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Reflections on Australia Day · Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps

• 0:00
  Get a humans welcome to the safe space for dangerous ideas and happy Australia day.
• 0:08
  Are we allowed to say that?
• 0:10
  Can I say happy Australia day?
• 0:11
  It's invasion day.
• 0:12
  Happy invasion day.
• 0:13
  It feels a bit like, you know, on Remembrance Day or Anzac Day or one of those other days
• 0:19
  that commemorates war.
• 0:20
  You don't say happy Remembrance Day.
• 0:23
  Sad Remembrance Day.
• 0:24
  In honour of Remembrance Day.
• 0:28
  If you're not Australian, you may not be familiar with the bruhaha that exists around Australia day.
• 0:33
  It is no small bruhaha.
• 0:35
  It is a bruhaha and I intend to keep saying the word bruhaha as many times as it is humanly possible
• 0:41
  over the course of this episode.
• 0:43
  It is a bruhaha that has effectively castrated Australia's ability to celebrate itself.
• 0:50
  I don't celebrate Australia day.
• 0:55
  Most Australians I know don't celebrate Australia day.
• 0:58
  And if they do, it's with so many asterisks and caveats and sort of guilty nods to white privilege and genocide
• 1:07
  that it becomes more hassle and it's worth.
• 1:11
  And I just want to reflect on how that's happened and where we might go from here and what it tells us about the state of the conversation about things.
• 1:21
  I do not fall on this subject the way that many of you might assume I do or the way that many of my peers who are critical of wokeism and social justice identity politics do.
• 1:37
  I am of the opinion that we should change the date of Australia day.
• 1:43
  Australia day right now on the 26th of January is commemorated on the day on which the first fleet and Captain James Cook planted the British colonial flag on Australian soil.
• 1:57
  That is an important fact.
• 2:00
  That makes it very different from the 4th of July in the United States where what's being celebrated is the victory in a revolution.
• 2:08
  It makes it different from the 14th of July in France best deal day where what is being celebrated is the liberation of political prisoners.
• 2:16
  It makes it quite different from most countries national days where most countries were created through war or liberation.
• 2:27
  It may not be pretty for the vanquished.
• 2:29
  It wasn't pretty for the Brits when they lost their American empire but nonetheless we don't tend to commemorate these things on the day on which civilizations were dispossessed of their land.
• 2:43
  Part of the tricky thing for Australia is that Australia has never become a fully independent country.
• 2:50
  Of course functionally we're independent we don't take no crap from nobody we don't take no rules from her majesty.
• 2:58
  Oh it's his majesty now isn't it that sounds weird his majesty.
• 3:02
  Nonetheless the head of state of Australia is his majesty King Charles talk about a bloody anachronism.
• 3:12
  Isn't that ridiculous isn't that hilarious that in 2024 the head of state of an independent medium sized forward looking self-empowered country like Australia is this dottering old kind of eco terrorists living in a palace in London.
• 3:34
  Nonetheless it is it is that way and that's true for New Zealand and that's true for Canada and that's true for a whole bunch of other countries which have never bothered to snip that final connection to the British monarchy.
• 3:49
  As a result we've never quite had that moment when we can say now my friends we are truly free we had a referendum about this in 1999 about becoming a republic that would not mean anything in the Australian context other than just sort of changing the name on the document of the person who is ultimately responsible for sacking the government and signing bills into law.
• 4:15
  Changing that name from being the governor general of Australia who works on behalf of the king or queen to a person who is appointed by a significant majority of both houses of parliament that was the idea in the 90s it fell over largely because a number of Australians were hoodwinked by monochests and conservatives into thinking that there could be an alternative model of a republic where the people would vote for a popularly elected president.
• 4:41
  That's not really workable in the Australian context because in a parliamentary democracy it's terribly important that the power lie with the executive branch and you can't have this other person who may be able to claim some sort of public support in this rival position that could trump the prime minister it's important that the prime minister be the only person who is who even has the sheen of being popularly elected.
• 5:10
  You can imagine constitutional crises being a fairly regular appearance if there were political figures in the role of the president and if the president had the ability to fire the government as they do as the king does and not sign laws that the legislative branch had had passed.
