Anyone remember Ken Done? The BFD’s readership is of an age that almost all of us remember the 80s, so you probably vaguely remember his twee, colourful cartoon koalas. Done is the former ad-man who made a motza out of doona covers and drink coasters, emblazoned with his trademark, “Aussie, Aussie, Aussie!” tripe.
(When I say “trademark”, I mean that literally: Done successfully sued rock group This Is Serious Mum over the cover art of their “Australia, the Lucky C-t” album.)
Not content with getting rich selling lurid tat to tourists and bogans, Done has latterly reinvented himself as a “serious artist”, hawking brightly-coloured slush that looks like Monet’s kindergarten scrawls. He also apparently fancies himself as a political commentator.
A new Australian flag, says artist Ken Done, would be the symbol of a modern Australian republic that recognises Australia’s Indigenous peoples in the Constitution.
This is no more than an agenda for a beach towel to be the new flag and a thought bubble for a new constitution.
There is also the not-insignificant point that Aboriginal Australians are already recognised in the Constitution. When the Constitution says, “the people”, it means all Australians, regardless of race or colour.
The problems of the indigenous aboriginal people are not going to be solved by adopting one of the many proposals for so-called recognition.
It is indigenous leaders of the calibre of the late Senator Neville Bonner who loved the Flag and the Crown who will do that.
Senator Bonner was a founder of Australians for Constitutional Monarchy, whose campaign motto has long been:
To preserve, to protect and to defend our heritage: the Australian constitutional system, the role of the Australian Crown in it and our Australian National Flag.
But, hey, let’s listen to an ad bloke from Sydney, instead.
Done said he had been thinking about the flag for 30 years and that the Sydney Games 20 years ago would have been the perfect time to change it.
“I’ve been thinking about it for a long time,” he said. “I’ve talked to a number of prime ministers about it. You have to have political will to make it happen.”
He said there needed to be a campaign to build momentum and the motivation to change.
In other words, what the left always do: just keep nagging, whining, bullying, brow-beating and foot-stamping until everyone else sighs and says, “Fiiiiinnne… if we give you this, will you just go away?”
They never do, of course.
But, so far, Australians have resisted the left’s decades-long tantrums over our flag.
Most Australians see no need to change a flag chosen by the Australian people in an open competition at the time of Federation; a flag under which our soldiers have fought and our athletes have long competed.
At the time of the passing of the Flag Act , Labor leader Dr HV Evatt described it as the ”most beautiful flag in the world.”
And as for constitutional change, as two of our founders said at Federation, the Constitution is designed to allow for change, but only change which is ”desirable, irresistible and inevitable”[…]
Australians are a wise constitutional people. They have a long record of approving change only if they are satisfied that change will manifestly improve the governance of the country. Indeed, they have a well-tuned rodent radar. If they can smell a rat in a proposal – as they did in 1999 with the politicians’ republic, they will say a very firm, “No”, as they did in the 1999 landslide. And they did this despite the at times hysterical insistence of media and politicians.
The Good Sauce
And that’s what really gets the goat of people like Done. The Australian people just keep refusing to do what their “betters” in Sydney’s harbourside mansions and Melbourne’s million-dollar inner-city terraces lecture them to.
And we’re perfectly happy with our flag, thanks.
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