Hijacked by the conservatives

With Invasion Day looming, today’s Canberra Times reports,

The director of the National Australia Day Council, Warren Pearson, said he was pleased that ordinary people had rejected the flag being used as a symbol of bigotry.

Phil Cleary reckoned,

John Howard needed to grasp that the flag had been discredited in Cronulla. "I don't want to see some fascist wrapping himself in an Aussie flag and then making out grubby patriotism and using it against people. The flag has been hijacked by the conservatives who are straight out of the McCarthy era."

I always thought the flag and the grubby patriotism, bigotry and racism it symbolises belonged to the conservatives. In a profound insight,

American Michael Platow, a social psychologist at the ANU, says different countries express their nationalism in different ways.

It has never made me proud of the colonial settler state where I was born that their national day commemorates an important date in the struggle for independence from colonialism. But at least it’s not explicitly a celebration of beginning of the genocide the country was built on!