In recent years, we seem perfectly happy to celebrate every difference – every culture, every group, every identity, every grievance. But suggest that Australia might also be celebrated or that we need a common national identity, and suddenly it becomes controversial. It shouldn’t be.
A nation is not a collection of competing tribes permanently negotiating which symbols get to dominate the public square. A nation is a shared home. And a shared home needs symbols that belong to everyone.
That is what a national flag is for.
September 3 is Australian National Flag Day. I’ll bet almost no one knows that. And perhaps that tells us something.
We increasingly talk as though Australia is simply a collection of separate communities, with nothing binding us together except geography. Too many have become antagonistic to our own national story. We teach children to question almost everything about the country they live in, yet rarely teach them to value it.
That is not developing nationhood. And it is certainly not a recipe for social cohesion.
When the Commonwealth sought a design for the new Australian flag in 1901, it wasn’t handed down from some distant authority. More than 32,000 Australians entered a design competition with 14-year-old Melbourne schoolboy Ivor Evans, one of five joint winners. It’s a reminder that national identity is something built together.
The Australian flag is not a partisan symbol. It does not belong to one race, one religion or one political movement. The flag does not belong more to a fifth-generation Australian than to a child whose parents became citizens yesterday. Nor does it exclude Aboriginal Australians or Torres Strait Islanders. Our national flag represents all Australians because it belongs to Australia. And therefore, it belongs to every Australian.
The point of citizenship is that we are part of something bigger than ourselves. Every generation must preserve our institutions, freedoms and social cohesion for the next, but that becomes extraordinarily difficult – perhaps impossible – if we raise children to feel little attachment to the country they will one day be asked to preserve.
Nor can we continually divide people according to ancestry and expect common citizenship somehow to emerge.
National identity and social cohesion are built slowly, generation after generation, and cannot be manufactured by government after it has disappeared.
We should fly one Australian national flag, not because every Australian has the same ancestry, religion, or history. We should fly one flag because citizenship requires something more powerful than our differences: it requires a common allegiance to the country we share.
One nation. One flag.
Because we are all Australian.