Today is Australia Day, a national holiday marking the arrival of The First Fleet to establish a penal colony on Terra Australis in on January 26, 1788.
There is plenty to celebrate in this nation with an overall standard of living ahead of most of the world. But there is also a darker side to things.
First Fleet arrival 1788
January 26 also marks an invasion. The continent was claimed under the terra nullus doctrine which in basic terms means it was not already inhabited. Except it was inhabited – by Indigenous Australians. And the succeeding history towards that First Nation was awful. They were dispossessed, driven out of their lands, treated as less than human. There were massacres and all sorts of inhuman treatment that were simply written out of most of our history in the twentieth century. It took almost 200 years for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders to even be accorded actual citizenship in Australia.
Overall Australia’s history in regard to the First Nation has been shameful. While steps have been taken in the right direction, the gap between Indigenous communities and the rest of the country is appallingly big. Are we doing enough to assist? I doubt it. And governments on both sides of politics are equally culpable.
For a nation that was established by invasion, an illegal acquisition, Australia’s current treatment of more recent refugees trying to arrive by boat is truly shameful. Refugees fleeing oppression, war and other horrors are being thrown into off-shore camps in appalling conditions. Both sides of politics have been culpable in these camps being set up and maintained but things have clearly become worse under the current governmental regime. The Abbott government has gone to considerable lengths to try
Prime Minister Tony Abbott
and maintain secrecy about what has been going on. It took courageous whistle-blowers to let us know what was really going on and how much of a cover up had been going on. We now have instances of refugee status being refused with claimants being forcibly returned to their point of origin with our government ignoring international advice about the dangers to those people.
Scott Morrisson
People have been returned to places of danger with one confirmed case of a person being murdered by those oppressive forces he had been trying to flee. His blood is on the hands of Prime Minister Tony Abbott and former Immigration Minister Scott Morrisson. Nor was there any real signs of repentance. We have even been blatantly lied to in respect of things such as what medical facilities were being provided. The United Nations has condemned the conditions of the Manus Island facility but there is no real sign of our government taking any meaningful action in respect of a UN report detailing the many, many shortcomings and problems that needed to be addressed. But is that really so surprising considering we have a Prime Minister who has publicly questioned why Australia is still even a signatory to the UN conventions regarding refugees?
This very high standard of living comes with costs. A big cost is environmental impact. Our per capita contribution to things like climate change emissions is among the world’s highest. We have an obligation to at least match that detrimental world impact with off-setting remedial actions. But instead our government has put in place its Direct Action policy, a policy that saw dismantling of infrastructure which supported things like reduction of damaging emissions. Rather than ‘direct action’ what we actually have is a ‘do as little as possible’ policy.
Prime Minister Tony Abbott made his real intentions towards climate change very clear on a trip to North America. He blew off meetings with the likes of the International Monetary Fund to instead head off to Canada. During his Canadian sojourn, the media focused more on his quite public gaffe in mispronouncing ‘Canada’. For reasons that escape me, much less attention was paid to the much more sinister product of that trip. After being closeted in a meeting with the Canadian Prime Minister, Abbott emerged to announce they had formed a new alliance to combat climate change action. Their express stated objective was to combat, ie block, remedial climate change actions around the world. They made a public call on other conservative governments around the world to join them.
I am not aware of a single government anywhere in the world making any statement of support for that alliance. Since then it appears to have been flushed away into the sewers with the rest of the excrement. However that stunt makes Tony Abbott’s mission quite clear – to STOP as much climate change remedial action as possible. He has even declared that it is Australia’s destiny to continue providing the world with coal in order to continue fossil fuel electricity consumption. His government is attempting to reduce Renewal Energy Targets. The Minister who holds the portfolio overseeing things like RETs has defended the reduction of those targets by declaring he knows better than pretty much everyone else on that issue. For those who might question that statement, I still have his email where he makes that claim.
Former Prime Minister John Howard
Tony Abbott’s mentor, former Prime Minister John Howard, at least had the political savvy to try to hide his climate change denying beliefs until he had left politics (or more correctly, kicked out by his own electorate in 2007). Tony Abbott has however been quite straight forward. He has made it very clear he wants all climate change remedial action STOPPED. However his phenomenal hypocrisy has seen him claim to really be an environmentalist. So in yet another issue of vital importance, we are regressing rather than attempting to take the present chance to become a world leader in climate change repairs.
