, repeatedly expressed that they hated being what amounted to little more than babysitters of criminals. The first peoples like the Eora, were unhappy that men who looked like ghosts shoed up out of nowhere and drove them off their own land.
It doesn't even help that Australia Day if it is a thing, was legally the 1st of January 1901; however far less fanfare was given to that than the bicentenary of New South Wales, 13 years earlier. Australia as a nation exists in the wake of fears that the newly federated Germany had plans of acquiring its own empire in the same way that France and Britain had previously done. The Franco-Prussian war of 1870 was still reasonably fresh in peoples' minds and when Germany acquired New Guinea in 1895, that was more or less the tipping point. History may have proved the federation of Australia in the wakr of that, when the first bout of unpleasantness kicked off in 1914.
As for the holiday itself, Australia Day really only came to national significance on the run up to the bicentennial of colonial rule, in 1988. Before then, while it was a public holiday in other states, the other states of Not New South Wales were staunchly proud of their own Proclamation Days.
This last point in particular leads me to ask the people of Not New South Wales, why do you even care? I am perfectly prepared to accept that people not in New South Wales would pay homage and fealty to the self-appointed Premier State (according to the vehicle number plates), because all y'all in the other five states are all second rate.
If not, then why? What does the right gain from Australia Day other than performative agitation? I can't genuinely believe that Australia Day is actually celebrated for any other reason than to open tinnies, have a barbeque, and maybe watch cricket. To be honest, that can be done on any day you choose.
Maybe the right actually wants to take up Premier Parkes' famous question as public policy. When Henry Parkes, the then-Premier of New South Wales, was planning the upcoming 1888 Centenary celebrations, he was asked what, if anything at all, was being planned for Aboriginal people, to which Parkes retorted: "And remind them that we have robbed them?"
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