Mark reflects on the Australia Day public holiday.

Author:  Mark Seymour.

Date: 26 January 2022.

Original URL: N/A.

Article Text

#australiaday

(Pic thanks to Souvenirs Asutralia)

Australia Day..

All democracies are born of bloodshed. Through invasion, revolution or both..

Big call you might say but in fact, it doesn’t take much digging to confirm..

Nations we hold up as beacons of tolerance, diversity and inclusiveness, have ALL arrived at representative government through raw human expediency..

Simply through the need to avoid violence, to eliminate the oppression of one group over another, it was deemed best to enable groups, classes, tribes, whatever you’re collective poison, to get a run at the big house at regular intervals so that violence was kept at bay..

Only through the expectation that one interest group could be removed from government and replaced by another, could the rule law be held accountable as truly independent.

Tolerance in law, would only be achieved if human beings believed their best interests were being respected.

Nasty I know, but there it is..

And yet somehow, amongst all of the world’s modern democracies, Australia has grown and prospered in the unique belief that’s it particular brand of democracy was simply a flowering of common sense and good will.. and that was pretty much it.

How mad is that?

Let’s go to first principles. Wealth is acquired through the acquisition of land. What brought Europeans here? Hunger for wealth. The consolidation of any nation state, ours as much as any other, was wrought through the removal of whatever obstacles were there. Human or otherwise.

let’s not get bogged down in moral questions here. These are simply the facts.

Our national foundation was only made possible through the physical domination of one tribe over another..

And as it would hopefully run, in the name of moral transparency, the subsequent resolution of that conflict through the acceptance of the defeated class, group, tribe, race, in the national political discourse..

And so.. democracy..

Except we didn’t quite get to that last bit.. at least not until 1967. And how did we do this? By simply ignoring the fact that the conflict ever too place.

But hey, let’s not split hairs. It was just our version of racial Oppression. And let’s face it.. there’s nothing special there. Many democracies have endured for hundreds of years shouting the benefits of their own particular brand of entitlement, the stellar example of tolerance they have upheld.. unique in the region, the world.. while they continued to shaft in all manner of ways, the rights, interests, claims on land, capital, of the original race.

And in that, Australia simply isn’t that special.

Every year Australia Day rolls ‘round and arguments about of the true ‘character’ of Australian democracy erupt and subside.. while Indigenous suffering, incarceration, and abuse simply rolls on..

You could say that Invasion Day steals the show and that conflict itself is good for democracy.. As long as there is argument over the date, then at least somebody’s thinking.. and it certainly makes the day a lot more interesting..

than the bright shining lie it would otherwise be.

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