In his 2006 speech entitled "Can Australia Survive the 21st Century?", noted Australian businessman Hugh M. Morgan outlined some very important and thought-provoking points about the low value we attach to Australian citizenship and nationhood. He attributed this national self-deprecation to our "intellectual elites" and their contemptuous attitude toward our Anglo-Celtic inheritance.

Morgan noted:

"Australian civilisation is an off-shoot of the confident and outward looking civilisation of 19th century Britain. We share with the other countries of the Anglosphere the inheritance of the common-law, democratic political institutions, and the freedoms which were prescribed in the Magna Carta. It is this inheritance which makes Australia a nation which is envied by so many people in other parts of the world. And our immigration policy must be coherent with sustaining our civilisation and our culture.

Any discussion about immigration must canvas those issues which arise from Australian citizenship, and the value which we should attach to Australian citizenship. I am convinced that as a nation we do not value Australian citizenship as highly as we ought. One of the reasons for this serious undervaluation is that our intellectual elites, or most of them, are competing with one another to write down Australia as morally deficient, to the point where our legitimacy as a nation is under constant attack."

Full speech:

http://www.henrythornton.com/article.asp?article_id=4028

This across-the-board assault on Australia's Anglo-Celtic heritage probably began as a reaction to Menzies era Anglophilia. It's now reached a situation where we've gone from one extreme to the other, from Anglophilia to Anglo denial and even Anglophobia. The "intellectual elites" Morgan referred have shown that they will not rest until every vestige of traditional Anglo-Celtic Australia is completely expunged. Only then will Australian nationhood, in their eyes, be considered worthy of celebration.

So, what is behind this burning desire to completely redefine Australia's national identity, even against the will of most of its own people? What is so wrong with recognising Australia's core cultural heritage and celebrating the leading role it played in building one of the world's most stable, free and prosperous nations?

There are a few technicalities here in Australian history Oligarch.

Interesting points never-the-less.

You assume all British / Australian colonial history is from C19th Britain. The folds go back further in time.

OK, I'm not touching Aboriginal culture here, which is another topic.

We have here at least 5 different colonial histories in Australia. The oldest is in NSW.

The old ghosts rattle chains in defiance of tyrrany. Yet Anglophobia goes back beyond the Rum Rebellion before C18th Bligh. The authorities and the elite of the colonial establishment in NSW weren't entirely loyal to the British Aristocracy.

In the period between the rum rebellion and the arrival of Macquarie, NSW was independent from the Empire. This was not in the name of liberation; this was power hungry tyranny. The convicts cheered when the Royal Empire regained control of the colony. Law and order reformed when Macquarie's garrison returned civilization from the NSW colonial police autocrats.

The Police state was always contemptuous towards the aristocracy, and also towards the weak and underprivileged.

Victoria was a free colony that only once had a convict hulk in Hobson's Bay and that was temporary. It always prided itself on being more "decent" in the name of the Queen, and away from the corrupt NSW constabulary.

No wonder under C20th Australia: the Menzies Government, from Victoria, were Anglophiles. NSW authorities partly wanted to do their own thing.

South Australia was different always being a free colony.

Victorian Liberals like Menzies tended to be nation builders, pompous and Royalist yet in most ways, fair. NSW Liberals had a more separatist background yet they tended to be free traders and more cold blooded in economics. Hence Howard and soon, the Republican Liberal leader: Malcolm Turnbull.

There is not one Australian colonial story, there are at least 5: pre-Federation influences, especially when you talk about C19th culture.

The poor in Australia are slow to work the difference between dignity and a hunger for power from our leaders.

In my hungry childhood in Bowral and other parts of the southern Highlands of NSW I grew weary of English Australians.
The Menzies like talk of England being home still turns my blood to heat.
Yet I have no wish to Dennie our past or to turn away from the fact while clearly different we are a nation based on mostly British blood lines.
I like most would not fight against the fact we are closer to Asia but just as different from them as we can be.
What s so wrong in just being Australia?
If any of those Aussie Poms still talk of home in Bowral please go! home I MEAN,

I can assure you that I have no misty-eyed longing for the grand old days of the British Empire.

Australia has long outgrown its former status as a "branch office of empire". Australians forged their own unique identity long ago, boasting a proud history in art, music, literature, sport and film, with achievements in every scientific field.

But yet the "intellectual elites" disparage the early settlers as nothing more than transplanted Britons or Irishmen, completely ignoring their nation-building efforts and their founding role in forging a unique Australian identity. An identity that was heavily Anglo-Celtic influenced, but uniquely Australian nonetheless.

Belly said: "What s so wrong in just being Australia?"