Australia’s record in these key matters is dismal to put it mildly. And while we have the same people from both sides of politics running things, I cannot see any real chance of positive change. If anything we currently seem destined to continue going backwards.
On reflection, I do not see a lot to celebrate this Australia Day.
Words By Ross 
argeus
January 26, 2015
The thing about the First Fleet is that, IMO, to an Australian it’s more or less an “original sin”. It is something that 2000s Australians has next to no control over because it’s happened, and that’s also the whole reason they exist at all as both individuals and a people. It’s somewhat analogous to being born into the family of a self-made mob boss: You’ve committed a “sin” solely by being alive and living on the bounties of your parents’ crime.
In addition, I hardly think it’s fair to blame “Australia” as a country for what is essentially a government that is openly disliked by quite many of the country’s intelligentsia. Be it refugees, welfare slash, climate change issues or the war on terror, is there anything Abbott and Co. does that actually receives widespread applause at all?
As for whether Australia Day is worth celebrating at all, perhaps a fundamental question is in order: What IS Australia? Is it the country and its political/corporate trappings? The land, the flora and fauna? Its people – and if so, are we talking about “everyone”, or insular groups – whites, indigenous Australians as well as all walks of refugees at varying stages of integration into the Australian society? Or, more particularly, the culture, the intangible values and that feeling of “being Australian”?
The point being, you cannot determine whether Australia has been doing well – as in meeting its objectives and defending its interests – without determining what these objectives and interests are. Which is to say, what Australia actually is.
To take an extreme example, if an ultra conservative neolib white supremacist is to say Australia is a country of God that should be populated solely by honest-to-God white Christian, that everything including the environment takes a backseat to the enrichment of said white Christians, and everyone else can go jump into the Great Barrier Reef, then obviously Australia Day can be celebrated gleefully each year, every year.
Obviously very few educated people believe such a thing. But then it wouldn’t be a stretch to say Australia means different things to different people and whether whatever has transpired in the past years stood for their definition of Australia is understandably subjective.
ausross
January 26, 2015
Thanks for the comments, Linh.
I am not suggesting all non-Indigenous Australians are somehow at fault for the First Fleet landing. But to fail to acknowledge it for what it actually was is sheer ignorance. Don’t forget that Abbott’s mentor, John Howard, did his best to even stop discussion of the matter. He attempted to rewrite the syllabus of Australian history taught in schools into continuing to write the Indigenous experience out of our history. People who tried to raise the issue were contemptuously dismissed as ‘black armband’ apologists. Abbott has repeatedly made public statements which continue to ignore the Indigenous side of things. And he still has his defenders. And Australia Day celebrations conspicuously ignore that fundamental truth.
Actually I do blame plenty of Australians for the current status. It started with the fact that enough people voted for Abbott, despite his track record, to place him in this position of power. The response to the disgraceful Canadian stunt, despite it very clearly portraying Abbott’s real agenda, has been pretty much to ignore it. There should have been a national outcry but instead we had nothing more than a passing reporting by media. We are failing in basic human rights and our government continues to defend these. Don’t expect anything to change with the Abbott government continuing with Morrisson’s stunt of turning immigration and related services into a new entity called Border Force with public servants being threatened with dismissal if they refuse to play ball. We have a nation where the Immigration Minister is allowed to dictate what must be done at Australian citizenship ceremonies ie local governments like City Councils must read aloud a Morrisson ministerial statement or have their right to perform such ceremonies removed. And I have not seen any signs of Morrisson’s successor doing anything to change that stance. And again there was minimal public concern over that disgusting blatant party politicisation of Australian citizenship. We have a representative Head of State – the Governor General – who refuses to take any action over the question of whether our Prime Minister was actually eligible for Parliament in the first place. The GG’s office will not even respond on the matter at all.
There is plenty that we could celebrate about Australia. But it has been my choice to elect not to celebrate but instead express my reasons for why I do not feel we should be all running around, face painted, flags draped over our shoulders and getting shit-faced drunk over how fan-bloody-tastic we are.