There is something ridiculous about hundreds of thousands of people marching on Australian streets waving Australian flags. What sort of country needs to make such a display of nationalism on its own soil?
The answer to that was more than apparent during the days leading up to today’s march. Politicians and media commentators were elbowing each other aside to make the most absurd criticisms about this totally organic grass-roots movement, March for Australia. You will be marching alongside Nazis! You’re all a bunch of racists! Uber drivers will be even ruder to us if these protests go ahead!
I met maybe a dozen strangers on the march, half of whom were, in true Australian style, attending simply because someone in politics or the media had told them not to.
The warnings from the elitists — that such displays of patriotism are incompatible with our new multicultural utopia — were reeled off by supposedly knockabout bloke Paul Murray and his understudy Joe Hilderbrand, Immigration Minister Tony Burke, Environment Minister Murray Watt and the normally sensible James Paterson, among dozens of others, with a confidence that was sadly unaware that the world outside their Canberra offices and Macquarie Park studios had shifted since the last time they poked their heads out the window. They all declared with smug confidence that they would not attend the ghastly rallies; they all would have learned a lot if they did.
If Australians marching for Australia in Australia looks kind of weird, it’s nothing compared to what happened four weeks ago, when a hostile mob waving foreign flags took over our beautiful Sydney Harbour Bridge to express their anger about a war on the other side of the world.
I attended that march too — well, just the start of it, and only as an observer — and it felt as much like an act of colonisation by unassimilated migrants as it was a protest against the only liberal democracy in the Middle East.
Today’s march was an emphatic riposte. How media experts and politicians failed to realise this is anyone’s guess.
Australia finds itself at this lamentable nadir because firstly its mainstream media is woeful; and secondly because both sides of politics, having become bored with fighting over mostly immovable traditional voters, are now engaged in the more exciting battle to win the affections of our rapidly growing ethnic enclaves, especially now that these “minorities” will probably outnumber the rest of us within a generation.
Politicians are expounding the tropes of supposedly oppressed migrants with conspicuous ease, unaware that their cavalier aspersions about the innate racism of Australian culture are not only fomenting anger among us long-suffering hard-working patriots, but aren’t true anyway. Australia is a great place to which to migrate if you do it correctly. Just ask this lovely Indian lady, whose passion for Australian culture and values puts Albo in the shade.
And here’s John, another migrant from today’s march, who arrived here from England 60 years ago with not even enough money to catch a taxi from Circular Quay to Bondi. He’s now a multimillionaire, and despairs at what politicians are doing to the country he loves.
Things are shifting in Australia. Independent media is quickly emerging as a legitimate alternative to the moribund mainstream. Politically, however, there’s still no alternative to the uni-party, which is a shame. No country should be ruled by people who instinctively and lazily assume their own constituents are nothing but a bunch of gullible bigots.
