FORMER ALP deputy Tanya Plibersek displayed a level of national pride on Australia Day that set heads exploding across her inner-city base.
She also had centre-right conservatives scratching their own heads and agreeing with her, perhaps, for the first time.
Plibersek, who is now Labor’s federal education spokeswoman, dared to suggest Australian school children might learn the citizenship pledge recited by all new Australians.
“It’s a pledge I love,” she said moments before being publicly shredded by her once fawning clique of semi-detached trendies.
MY LOYALTY
“We’re not committing to an abstract notion, to a crown, we are making a commitment to one another, as Australians,” Ms Plibersek told an audience at a citizenship ceremony in Sydney on January 26. [see video below]
“From this time forward I pledge my loyalty to Australia and its people – not a crown, not a person, not a political party, to Australia and its people – whose democratic beliefs I share, whose rights and liberties I respect, whose laws I will uphold and obey.
“I think every Australian school student should learn that and think carefully about what it means. It is a really elegant expression of what it takes to be a good citizen and about the rights and responsibilities we hold as citizens.”
Plibersek’s thoughts, however, are at direct odds with the Left’s post-nation globalist agenda. The one where the unrepresentative UN is in control, where international law is supreme and the despised & borderless nation state is dudded into paying for it all.
As expected, Leftist commentators, ABC types, union leaders, Greens politicians and other nation-haters instantly piled on to Plibersek.
PLANT
A social media hashtag “f*ckrightoff” sprung into life. A Greens Party federal senator said Plibersek’s national pledge idea was “sad” while an ABC presenter called it “retrograde”.
Liberal Party “plant” Jane Caro joined in, on cue, and ensured the Left looked even more irrelevant.
Caro publicly condemned Ms Plibersek for “endorsing pride in spurious geography”. [cheque’s in the post Jane]
These over reactions were so predictable it’s impossible not to believe Ms Plibersek didn’t intentionally draw them out. So what is she up to?
Has she finally come to terms with the reason she’s an Australian? That her parents had fled an Eastern Bloc nation ruined by radicals with similar views to her Labor colleagues.
Is she becoming more mainstream with age, experience and parenthood?
Or is she simply trying to prevent her family’s adopted homeland from becoming a brutal socialist republic, as Slovenia had become before they fled?
CHRISTIAN
More importantly, is she planning a defection to a Party with less extreme ideals?
Ms Plibersek could even be open to wrapping herself in the blue ensign and celebrating the nation’s successes alongside forgotten, quiet Australians – the nation’s true battlers.
It’s difficult to make a call right now. There’s a bit of mixed messaging going on.
But should she at any time come out defending Christian values, we’ll know it’s on.PC
PICTURE: Tanya Plibersek with the flag. (courtesy: smh.com.au)
