The Violent Politics of Australia Day
Keith Windschuttle
Editor-in-chief
Editor, Quadrant Magazine, 9 January 2022
The group of Aboriginal activists and their white supporters who set fire to Old Parliament House on December 30 were marking what will soon be the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the Aboriginal Tent Embassy in the parliament’s grounds. They were emulating the degree of violence that took place at the same location on Australia Day in 2012 when demonstrators marked the fortieth anniversary of the Tent Embassy’s existence.
This is a point that none of our mainstream news media have so far chosen to make in their plainly subdued reports of this willful assault on such an important symbol of Australian democracy. Indeed, even The Australian let down its readers, claiming “The Tent Embassy was getting ready to celebrate 50 years of peaceful occupation of the site.” Its journalists said the incendiaries were motley outsiders, many of them white. The newspaper said there was “rising tension” between the long-time occupants of the tent embassy and “the new arrivals, many of them anti-vaxxers and ‘sovereign citizens’ who believe laws don’t apply to them”. However, let me remind Quadrant readers what happened on the fortieth anniversary and what the Tent Embassy occupants regard as acceptable political behaviour.
At 2pm on January 26 2012 Prime Minister Julia Gillard and Opposition Leader Tony Abbott went to the Lobby Restaurant on King George Terrace, Canberra, just down the road from Old Parliament House, to present the National Emergency Medals. These awards are part of the Australian honours system and only given for exceptional action in protecting lives and property in direct response to events like the Black Saturday bushfires in Victoria in 2009 and the Queensland floods and cyclones in 2010–2011. The ceremony is usually a dignified affair that the recipients of the medal and their families are proud to remember. On Australia Day 2012, however, the ceremony was anything but.
Soon after it began, an angry mob of 200 Aborigines and their white supporters marched up to the front door of the restaurant and loudly interrupted proceedings. When security would not let them inside, they surrounded the building and, banging hard on its glass walls, shouted “shame” and “racist” and chanted: “Always was, always will be, Aboriginal land”.