• 5:28
  It's important that that be an apolitical figurehead behaving in a scrupulously apolitical manner and there's no way of ensuring that if you allow anybody to run for president and you allow the whole epilogue to vote anybody in that could be a partisan political figure what if you get a left wing populist as the president and a right winger as the prime minister.
• 5:47
  That would spelt doom therefore the original idea was you have to have a scrupulously non-partisan figure and the only way to do that is to make sure that you know like a two thirds majority of both houses of parliament and the prime minister and the opposition leader all agree on this person which means that that person would basically become probably a sportsman.
• 6:07
  You know you probably just end up with former Olympic athletes and they'd sit there in a nice big throwny looking thing and they'd sign things with a big quill and then they'd put those things in the mouths of the pigeon and the pigeon would fly off to I don't know some some sort of Willy Wonka-esque majesty land where our laws get enacted in Australia I'm not very big on how the how a bill becomes a law as you can tell nonetheless that's how it's going to work.
• 6:31
  So that fell apart because the monarchists and the conservatives cynically made their slogan and you may not remember this if you're an Australian of a youngish age but the slogan for the no to an Australian republic campaign in the 90s was let the people have their say let the people have their say.
• 6:52
  In other words vote no in the referendum to become a republic so that we can turn around very quickly and have another referendum which will be a better model where you will have your say about a president.
• 7:04
  In a model of republicanism that has never worked democratically anywhere else in the world but will make it work here so that you can have your say.
• 7:13
  And of course what that ended up doing was it meant that King Charles is now the head of state still of Australia I'm not sure how that ended up giving the people their say when our quarter of a century on and the people apparently still don't have their say.
• 7:29
  It's now become a trickier proposition to become a republic in Australia because I think the instability of global democracies and of liberal democracy in the world order has made people much more leery of change.
• 7:41
  There was a kind of a boisterous optimism in the 1990s the era of Bill Clinton playing is saxophone on our senior halls show and Jerry Seinfeld doing a show about nothing it was pre 9 11 it was pre Arab spring it was pre Iraq war it was certainly pre Donald Trump.
• 7:59
  And I think there was a sense that you know we won we won we won the Cold War things were good liberal democracy was ascendant we can tinker at the edges it's not going to make any difference we can remove the British monarch and put in some figure skating Australian legend who everybody likes as our head of state who cares.
• 8:21
  In subsequent years we've become less sanguine I believe about the future of liberal democracy.
• 8:29
  We've become more wary of the possibility that rival political systems like Chinese communism which is not communism but a kind of capitalist mercantilism and authoritarianism that that could become a model that gets exported using Chinese soft power to all kinds of developing countries.
• 8:49
  And what's good for the Solomon Islands may someday be good for Indonesia and may someday be good for Australia.
• 8:57
  There's a worry also that expansionist dictatorships like Russia will be allowed to get away with too much and after biting off half of Ukraine will start tinkering around with little men little faceless men creating little insurgencies and other central European and Eastern European countries and that the stability of the world order cannot be taken for granted the way that it has been for our parents and grandparents.
• 9:27
  Thus I am pessimistic as as someone who literally was the head of the republican club at my university at college republican meaning not republican in the American context of a political being politically right wing but in the constitutional context of simply saying why don't we keep everything the same in Australia except just remove the ridiculous old lady in the palace and puts been Australian in there.
• 9:52
  So that's where republicanism is in Australia and I go on that tangent to put some some sort of color and some flesh on the bones of this question about Australia day.
• 10:03
  So we don't have that day of cutting the final tie to the United Kingdom.
• 10:10
  You could I suppose pick as a national day the day when Australia became a country in other words the federation of states became a unit much like the United States of America and unlike countries like the UK or New Zealand Australia is a federation so is Canada these were in other words previously self contained colonies that came together in an arrangement to create a country to create a common country.
• 10:38
  And that happened unfortunately on the 1st of January 1900 was 1900 and 101 so I'm a terrible Australian don't even know the birth year of my country well I do know that was the 1st of January so expecting people to celebrate a national day on the 1st of January is a little bit rough.
• 10:58
  You know I mean who's going to do that you get up after you got all hung over with kind of moat dribbling down the side of your chin and like a party hat strapped half onto the side of your face because it slipped off while you fell asleep and someone else's vomit that mean that that's a good new year's eve and you wake up and go yeah it's right I'll do it all over again have more fireworks so that's not going to work.