Half a century ago, we saw ourselves as an outpost of Europe in the South Pacific, but we now say that we are part of Asia, a proposition that is culturally and geographically erroneous. The problem today is that we've so emphasized integration with Asia that we have forgotten the importance of Australia, even going so far as to downplay our own culture and heritage.

Hugh Morgan has long had more influence on Australian ideas than any (more worthy) people I know. What he argues for is a simplistic, racist, hegemonic discourse that he can be KING of.
Most of the more erudite intellectually elites he speaks of have merely been challenging us be better, think more critically and productively and engaged with others on the same plain.
But for luddites like Morgan this is self depreciation.
What a tosser!

Another shock and awe campaign from a culture warrior. Don't you guys ever get sick of this stuff?

Nobody has suggested we should be part of Asia for more than a decade now and these academic elites you're all so set on crucifying could be counted without taking your shoes off.

How come you guys are so easily frightened?

chainsmoker said: "Nobody has suggested we should be part of Asia for more than a decade now..."

At the risk of digressing from the main topic at hand...

"...A combination of Mandarin and Cantonese is now the most, if you can combine them, is now the most widely spoken foreign language in Australia. And that's a little fact, a little vignette that's probably known to a lot of you, but when you tell that to an Asian leader or even more so, to a European leader, they're perfectly astonished. And it's just an illustration of the way in which we are naturally and comfortably and permanently part of this region and see our future in it." - John Winston Howard, 2006

http://www.abc.net.au/am/content/2006/s1793482.htm

Not as overt as Bob Hawke's proclamatiom that "demography is working as inexorably as economics to make Australia's future be part of Asia", but an extraordinary comment nonetheless.

Not to mention Kevin Rudd wanting to make Mandarin compulsory in all schools. Why? Because he can speak it, so should the rest of us. Maybe he is right.

Commonwealth countries like Australia, Canada and NZ don't by nature tend to be patriotic. We have never been entirely satisfied as we can always do things better. This is also Buddhist philosophy.

On-the-other hand, you could have a point about Australia.

Metaphor time.

In a way, the film: "Muriel's Wedding" captures an Australian trait: the rejected child.

The formation of the European Union was just like Muriel's friends who rejected Australia and the daggy colonies when they all started "marrying" each other. They distanced themselves from the trashy "convicts".

Australia was the embarrassment that wouldn't go away.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FDuHvifF0mk

So Australia: Muriel, had to reinvent herself into something more savvy than we really are: as the movie so astutely shows, Muriel in all her fantasies, self hate and fraud ends up being just like her father. The mother, in this dysfunctional family suicides almost unnoticed. Rather than deny the truth of mundane life, she "drowned" in it.

If our father's have run away with "aunty Germany" (what a coincidence!), our mother is all but dead from depression, and no one wants the family to work as its too boring, why would we want to know who we are?

The problem is fraud and denial are but destructive resorts?

If Australia is the abandoned child that has to turn to fraud or pretence, will we ever have the courage to have a serious chat to "the family"?

You know this country as a commonwealth is not nearly as boring as people would have you believe.

How are these so called self-loathing, anti-Western academic elites responsible for the number of Mandarin and Cantonese speakers in Australia?

They don't set immigration rates. Language departments in our universities are closing down all over the place, so you can't blame them for teaching these languages. It wasn't the elites' idea to turn us into China's quarry.

OK, so you clearly don't want to be part of Asia. Great. Whatever. I fail to see what the kind of elites you're talking about have to do with it. The elites responsible are more likely government ones, and business and mining elites who are making money out of it

I respond upon the article, Can Australia Survive the 21st Century? BY By Hugh M Morgan AC AT http://www.henrythornton.com/article.asp?article_id=4028 which indicates to me that the writer may have had considerable education but lacks any comprehension as to what the Commonwealth of Australia is about. His comments about dual citizens, and “Australia citizenship” are in my view, as a “CONSTITUTIONALIST” and Author of one of my books published on 30 September 2003,
INSPECTOR-RIKATI® on CITIZENSHIP
A book on CD about Australians unduly harmed.
(ISBN 0-9580569-6-X prior to 1-1-2007) ISBN 978-0-9580569-6-0
uter and sheer nonsensce.

See also my extensive set out on my blog at http://au.360.yahoo.com/profile-ijpxwMQ4dbXm0BMADq1lv8AYHknTV_QH and my website http://www.schorel-hlavka.com
The writer should be aware that laws that are unconstitutionally are no laws at all and Australian citizenship is not a nationality but a political status and the Commonwealth of Australia is not a country but a “political union". If he doesn’t even understand this then I view he rather undermines the good work of the Framers of the Constitution!