It was not a happy Australia Day for Michael Pascoe. Two polls told him we’re getting meaner, less confident, less welcoming, less Australian.
There was a lot of depressing news over the long weekend, so much that you might have missed the opinion poll indicating Australians are getting meaner.
The SMAge reported ($) its Resolve poll found 68 per cent of Australians now support January 26 as the date for Australia Day, up from 56 per cent shortly after the Voice referendum two years ago and only 47 per cent three years ago.
That trend since Albanese’s disastrous Voice debacle reversed a steady decline in support for January 26 as older monarchists died off and the proportion of younger people rose.
Perhaps the kindest interpretation would be that maybe, with so much bad stuff going on and optimism dimming, some people have just grown tired of the annual culture war and want it to go away, a cohort of “ah, bugger it, another lost cause, leave it January 26, move on, too bad about the blackfellas”.
It’s the day, the date
Maybe the poll was distorted by January 26 this year happening to fall on the right day for our mid-summer public holiday, the last Monday of January.
Certainly it was distorted by the question, to wit: “If we are to have a national day, what is your preference for the date of Australia Day?”
Invasion Day marches in Sydney and Melbourne were huge
I wonder if the result might have been a bit different if people were instead asked: “If we always have the last Monday of January as our summer public holiday, would you mind if some other date was called Australia Day?”
With those thoughts and if it was just the SMAge poll, I wouldn’t have bothered spending time writing this, but that trend of caring less about offending a significant group of Australians and showing an ignorance of history came on top of the various polls showing the rise in support for One Nation.
The Trumpian rise of Hanson
The polls claim about 20 per cent of Australians would give their first preference to what can be more accurately called One Hanson. That one-in-five of us would want to give power to such a dubious and Trumpy outfit is indeed depressing.
One Hanson came about first by bashing indigenous Australians, then Asians and now Muslims. It doesn’t even bother to keep its antisemitic and Islamophobic dog whistle in the silent range.
Like Trump, One Hanson is a party of fossil-fuelled climate deniers.
Like Trump, One Hanson seeks to blame migrants for all problems and, nudge-nudge, wink-wink, brown migrants at that.
It’s even veering off into the loony Robert F Kennedy medical science scepticism territory.
And don’t forget, One Hanson is so deep in gun psychosis that it tried to get money from America’s National Rifle Association.
With the Trump Administration now murdering its own citizens on camera and lying about it, I can’t imagine how anyone with self-respect would want to hug the MAGA madness, but Gina Rinehart’s little mate Pauline does, right down to partying with Trump at Mar-a-Lago.
The underlying sentiment of One Hanson is a meanness of spirit, a closed mindedness, a lack of confidence in Australia’s ability to welcome, to learn and grow.
It’s a platform promoted by the Murdoch empire
and fellow-traveller shock jocks offering simplistic answers to complicated problems. I liked to think Australians’ healthy scepticism largely protected us from the power-hungry selling snake oil, but that meanness thing seems to be taking root even as the United States demonstrates the evil that flows from it.
Dysfunctional Liberal and National Parties and timid Labor don’t help by failing to provide attractive alternatives. An age of least-worst political choices provides space for populist rat-baggery.
Millennial backlash?
And on top of that, now the SMAge tells me even the young, those in the 18-to-34 age bracket, have turned mean over January 26 with 55 per cent of them allegedly wanting to keep calling that date Australia Day.
I’ve written about the date absurdity several times over the years, most recently here two years ago. Click here (https://www.thenewdaily.com.au/finance/finance-news/2021/01/22/fourth-monday-of-january-michael-pascoe ) as I think the arguments remain sound with one exception thanks to concentrating a little more on the history of it.
What actually happened on January 26, 1788, was Governor Phillip, English prison camp commandant, raising the Union Jack and claiming this land for Britain. How stupid would we have to be to want “Australia Day” commemorating the claiming of our land by another country?
It’s a given that we need a holiday to rule off the summer holidays, the last Monday of January. Call it that, Mid-Summer’s Day, or the High Summer Holiday.
Birth of a nation the obvious choice
The thing called Australia Day logically should mark the birthday of Australia – January 1, 1901. Until then, our nation did not exist.
Sure, it’s already a public holiday. Doesn’t matter, we have Mid-Summer’s Day to make up for that.
Sure, it would be widely experienced with a hangover. That’s a rather Australian experience.
And all that money we blow up in the first minutes of January 1 would be a celebration of a braver, less-mean Australia, our national birthday candles, rather than just a date flipping over on a calendar.
To plagiarise myself again, the celebration of our nation should be a matter of unity. It can’t be when the date marks Invasion Day/Survival Day for many, when about a third of us don’t support it.
We’re better than that. Or we used to be.
Michael Pascoe is an independent journalist and commentator with five decades of experience here and abroad in print, broadcast and online journalism. His book, The Summertime of Our Dreams, is published by Ultimo Press.