• 11:24
  As an aside an interesting little tidbit of information that you may not be aware of during the constitutional conventions prior to the creation of Australia in the 1890s there were a series of constitutional conventions in which the colonies came together and said okay this is silly that we're all separate let's make a country.
• 11:41
  And Western Australia which is one of the largest jurisdictions in the world you know it occupies basically pretty much half the size the size of the entire continent and the continent itself is the same size as the contiguous United States so you're talking about massive areas of basically nothing I mean you know indigenous people will get angry at me for saying there's nothing there but let's face it from a lesson perspective there's fuck all it's just lots of desert very pretty desert very pretty desert
• 12:11
  with very intriguing little spiky thorny lizardy things who hide underground and come out when the when the mercury drops below 130 degrees Fahrenheit which it really does nonetheless Western Australia was not crazy about this idea in the 1890s of becoming part of this country but New Zealand which was another colony was quite partial to the idea of teaming up with some of these larger colonies on the mainland so there was a period
• 12:41
  in the 1890s where there was a serious possibility that Australia would become the eastern half of the continent and New Zealand as one country with Western Australia being a separate country and then at the last minute New Zealand jumped out of the the source and Western Australia jumped in and we have the more logical country of Australia although you'll note that Tasmania joined and there's nothing inherently logical about that particular island being part of Australia but New Zealand not they're both not connected
• 13:11
  to the mainland so nonetheless this country comes into being at the beginning of the last century we spend all of our time you know not worrying particularly about the head of state it starts to come up in the 80s and 90s this question of whether or not we should have our own head of state and when that fails at around the same time you start to get this pushback about January 26th you start to get this conversation which is initially a fringe conversation
• 13:41
  of you know I suppose radical indigenous leaders who start to hold protests around Australia day celebrations they start to go outside you know Australia day festivities and fairgrounds and
• 13:58
  you know play loud blaring music and bang on drums to disrupt people's good time and fly the Aboriginal flag and at the time it still seems a bit radical and a bit unseemly and a bit you know not the dumb thing but over time as Australia begins to reckon properly with the barbarism of its past and with the fact that there were a number of civilisations inhabiting this landmass who at the time well and so
• 14:27
  the time well and still are the oldest continuous civilisations on the planet older even than any civilisations in Africa where there's been more change and more cross pollination of different societies you had these cultures who are essentially preserved in aspect for tens and tens and tens of thousands of years doing their thing in certain harmony with the land and then largely exterminated and certainly having their interests completely steamrolled
• 14:56
  by the most sophisticated civilisation in the history of the world at the time the British Empire there was no way that was going to go well for the colonised there was no way that the most and it's difficult to talk about this stuff because one risks you know triggering a lot of trip wires and sort of blundering around trading on egg shells and getting oneself cancelled if you imply that indigenous or First Nations civilisations
• 15:25
  civilisations were primitive in some way so let's not use that word but let's just say that if you impose on to the evolution of humankind a very sort of 18th century idea of progress right where there is you know
• 15:45
  Neanderthals and then cavemen and you know then the homo erectus gains supremacy and you have like the discovery of fire and the wheel we have the bronze age and the iron age and the information age after the industrial revolution you think about this kind of linear line of progress that the British imperialists would have been thinking about in the 1700s you superimpose that onto Australian First Nations civilisations
• 16:15
  well they weren't doing agriculture the way we understand it with farms and fences they weren't using the wheel they had fire but they didn't use it to smelt metals or anything so they were in that perspective pre bronze age
• 16:33
  now this is not a pejorative thing to say you know they survived a lot longer than any western civilisations have had the opportunity to yet so they're doing a lot of things right
• 16:43
  but in terms of their tool making abilities you had the British Empire who had you know gunpowder that they were using up the wazoo and the most formidable ships that humankind had ever constructed
• 16:57
  an incredible seafaring capabilities and military prowess crashing into what was functionally from their perspective a pre bronze age society
• 17:07
  and the calamity that ensued for First Nations Australians is beyond comprehension and those ripple effects exist to this day and you know
• 17:20
  are not just ripple effects from the initial insult from the initial aggression but from a long standing set of policies that regarded First Nations Australians as essentially being fauna not really being fully fledged human beings
• 17:36
  I mean as recently as the 1960s they were being taken away indigenous children were being taken away from their families stolen essentially
