Happy Australia Day!

[watt price tully]

[Dave The Man]

The People who Burned the Flag on Australia Day can get our of the Country because they hate that much

[Skids]

[watt price tully]

[stui magpie]

Changing the day will fix nothing and do more damage to reconciliation.

Aboriginal people will be in exactly the same situation as they are now.

Culture change, Yes. I agree. Lets start with getting more Aboriginal kids to stay in school and get jobs. Let the kids see you can work in the "white" world and retain your culture, work on eradicating the cultures of poverty, blame and victimisation that in my humble opinion the progressives foster and nurture, and encourage self reliance and responsibility instead.

[Skids]

^ Yep... and an overwhelming majority of Australians agree. Aboriginal Australians are pretty much evenly split.

Just leave it alone.

A 2017 poll conducted for The Guardian revealed only 15% of Australians supported changing the date of Australia Day, with 83% supporting keeping the name "Australia Day". The poll also found that the majority (68%) felt positive about Australia Day, 19% were indifferent and 7% had mixed feelings, with 6% of people feeling negative about Australia Day. Among Indigenous Australians, however, only 23% felt positive about Australia Day, 31% were negative and 30% had mixed feelings, while 54% favoured a change of date.



https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australia_Day

[David]

[Mugwump]

[watt price tully]

[HAL]

It seems logical to me.

[Mugwump]

Changing the date is probably only superficially about what happened on January 26th 1788. It is really about Orwell's formulation : "Who controls the past controls the future."

What is really being aimed at here is an act of forgetting. If we can be made to forget how and where our freedom originated, and made to feel ashamed of our past, then we will give ourselves over to those who assume new power, based upon the idea that our very occupation of Australia is illegitimate. For if 26th January is illegitimate, then the whole of modern settlement is illegitimate. And once you accept that, then you are subject to those who administer the new legitimacy, free from any responsibility to history. Australia's historic liberties, its free market system, its free speech, are all chipped away until the edifice falls and the "progressive" state, under new management, can refashion the ruins until we are as successful as Brazil or South Africa - two alternative courses that our history might have taken, but thankfully did not.

This stuff pretends to be about morality, but it is really about power and domination. As Lenin, said, the "who does what to whom?" question. The restraint on "who-whom" is our memory of the institutions and history that brought us here so successfully. Many Australians assume that these liberties fell from the sky, but they did not. They grew from the cultural and institutional assumptions of those who founded and developed Australia post-1788.

As long as they remain unforgotten, we can remain free and prosperous.

[Mugwump]

[stui magpie]

[David]

^ I'm honestly sceptical over the assertion that changing the date would cause a backlash. Some proportion of the population would shake their heads and mutter about "political correctness gone mad" and a few on the far-right would be ropeable, but that's inevitable with any change of this kind. I just don't think it's an issue that greatly concerns the majority of the population and I think most people would accept the change pretty quickly.

Mugwump, whenever this topic comes up you start going on about 'effacing history' and so on. But no-one's saying that we should forget the 26th of January or that nobody should be able to celebrate it. Indeed, one could feasibly make a compromise case for keeping it on the calendar as "First Fleet Day" or some such and simply assigning the Australia Day public holiday to a different date. This isn't the grave act of cultural vandalism you make it out to be; plenty of countries have changed national holidays, national anthems, capital cities and flags over the years. That's because cultural meaning is not set in stone. Certain traditions do dim in importance as the decades pass, while others start to carry more resonance.

As I've argued in the past, you could still make a very good case for changing the national holiday even if it wasn't so deeply offensive to Indigenous Australians. That's because the 26th of January 1788 holds most significance within an older conceptualisation of what Australia was as a country. Now, as merely the start of the first modern wave of immigration ��and merely one of many � I would argue that it no longer encapsulates everything Australia is. Something that speaks of our independence from Britain and multicultural identity seems more apt now.

[stui magpie]