It’s a paradox, for sure. As support for the celebration of Australia Day on January 26 increases, so does the intensity of “invasion day” demonstrations.

The recently published Roy Morgan Poll asked this question: “On January 26, 1788, Captain Arthur Phillip landed at Sydney Cove. In your opinion, should January 26 be known as Australia Day or Invasion Day?” Seventy-two per cent of those polled took the Australia Day option. As to whether the date of Australia Day should be altered, 60.5 per cent did not want it changed – up slightly from when last polled in 2024.

It’s much the same with the recent poll commissioned by the Institute of Public Affairs. Seventy-six per cent of respondents supported the January 26 option.

On the evening of January 21, ideologically motivated vandals destroyed or damaged two historical statues in Melbourne’s Flagstaff Gardens. The Pioneer Monument was erected in 1871 to commemorate the settlement of Melbourne. It was sprayed with an inverted red triangle, the symbol of the radical Islamist terrorist organisation Hamas, and the words “Land Back” were written near the inscription. The nearby Separation Monument suffered a similar fate. It was erected in 1950 to celebrate the centenary of the separation of the colony of Victoria from the colony of NSW.

To complete the sense of alienation, the words “Death to Australia” were written on the base of the Pioneer Monument. Clearly, the vandals favour the destruction of contemporary Australia – one of the freest and most prosperous nations on earth.

In a completely unrelated event, January 21 marked the launch of what the ABC calls its “new sharp satirical special Always Was Tonight” presented by Tony Armstrong, who is described as a Gamilaroi man. According to the taxpayer-funded public broadcaster’s media centre, the program brings “a fearless First Nations lens to the stories that are shaping the country”.

This is mere spin. It is false to imply that there is “a First Nations lens” on any matter. Like other Australians, Indigenous Australians do not have a single view on anything. The format of the show is essentially that of ABC TV’s The Weekly, with Armstrong filling the role of Charlie Pickering.

The jokes are of the usual fashionable leftist kind with political conservatives the targets and the focus on Aboriginal issues. Presenter Brooke Blurton (who identifies as Indigenous) has this to say at one part of the program: “Sky News will announce a competitor to Triple J called Triple K. They will celebrate Australia Day by taking the hood to the hood with the hottest of 100 crosses.” Here a logo is shown featuring a Ku Klux Klan hood. How funny is that?

Always Was Tonight concludes on a serious note about Indigenous children in prisons and a call for all Australian governments to raise the minimum age for criminal responsibility to 14. But its essential message is that Australia is racist.

Sky News’ The Bolt Report on January 21 ran a clip of Armstrong’s appearance on Network Ten’s The Project where he said: “This country still can’t accept that it’s a racist country … that it’s built off the back of slavery … of dispossession. It’s built on the back of rape and pillage of Indigenous people.”

The first sketch presented by Armstrong centres on the claim that the early settlers intentionally infected Aboriginal people with smallpox. No evidence is presented for this most serious allegation.

For an Indigenous Australian in an allegedly racist nation, Armstrong has done remarkably well in sport at the highest level and in the media. He was reported in the Daily Mail in June 2022 as saying that he was raised by his white single mother and does not know his Indigenous father.

Armstrong was educated at Assumption College in the Victorian town of Kilmore, which was founded by the Catholic Marist Brothers. Armstrong’s single mother managed to pay the school fees and her son completed year 12.

After that, there has followed a brilliant career. Yet the host of Always Was Tonight reckons he lives in a racist country built on the back of dispossession. But there’s the difficult point. Without colonisation, which Armstrong states led to dispossession, he would not have been born.

Addressing The Sydney Institute in February 2017, Stan Grant said: “I am drawn from the Wiradjuri and Kamilaroi of NSW, my story also comes from the green fields of Tipperary.” He spoke of an academic of Indigenous-Anglo-Asian heritage who saw himself as both “coloniser and colonised; black and consummately white”.

Any Indigenous Australian with non-Indigenous ancestors owes his or her existence to, yes, colonisation. When former Greens and now independent Victorian senator Lidia Thorpe, who identifies as Indigenous Australian, said on October 2023 “we’re in a war” with non-Indigenous Australia, she was talking about going to war with herself.

Certainly, in the decades after 1788, the Indigenous population suffered grievously from imported diseases and frontier violence as settlers moved away from the centres of colonial government.

But there was also co-operation between settlers and the Aboriginal people and many partnerships, even marriages, occurred.

But all that is now long gone and the British, for all their faults, were perhaps the best colonisers.

The evidence suggests that majority support for maintaining Australia Day – and not introducing “invasion day” – is at least steady and probably slightly increasing. Australia Day is opposed by some Aboriginal people, alienated leftists, radical Islamists and more besides. This group is not going away.

But neither is the group – consisting of diverse backgrounds – that likes Australia. I would make Australia Day the last Monday in January, as it was before 1990, but I acknowledge that this is not the majority view.

On Australia Day this year, I will be reading parts of the recently released Commemorative Book to Mark 50 Years of Vietnamese Refugee Settlement in Australia. It was very much influenced by former South Vietnamese diplomat in Australia Tuong Quang Luu, who became a refugee.

The cover contains a photo of four Vietnamese women carrying a placard declaring “Thank You! Australia” who are followed by the NSW Police band. That’s a good reason to celebrate January 26, in a paradoxical way.