Former Liberal prime minister John Howard has dismissed calls to change the date of Australia Day in favour of retaining British values brought to Australia during settlement.
Mr Howard argued that British colonisation was the best option for Australia in comparison to alternatives of that time period, The Australian reports.
‘Their settlement policies, their colonial policies, were not without fault, but they were infinitely better than the alternatives from around the time, Mr Howard said.
John Howard has dismissed calls to change the date of Australia Day in favour of retaining British values brought to Australia during settlement
Mr Howard retained his position that colonisation of Australian land was essentially inevitable, and the British settlement was most likely the best outcome.
Slamming campaigns to shift Australia Day from January 26, Mr Howard said the move was merely ‘a Green-inspired, left-wing exercise in gesture politics’.
Mr Howard also asserted that an inscription on a Captain Cook statue in Sydney’s Hyde Park that says Cook ‘discovered this territory’ should be left as is, despite calls from ABC’s Indigenous Affairs editor Stan Grant to have it amended.
Stating that ‘context is everything’, Mr Howard agreed with Aboriginal leader Warren Mundine who said: ‘if you start mucking around with statues then you might as well start tearing down the Pyramids.’
‘I thought that was a good way of putting it because if you look at all the figures of history, if you go back sufficiently in time, you will find people on both sides of politics advocating what would now be seen as racial immigration policies,’ he told the publication.
He also defended his attitude against apologising to Aboriginal people during his time as the country’s leader, saying modern attitudes were incomparable to previous generations.
Mr Howard argued that British colonisation was the best option for Australia in comparison to alternatives of that time period
Mr Howard said calls to change the date of Australia day were merely ‘a Green-inspired, left-wing exercise in gesture politics’
‘In some circumstances the behaviour is undeniably evil and unacceptable. But you can’t do that, you have to think of the context of the time.’
In terms of history curriculum taught in schools, Mr Howard said he disagreed with the tendency to have British contribution to Australian history ‘written out’.
‘I don’t know how to advance the position of the First Australians by diminishing the benefits of our British heritage,’ he said.
Mr Howard said he disagreed with the tendency to have British contribution to Australian history ‘written out’ of school curriculum