• 17:46
  and installed in nice white religious families who are going to bring them up properly and teach them about real things not all of this silly Aboriginal nonsense
• 17:56
  you know that many oftentimes they were not faster families and so the children were taken away and they were put in orphanages in kind of hellish places run by brutal nurse ratchet style nuns
• 18:08
  not always I can understand that conservatives might listen to this and say look a lot of these were well-meaning people trying to do the best what they thought was the best thing for these children
• 18:16
  yeah sure okay I mean you know there's always there's all there were good Nazis as well you know not to not to reach straight for the most obvious parallel but you know there's always good people and bad people and all things
• 18:28
  that doesn't change the fact that the overarching set of policies the kind of network of policies towards First Nations people for at least a century and a half were horrendous barbaric and dehumanizing
• 18:41
  so we've recognized all that in the past couple of decades we've come a tremendously long way you know a lot of Australians will say that we're an erudemably racist country and that you know we haven't really reckoned with our First Nations problem or that kind of intrinsic moral stain I disagree
• 19:01
  I mean I left this country when I left university and I came back a dozen years later bouncing back and forth frequently in between and over that dozen years between the mid 2000s and I guess the late 20 teens
• 19:21
  there was a massive earth shattering shift in the visibility of First Nations issues as a as a matter of public concern I mean it was probably second only to climate change becoming an issue over that of the course of that time
• 19:39
  I mean when I left you know in the early 2000s it would have been regarded as tokenistic and weird to do a land acknowledgement or an acknowledgement of country as they're called at an awards ceremony or something
• 19:52
  nowadays it would be considered weird not to start a zoom meeting between a couple of white middle managers about HR policy without doing a tokenistic land acknowledgement
• 20:05
  now setting aside the question of whether or not that's a good evolution or whether that's just wealthy white university educated people patting each other on the back without actually having to do anything substantive to redress the inequalities between white people and First Nations people
• 20:20
  let's just at least acknowledge the change and say that to those people who wanted to bring First Nations issues to the fore that is a triumph of sorts
• 20:32
  so there's been at least a symbolic change there's been an attempt at practical change repeated attempt at practical change as you've had left wing governments pour lots of money into things like what was rather comically called literally Aberstudy
• 20:49
  there was Oz study which was a student loan program interest rate interest rate student loans for everybody and then there was Aberstudy which was just for Aboriginal people which sounds incredibly condescending in the hindsight and a little bit racist
• 21:05
  so there were programs like that there was there was affirmative action in universities you know there were concerted attempts to make life better on the ground and then what you found and what I saw as I was traveling around Australia
• 21:19
  in my university years for friends and I bought a four-wheel drive and drove around this great continent of ours over the course of a few months what you would see is that you'd get to outback towns and depending on the day of the week
• 21:33
  you'd either have whole communities of indigenous Australians hanging out in the public park drinking and sniffing glue or you'd have them lining up along the street waiting for the welfare office to open if it was welfare days so they could get their welfare checks
• 21:51
  that sounds like I'm being racist I'm literally not I'm just describing what was happening and what we were seeing I'm sure there were a lot of productive first nations people who were at work who we weren't observing but the phenomenon was true of there being a kind of prison a kind of prison of welfare that was pretty obvious to anybody who understood what was going on in these majority indigenous towns where there was not an ethic of entrepreneurialism
• 22:20
  there was not an ethic of you know pulling young people up by their bootstraps and giving them a vision of themselves that was bigger than them where their community currently was I'm not casting blame for that I mean it's not the job of people who've been dispossessed and shatter upon for centuries to figure out how to do it for themselves but there was a collective failure of Australia to create a context in which indigenous self fulfillment and flourishing could occur
• 22:49
  and there was this attempt to throw lots of money at the problem thinking that that would solve the the guilt wound of white people and I'm sure it did for a time until we realized that you know would you really flourish best if you had just a fortnightly or weekly dollop of cash being handed to you no strings attached no questions asked just because of the color of your skin or your your life circumstance
• 23:16
  you know I mean even it was during the 1990s that even the left in the form of Tony Blair and Bill Clinton and in Australia slightly earlier Bob Hawke and Paul Keating realized that the welfare state as we knew it had not been serving people terribly well and it needed to be connected in some way to productivity and to inducements to get off your barman do something with your life so to speak.
