The City of Yarra in Melbourne has delivered a chilling message to activists everywhere: if you shout loudly enough, vandalise and deface public property often enough, you will eventually get your way.

The decision to remove a monument of Captain James Cook in Fitzroy’s Edinburgh Gardens after yet another act of vandalism, has demonstrated yet again, when the mob wins, we lose. And in the process, more of our proud history is erased.

As the Institute of Public Affairs’ Dr Bella d’Abrera said:

‘Apparently, the best way to engage with history in 2025 is to vandalise monuments. We used to debate ideas, now we just remove anything that might offend. The real tragedy isn’t the monument; it’s the intellectual cowardice.’

Dr d’Abrera went on to say, ‘It’s a sad indictment of the state of Melbourne that even a granite monument, quietly standing in a park, isn’t safe from ideological vandalism. When statues must be removed for their own protection, you know that we have a deep cultural problem.’

This is not just about a monument. This is about what kind of society we are becoming. The decision to permanently remove a monument to one of the most pivotal figures in Australian history is about acquiescing to the mob. It is a retreat from reason, from democratic principles and civic courage. It is not reconciliation. It is surrender. It is the triumph of destruction and of ideological noise over historical literacy.

The monument to Captain James Cook – like statues of historic figures all over the world – was not a promotion of perfection. It was a recognition that Cook’s voyages were among the most consequential events in the formation of modern Australia and, to that time, science.

To remove Cook is not to reconcile with Indigenous history. It is to sever a foundational thread of the nation’s story altogether and rewards vandalism as a form of political expression. It also conveniently ignores the simple fact that Cook never was a coloniser, nor was he even an advocate of colonisation.

This moment is the fruit of years of cultural corrosion. It is no coincidence that those cheering the statue’s removal are overwhelmingly products of an education system that has spent decades undermining Australia’s foundations. Our schools now teach children to distrust the West, to view Australia’s origins with shame, and to approach history not with curiosity but with condemnation.

We have trained an entire generation to view colonisation only as invasion, not as a story of global navigation, exchange, law, governance, and nation-building. We have replaced education with indoctrination – and repeatedly tearing down statues is the result.

Cook’s monument is a public historical artefact – one which offered an opportunity for education, conversation, and reflection. But that is not what the activists want. They replace curiosity with contempt and rage and want obliteration. They want to dismantle not only physical monuments but also the cultural and intellectual ones upon which Australia rests. They seek not to improve, but to rupture.

And what, precisely, have they accomplished? They haven’t advanced historical understanding, nor social cohesion or reconciliation. They have simply created further distance between mainstream Australians and our proud history.

The great irony, of course, is that these same activists enjoy daily the fruits of the very civilisation they claim to despise. The right to protest, the rule of law, liberal democracy, modern healthcare, universal education, clean water, infrastructure, and welfare – all are legacies of the arrival of Western Civilisation to these shores. These are not incidental benefits; they are foundational.

Yet we have reached a point where those who benefit most from the West are the quickest to defame it.

History is complex. A healthy, confident society should be able to grapple with contradictions, to learn from both heroism and harm. But we are no longer that kind of society. History is now judged through the narrow lens of modern-day outrage, and authority gives way to appeasement.

The Cook monument did not stand alone in Edinburgh Gardens. It stood just metres from another monument – a so-called ‘climate doomsday clock’ counting down to 2030. This is the new iconography of our public spaces: not historical reflection, but anxiety-driven prophecy. One marker – Cook’s – offered the opportunity to explore the birth of a great nation. The other – the clock – offers only fear, fatalism, and despair. And that, it seems, is now the preferred narrative.

We are now raising children in a landscape where anxiety is valorised, and history is vilified. A generation that knows more about carbon footprints than constitutional foundations. A generation that tears down statues before understanding why they were ever built. And a political class too timid to say enough is enough.

Once history is erased, it cannot be recovered. Once statues fall, the ideas they stood for begin to fall with them. And once a country turns its back on its past, it loses any compass for its future.

Colleen Harkin is the Director of the Institute of Public Affairs’ Schools Program