Australia Day celebrates the settlement of Australia and the benefits to all, however imperfect, that could only have come from the most benign and advanced colonial power at the time, and with the Americans, in recorded history. This is not, of course, to say that imperial Britain did not have faults, some grievous.

But any study of the impact of the British settlement must consider three things. First, the alternatives were all less attractive. Usually, consideration of alternative powers is limited to the European, forgetting the Asian and especially the imperial Japanese whose brutal rule too many Australians suffered and died under in the second world war. Then there were the Polynesians and Melanesians. The second matter is that power abhors a vacuum and nothing equating or approaching state or government power existed in the land, certainly not one to sustain a resistance or a frontier war. A continuation of the hunter-gatherer society was therefore unlikely, indeed impossible.

Finally, there is the myth that what is described as the world’s oldest living culture was some utopian paradise protected by advanced customary law.

One of the leading historians in this area, Keith Windschuttle, has after long study concluded persuasively that unwritten, ununified and ununifiable customary law, in which the traditional recourse is violence, permitted to an unacceptable degree against women, is hardly the solution today.

As Inga Clendinnen, one of Australia’s most distinguished historians wrote, what the settlers saw as ‘remarkable’ were the blows Aboriginal men ‘publicly, casually, dealt their women for trivial offences’, and their ready resort to weapons. Provoked by a woman he ‘spears her… knocks her down on the spot…( striking) her on the head, using indiscriminately with a hatchet, a club or any  other weapon’.

Far from being confined to Sydney Cove, she writes that ‘the same scenes’ were witnessed by explorers and settlers ‘across the continent’. Rather than being a solution, Windschuttle argues that traditional culture is the problem.

Despite the issues of invasion and frontier war (topics I shall examine in another column), why do so many in the media report Australia Day as if its future were to be decided by the minority who want to overthrow traditional Australia?

When a similar campaign against the flag was mounted with an avalanche of assorted commentators and opinion polls, then prime minister John Howard wisely responded by legislating that any change would need to be first approved in a plebiscite where the existing flag was one of the choices. With clenched teeth, Labor did not dare oppose letting the people decide. They knew when they were defeated by a master.

When did you hear recently of some beach towel becoming our flag? Thank John Howard (and the Australian people) for that.

Now Queensland MP Heny Pike has given notice that he will introduce a similar bill relating to Australia Day. If the government and its allies kill his initiative, this will only confirm that they know the people want to keep Australia Day on 26 January, despite their unsubtle moves to undermine it over the citizenship ceremony ‘discretion’. Just as John Howard killed off Keating’s new flag campaign, so can the new Australia Day campaign be neutralised.

In the meantime, if a media outlet decides to run an opinion poll on Australia Day to advance some tired part of its agenda, as the Sydney Morning Herald did this year with a poll about a politician’s republic, at least do it with some professional rigour in its preparation. It was extremely unwise to base it on a dog-whistle 57-word question containing two false claims, each repeated twice and each propaganda already used by the semi-official ARM republicans. These were that Australia isn’t even now independent and that we don’t have an Australian as head of state, despite all governments – both  Labor and Coalition – saying to all the world that we do.

On the latter, Australians for a Constitutional Monarchy has been advised by a team of leading lawyers and experts in vice-regal practice who are unanimous in concluding that the governor-general is indeed head of state.

The embarrassing headline on the story about this poll,‘Royal drama pushes Australian voters towards republic: poll’ was not saved by a side question on Harry and Meghan. Demonstrating that, as has been argued here, Australians are a wise constitutional people, the result  was that a minuscule margin-of-error 3 per cent joined the 19 per cent who in the September Resolve Monitor poll strongly support a politicians’, rather than our crowned, republic.

One thing is clear. Republican politicians will be extremely angry with the Herald for revealing just how hopeless a second referendum would be.

In the meantime, the cause of those campaigning for the break-up of Australia was hardly advanced by Senator Lidia Thorpe’s embarrassing Australia Day harangue in Melbourne. And why did her supporters cheer each of her ludicrous claims as if they actually approved of them? ‘This is a war.’ ‘They are still killing us.’ ‘They are stealing our babies.’ Each followed by cheers.

These claims are as baseless as are the myths invented to convince other Australians that our constitution is a racist document in need of radical reform.

The latest and the most laughable myth is by the federal minister, Linda Burney, that had the Voice existed, the outrage in Alice Springs and in many other places, would not be occurring.

Ms Burney surely realises the outrages are occurring because both she and the Prime Minister were deaf to the pleas of leaders unlikely to ever join the inactive and compliant indigenous establishment populating this Voice.

The origins of the key myth arguing Australia was invaded go back to the mismanagement of the 1967 referendum and its consequences. I propose to return to this, and whether the elusive ‘frontier wars’ actually took place, in a later column.