• 23:41
  So there's been this pickle in Australia's relationship to indigenous policy where you've had left wing governments throw lots of money at the problem problem thinking that would fix it and it did fix the problem as they saw it because the main problem they were concerned about fixing was white guilt not black advancement so you fix the problem of white guilt by throwing lots of money at us then you realize that it's not actually fixing the problem that indigenous Australians want fixed which is the inequality the so called gap between the outcomes of white Australians and indigenous Australians or
• 24:11
  rather non indigenous Australians and indigenous Australians because even non white migrant Australians newcomers outperform indigenous Australians so clearly not a question of racism per say it's not a question of skin color per per say it's a structural question about opportunity so then conservative governments would come in and they try to overhaul the whole thing and they would listen to dissenting First Nations leaders who would say you know there is rampant crime alcoholism and
• 24:41
  domestic violence in First Nations communities we need to get tough on it we need to start making funding contingent on outcomes we need to get more entrepreneurial we need to be more essentially right wing in our attitude towards the dependence that has been created among these communities and at one point the John Howard government who was Australia's I think second longest serving Prime Minister actually sent in the army essentially into
• 25:11
  remote northern territory communities at the request of some indigenous leaders where you would have policies like alcohol bands for example where there was no you know you have you still have dry towns where there's no alcohol available and there was a kind of a militarization of Australia's response to cleaning up this mess that was regarded by the left as being brutalizing and a failure so swung back in the other direction and you know anyone who claims to have an easy answer about
• 25:41
  all this is lying or mistaken we just tried within the past six months to have a referendum about literally changing the Constitution to create an indigenous advisory body that would give its advice to parliament on bills that were under consideration that affected First Nations Australians and it tanked woefully in large part I believe because of dissent within the indigenous
• 26:09
  communities confusing the message for the guilty white university educated class you know a lot of people said the lesson to take away from the failure of that referendum is the Australia is racist I think that's too easy
• 26:25
  of course racists voted against that referendum but you didn't have to be a racist to vote against that referendum I know that for sure because I was hosting a daily talk back radio show and hearing from a lot of people who were saying things like why do we need to change the Constitution forever in order to redress an inequality that we hope is temporary
• 26:50
  why do we need to elevate on the basis of race one group when there are lots of disadvantaged groups in Australia why do we have to undermine the longstanding Australian ethos of egalitarianism and equality before the law by codifying racial difference in our Constitution.
• 27:08
  How is it fair to the you know impoverished Chinese Australian shopkeeper whose children came here as refugees whose parents rather came here as refugees after Tiananmen Square that they should not have an additional means of democratic input into the process of the Australian state craft but First Nations people should.
• 27:32
  So there were lots of these things that I don't think I think only it's an abuse of the English language to call such concerns racist in fact it denigrates and undermines the utility of the word racist and it sort of lets real racist off the hook by casting the net so wide that anyone who has can you know small see conservative concerns about a radical change to the country's constitution can only be motivated by racism.
• 28:01
  Let's keep racism for the racists shall we instead of using racism as a casual term for more than half the population so that was the most recent and just to clarify why there was to send within the indigenous community about this you know I spoke to a number of young indigenous leaders who felt that the referendum was just a capitulation to white tyranny that the state of Australia is fundamentally illegitimate sovereignty over this land.
• 28:31
  It has never been ceded by First Nations people to white people and that this was just a way of trying to get indigenous people to be complicit in the crime of the Australian state and what's needed is real reform by which they meant a treaty now a treaty between First Nations people and Australian and the rest of Australia is conceivable it's happened in other places New Zealand has a treaty with the Māori their First Nations ethnicity but it's hard to imagine
• 29:01
  getting there if you first reject the idea of what we were calling a voice which was this independent body advisory body now the steps the pathway to a treaty according to many indigenous leaders who had codified this in previous conventions where they gathered together to advise governments and what they wanted to see happen was that you would create this advisory body and then the advisory body would draft a treaty at some point.
