I’m old enough to remember when it was bizarre to meet young people who had never heard of World Expo 88. To mention such an iconic moment in our cultural memory and have people stare at me like a cow at a new gate left me wondering if they’d ever seen a TV!
But of course, people not even born in the last Century are now as much as 25 years old, so an entirely new generation has no idea how truly significant it was to us all when Australia turned 200 years old. It was a six month long party the entire world was invited to celebrate, held on the south bank of the Brisbane River. Each nation filled a pavilion proudly displaying the best of their history, culture, cuisine and exports.
At the head of that year, Australia’s bicentenary, then Prime Minister Bob Hawke gave a wonderfully rousing, patriotic speech on the steps of the Opera House. There were no racially exclusive flags strategically placed behind him or anywhere near the event, just unifying Australian pride.
“This is a day of commemoration.
Even more important, it is a day of commitment. Commemoration of the past, commitment to the future. My fellow Australians, today I use the word commitment in a very special sense.
For our commitment to Australia is in a very real way the quality which best defines what it means to be an Australian in 1988.”
I agree. There is not a single person born on this great island, ever, who is not descended from someone who migrated here from somewhere else. We are indeed a nation of immigrants: black, white and brindle.
Commitment is a not unhelpful way of describing the thing that makes us part of the first nation state here, the Commonwealth of Australia. It was all encompassing when the Founders wrote that the Constitution’s authority came from the popular resolve of “the people” of the converging Colonies. “The people” is not a racially exclusive phrase, but universal and exhaustive. Everyone is mentioned in the preamble, rightfully so, without distinction or class.
It is the will and intent of people to do their part and contribute to advancing Australia which makes them Australian, signified by birth or oaths of citizenship.
Hawke elaborated:
“For, let us ask ourselves on this day of all days, what is it that links us in this generation with the generations that have gone before? It is not only the fact that for the past 200 years, and to this day, we have been a nation of immigrants. It is not only the fact that we share together this vast continent as our homeland.
It is not only the shared inheritance of all that has been built here and achieved here over the past 200 years. And it is not only the common bond of institutions, standards, language and culture.”
And then there are the sentences I will come back to, for they appear harmonious with his message and overall claim, but are in fact now demonstrably problematic.
“Indeed, in today’s Australia, our very diversity is an ever-growing source of a richness, vitality and the strength of our community.
It is true that all these things that I have mentioned go to shape the Australian character and to define the Australian identity.”
The Labor Prime Minister finished strongly, but inadequately:
“Yet, beyond them, there remains one vital factor in the answer to the question, who is an Australian? And that factor is a commitment to Australia and to its future. It is that common commitment which binds the Australian born of the 7th or 8th generation and all those of their fellow Australians born in any of the 130 countries from which our people are drawn.
In Australia, there is no hierarchy of descent. There must be no privilege of origin. The commitment is all.
The commitment to Australia is the one thing needful to be a true Australian.”
Commitment to the nation and its advance generally is of course important, but it is far too nebulous and vague to have any meaning or measurability.
The Achilles heel of Hawke’s patriotic rhetoric is that it invites seditious, treacherously imperialistic ideologies like Islam to take equal place in Australian culture.
Without commitment to Australian ideas, there is no commitment to Australia.
To go beyond toleration to actual celebration of mutually exclusive ideas like Islam and Christianity (the unequivocal foundation of our culture and Constitution) is to practice political bipolar disorder.
The fact is that the cultural values which made Australia morally good, opened the door of our metaphorical house and welcomed in ideologies comparable to vandals and squatters who then complained we were taking up too much space in our own home, and are now seeking to evict us.
They will not, do not, open the door and tolerate Christian culture, Western ideals of freedom, Truth and justice. They lock and barricade the door to the national culture, identifying ideas of objective Truth, morality and justice as very real threats to their culture.
They subscribe to the self-defeating philosophy of “multiculturalism” only so long as it takes to gain enough influence to assert the virtue of intolerance towards traditional Christianity.
Hawke could not have been more wrong when he imagined that “diversity is an ever-growing source of strength in our community.”
The opposite is observably true globally, whether it’s the Marxist ideas of critical theory or Islamist ideas of social/political jihad, diversity of philosophies and cultural values has always been an ever-growing source of weakness in our community.
Hawke mentioned briefly a “common bond of institutions, standards, language and culture,” but it is the specifics of those which are, or at least should be, “the one thing needful to be a true Australian,” and diversity is the natural enemy of them.
The very least any political leader should do is defend a commitment to Australian values. Absolute freedoms are self-destructive, like a home with no doors or windows. The discrimination between benign and destructive guests both family and feral is a very prudent, healthy kind.
We absolutely should identify the hell holes Islamic and Marxist ideas created in world history by their vicious intolerance, and confidently say those ideas are hostile to Australian institutions, standards, language and culture.
Hospitality is great, but we still lock our doors at night. So it should be with the Australian culture previous generations were entrusted with and have destroyed by the fairytale of multiculturalism.
May we be the generation that celebrations of our Tricentenary can thank for restoring and patriotically defending the legacy of our Founding Fathers, vigilant against its dilution and destruction.
What is a “commitment to Australia”?
If it doesn’t include carefully defined and defended values and ideas, there is – or soon will be – no such thing as an Australian.
WHAT DO YOU THINK? Add your comments below...
Dave Pellowe is a Christian political educator & writer who gives priority of philosophy to God’s Word. He founded Church And State ministries in 2016, which has grown to include annual teaching conferences in Canberra, Brisbane, Sydney, Perth, Adelaide, Hobart and regional Australia by invitation.
Specialising in what God says about complex ethical and social issues, Dave Pellowe is a sought after guest speaker at churches, Christian schools, TV, radio and podcast interviews and other secular and Christian forums where love of Truth and nonpartisan thinking are valued. [more]
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