But this is what they do annually to whip up outrage from the likes of News Corp and other right wing nut jobs.
For the government everything for them is an ideological battle that invariably takes focus off the bigger issues. It’s a a distraction technique that Morrison is famous for. He’s no better than trump.
Get a grip mate. The higher incarceration rates amongst indigenous people and lesser life expectancies are tangible issues affecting quality of life.
Some of the posts here are beyond moronic, white people telling black folks to suck up hundreds of years of murder, discrimination, child stealing and police misconduct because it’s “divisive”.
Yeah we know all that sunshine. Haven’t you followed the improvement in the conduct of government agencies & society over the past decades & years?
And it wasn’t just black people either that suffered injustices.
Take a trip to Port Arthur & educate yourself about even how cruel white people were to other white people for the smallest of crimes in our colonial days.
Seams like you like to keep running over the same theme over & over. Many of us have moved on.
Glad to know white people have moved on from the injustice in which they were the perpetrators, sunshine.
Absolutely. Totally agree. We should always learn from our past & not repeat the errors of our past. Most of us look back with shame at atrocities that occurred in our past.
I certainly do.
I watched it on live terrestrial TV, part of a segment on Australia Day on Ch7 TV 6pm news.
Coalition government going real hard with the culture war shit. I’m not looking forward to the next federal election with how aggressive they’ve been in the past week.
Very clear that many government ministers think Sky News After Dark is setting the national agenda.
Can you stop referring to “white” people and “black” people - dividing by skin colour. We are one country of one people - Australians. The sooner we stop dividing this country into racial segments to better.
No. You’re being divisive by ignoring first nation’s intergenerational trauma.
With all due respect, I am not ignoring. We have come a long way over the past fifty years as a society (although social media appears to have played a key role in fracturing our society’s cohesion in the last couple of years).
But I will not spend the rest of my life (the next 40-50 years, maybe) over something that I had no involvement in, cannot change and will be the same afterwards (the distant past). I am still trying to figure out what their end game with all this is.
If there is a problem, you get it fixed then you move on otherwise there’s an agenda I am not seeing. Life’s too short.
The John Howard defence. 
The problem is that not all Australians feel comfortable celebrating Australia Day on that date, so fix it.
As someone who worked with indeginous communities before I moved to the UK I can tell you first hand that they cannot just get over it especially when rhe system is stacked against them. The inter generational traums of the past of what has happened to our first nations people.
To sit there an be dismissive and say to get over it and move on for them it just doesn’t work like that. For someone like aurora to make comments like that underlines the very problem that Australia has acknowledging and helping indeginous people.
Sorry for spelling I am typing this in bed on my phone.
Justice and equality. You can’t work that out? You nust be living in a bubble.
The only potential other date I can see is January 1 - as 1901 was when we became this nation. Would you be prepared to lose a public holiday out of this?
A really good perspective. But as a society we have many issues including a health system that struggles to make do, education system that sometimes spits out bad people, government full of waste which reduces our ability to fund essential services adequately.
If there are services that need to be improved in other parts of the nation as well, then that certainly should be part of the discussion.
But it all starts with the education system. An open question, is it particularly inadequate in these areas?
Very idealistic, but I am talking tangibly. Do they want everyone to vacate the country? What is the end game and when will be able to move on from the very distant past. As I said, our country has made very significant inroads over the past fifty years, but it is as if nothing is ever enough. In 40-50 years, the discussion will still be ongoing and all that would have been achieved is everyone will still be miserable and there will still be disadvantage.
Help, yes. Give a leg up over everyone else, no. That is the difference. Same goes with the “gender” stuff people go on about. Bring up to our standard, yes. But not to scale at the disadvantage of everyone else.
I think that Malcolm Turnbull and his Republic movement is potentially a good replacement. When the Queen goes, and if we were to become a republic, then we would have a few dates to have independence day celebrations. These could be ‘republic day’ or something. These would be 1) the day of the referendum, 2) the day of official independence, or 3) the day that the government ratifies the bill and makes it law. Then we would not have to celebrate Australia Day anymore and this whole debate can go away.
If a new date was chosen that commemorates something, the opening of the first Parliament would be ok - 9th May - it was also commemorated with the opening of the new Parliament House in Canberra.
What a ridiculous question to pose. If that date was indeed chosen, why wouldn’t you just have another public holiday on 2 January? This sort of scaremongering, which muddies the waters and loses the focus of the issue, we can do without.