• 29:31
  And although the Prime Minister at the time kept saying well he's still the Prime Minister kept saying this is not about a treaty this is not a pathway to a treaty he was only saying that so that you didn't scare off half the population who didn't want a treaty the reality is you were supposed to create the who would you make a treaty with if there's no advisory body to draft the treaty I mean you know First Nations Australians were a bunch of different civilizations a bunch of different peoples with different languages or scattered all over this massive land mass.
• 29:57
  You know some of them were living on island on island chains off the mainland and had practically never met other First Nations people so you need representatives of all of these different First Nations nations to come together in some forum and figure out what the treaty would look like so you know setting aside the question of whether or not a treaty is legit I remember John Howard the former Conservative Prime Minister who I just alluded to who had sent in the troops being interviewed saying hang on you make treaties with foreign country.
• 30:27
  You don't make treaties with portions of your own people we are a demos as Australians we are a single community a single unit you know multiple communities within that overarching umbrella community but nonetheless you don't make treaties with each other you make agreements with each other in a democratic process and you make treaties with other countries it kind of rips apart the fabric of the democratic state if you start making treaties with it if it starts making treaties with its constituent parts.
• 30:53
  Setting aside that criticism there was no way even if you in favor of a treaty is no way of getting there without having the voice so the idea that many aspirational or shall we say radical young First Nations activists who were critical of the referendum had this idea that you would doom the referendum so that we could turn around and do some real reform like a treaty.
• 31:18
  Was so depressingly misguided like I'd write if you want the referendum to fail because you don't want to have any real world progress because you think the state is illegitimate that's fine just say so but don't doom the referendum with this pie in the sky argument that you're going to turn around and have another larger reform in the wake of it.
• 31:42
  It's exactly the same mistake that happened with the referendum about the Republic in 1999 where let the people have their say was supposed to lead to an imminent alternative model of an Australian Republic with an Australian head of state and of course it didn't it was just a bait and switch it was a way of dooming something that the proponents of that of that model never wanted to see happen in the first place which was an Australian Republic.
• 32:08
  Similarly, you've just had this this second referendum on this First Nations body in which you had people make the crazy claim that you could get an entire nation of people which is 97% non-indigenous to go through the huge expense and hassle of trying to vote on this thing and create this new body for the 3% of the population who are First Nations.
• 32:38
  That number has been inflating dramatically in recent years because it becomes cooler to be First Nations and to trace your 264th you know of a fraction of your bloodline to First Nations but let's call it about 3%
• 32:51
  The idea that you know we would create a special
• 32:56
  constitutional carve out for that population and we would all focus on doing this and then that would fail and we'd turn around and go you know what we should do all of that over again
• 33:07
  except bigger more expensive and more radical how about it folks I mean that is just not the way that politics works
• 33:15
  it's not the way that human psychology works and I said this until I was blue in the face before the referendum
• 33:21
  but the people who wanted to do it are succeeded and I think the kerfuffle of confusion and mixed messaging was what did that referendum in.
• 33:31
  So all of this is just a potted history way of saying we have what seems to be something of a kind of intransigence you know unbreachable rift that exists between First Nations Australia and non-indigenous Australians.
