Well not quite. The Council has set-up some type of consultative process to air the views of a range of Australians, and of course who gets the most publicity. Well you figure it out by the headline appearing the the SMH:
These tax-payer funded community consultative processes have become veiled attempts to air the views of the radical left – because they wouldn’t get an airing any other way. You know, Australians are just a bunch of racists and so are our national symbols. Everything from the Union Jack to the Southern Cross. And of course guess who is to blame?
…the Australia Day Council launched a campaign last week to ask which symbols and images best represent our country, opinion-makers and public figures were at odds on how to answer the question – variously describing the Southern Cross as everything from ”beautiful” to ”racist”….
Tim Soutphommasane, a first-generation Australian and author of Reclaiming Patriotism: Nation-Building for Australian Progressives, said symbols such as the Southern Cross came to be associated with a new wave of patriotism under the conservative Howard government.
”Many Australians have been content to regard all expressions of national pride as thinly disguised racism,” he said. ”The result has been a surrender of all things patriotic to extreme nationalists.”
It is a bit formulaic – ‘ we are all meant to question our current symbols because clearly they are inadequate, especially after JH’. However if the Australia Day Council wants to promote this tosh they might want to consider that the only people with the identity crisis are those on the PC and radical left.
Australians for Constitutional Monarchy national convener Professor David Flint disagreed, saying critics were out of touch with the Australian people and that it was a ”pity to undermine the great symbols of the nation”.
”The fact [the symbols] have been imported doesn’t make them any less Australian.”