Could someone please remind me to send Senator Lidia Thorpe a bouquet?
For, after the appalling behaviour she and her fellow supporters demonstrated in anti-monarchy protests nationwide over the public holiday to mark the passing of Queen Elizabeth II, sensible Australians are likely to run a mile from the republican cause.
By dipping their hands in red paint to symbolise blood – and smearing it across what they wrongly believed to be the British coat of arms (it was actually Portugal’s) – these protesters have proved themselves to be exceptionally helpful in advancing the cause of our constitutional monarchy.
Others burned or cut up Australian flags.
They said it was to protest against the ills experienced by Indigenous Australians under the Commonwealth.
I don’t suggest for a moment that our history is perfect, though there is much more good in it than bad.
But you would expect that a group of people so disgusted by our institutions, history and symbols might learn a little about them before taking to the streets in vandalism.
Alas, as they smeared the “blood” across the coat of arms of Portugal rather than that of the United Kingdom, their perfect ignorance was proved.
One might think that if an institution had oppressed you so badly that you felt compelled to protest against it, you might at least be able to identify it.
And perhaps that’s the point.
Anyone wanting to see oppression in action needs to pay attention to the way that the Iranian morality police killed 22-year-old woman Mahsa Amini for wearing her hijab too loosely, along with several of the protesters who took to the streets following it.
That’s oppression.
Oppression is not – contrary to what Greens members of parliament have to say – requiring people on welfare to spend some of it on feeding their children by using a cashless debit card.
Most of the anti-monarchy protesters weren’t people who have been harmed by the institution of constitutional monarchy.
They were largely inner-city green-voting purveyors of the toxin that is identity politics, an ideology that demands individuals engage in competitive victimhood to claim advantages based on attributes that are usually genetic.
Our school history curriculum spends so much time lamenting the wrongs of our past that many children and adults alike know little about anything else from our history.
In that context, who could be surprised the politics of grievance has been given a foothold?
The best of our history comes from times when Australians have pulled together, valuing one another on the content of our individual characters, rather than our skin colour or creed.
From times when people have – dismissing as irrelevant matters like race – taught each other, employed each other, defended this nation together and represented it with distinction.
It’s hard to know what’s more repugnant: this ideology of division or the people who so ignorantly perpetuate it.
Amanda Stoker is a former Liberal Senator for Queensland and a Distinguished Fellow of the Menzies Research Centre.
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