• 33:51
  There is enormous good will I believe from non-indigenous Australians towards the indigenous and you can see that in the fact that Australia day
• 34:00
  is now a taboo day to celebrate this is a tragic thing Australia is worth celebrating Australia is a fabulous country
• 34:14
  Australia is a tolerant country it is a peace loving country it's an innovative country it's a bloody rich country
• 34:22
  it's a spectacularly physically beautiful country it has its faults it has its flaws of course it does
• 34:29
  it has its dark history to reckon with but you know rather than comparing it to an ideal country that you've invented in your head
• 34:38
  which is just like Australia but doesn't have any of its downsides compare it to actual other countries that really exist
• 34:46
  now is Australia better or worse than Nigeria and Vietnam and Bangladesh then Luxembourg
• 34:55
  than Kazakhstan even than Brazil or Canada
• 35:02
  Australia has a lot going for it and we deserve to have an opportunity to celebrate and be grateful for what this country is
• 35:09
  I do not blame the demands of Australia day as that opportunity to celebrate on First Nations people
• 35:17
  it's completely legitimate to say why do you have to have the celebration on the very day that Europeans
• 35:24
  invaded our landmass I mean it smells a bit off doesn't it I lay blame of this at the feet of
• 35:31
  conservatives who keep not wanting to change the day they have this crazy idea that if they just
• 35:37
  will away opposition to the day that it's going to somehow become a day on which we can all come
• 35:43
  together and join arms and celebrate together that ship has sailed pardon the metaphor that invokes
• 35:51
  the first fleet that ship has sailed Australia day will never again in Australia be an unruffled
• 35:59
  undevasive easy day to celebrate Australia or to celebrate anything that is never happening again
• 36:06
  that is never happening again so if you want Australia day to remain on January 26th
• 36:12
  what you are arguing for is for Australia not to have a day on which all Australians can
• 36:18
  celebrate including you including you the conservative who is pro January 26th because you're
• 36:24
  aware of the overtones you're aware of what it means contextually you're aware of the cultural
• 36:30
  divide so when you even if you go out on January 26th and you fly a big Australian flag up the
• 36:37
  window of your car and you have a picnic in a park to watch the fireworks with big Australian flags
• 36:42
  all over the place you know what that means to a significant portion of the country you know that
• 36:48
  that means fuck you to a significant portion of the country not just First Nations Australians
• 36:55
  but anyone who believes that it's inappropriate unseemly undignified to be waving in the faces of
• 37:03
  First Nations Australians our ability to trounce them hundreds of years ago and to demolish and
• 37:10
  denigrate their civilizations you know that it has those overtones it reminds me a little bit of
• 37:16
  the whole debate about imagery and iconography around after October 7th and the hummus attacks
• 37:22
  you know why can't I just fly a Palestinian flag that will have solidarity with the Palestinians
• 37:27
  let's all chant from the river to the sea Palestine will be free great that might mean something
• 37:33
  innocuous to you but you're surely aware that it doesn't mean something innocuous to Jews who
• 37:39
  notice that between the river and the sea there was a thing called Israel and if Palestine existed
• 37:44
  between the river and the sea then there wouldn't be any Jews living in the Middle East and they
• 37:49
  understandably worry about what your intentions are for the Jews who currently live in the Middle
• 37:53
  since they've been exterminated and run out of every other Arab country and why wouldn't they
• 37:58
  be in this new Arab Palestinian land as well so just parking to the side whether or not you think
• 38:03
  that is a legitimate fear you must concede that there is a cultural difference between the interpretations
• 38:09
  of symbols like the Palestinian flag or the star of David indeed if you were flying the star of
• 38:15
  David now would be seen as an incendiary act of supporting the worst excesses of Zionism by some
• 38:22
  and supporting the demolition of Gaza and the killing of babies and you could just say what I'm
• 38:28
  just flying the star of David this is the Israeli flag this is the flag of my people we've been
• 38:34
  around for 5,000 years you know this is a symbol it has meaning to me yeah it has meaning to you it
• 38:39
  has different meaning to other people and there's a parallel here with January 26th you can go around
• 38:45
  saying January 26th is innocuous to me it's just a time when all Australians can come together
• 38:50
  fine for you but you know that you live in a community where that's not true for a large
• 38:57
  minority perhaps even a majority of people so just change the bloody date so that we can all
• 39:02
  celebrate this great country like yes you can compare you can whine all you want about the fact
• 39:09
  that the left has made January 26th controversial you can say why can't we all just come around
• 39:16
  and do a big come by are about that date but you're living in cloud cookie land that's a fantasy
• 39:22
  again you know instead of comparing Australia to actual other countries you're comparing January 26th
• 39:28
  to a as it exists to a January 26th that you've invented in your brain in which First Nations people
• 39:33
  are unruffled by that date they're not unruffled by that date they are very ruffled by that date
• 39:40
  and they've managed to persuade a lot of other Australians myself included that that date is
• 39:44
  inherently ruffle worthy and we should be ruffled by it so there is no going back now if you want
• 39:50
  to have the thing that you think January 26th is which is an uncomplicated guilt free way of
• 39:56
  celebrating Australia for all Australians change the date what should it be changed to I don't know
• 40:03
  I don't really care hopefully make it in winter so we can all go out or maybe like May September
• 40:09
  I don't give a shit just make up some stupid date it shouldn't be January 26th anyway hope
• 40:14
  that's useful happy Australia day sorry Australia day sad Australia day have a good long week