Tony Abbott has written Australia, a personal take on our history, focused on the positives. But this is a mug’s game, with the national psyche permanently switched to self-loathing. Just look at the Black Armband View of History industrial complex, and the Tafe human resources double-degree grift to see where the real money is.

Like so many Australians with a machete to grind, I wear boardshorts and don’t worry about anything much really. But I do live to self-loathe and go to the beach. As Maslow’s Pyramid of Misery shows, life is too short to waste on being happy. My patriotic misery includes mandatory Pilates classes at the local Body Machine where I work out with my fellow self-loathers – often young university PhDs specialising in megalomania – with their constructed preening ripped headphone-wearing bodies by the hour.

Channelling 1980s Jane Fonda they talk a big game about positive self-image as they negotiate dumbbells but as you study the wreckage of your own physical self you realise this is just a scam, perpetuated by under-30s who’ve never experienced being brought back from the dead by a paramedic.

Negativity is implicit to my Aussie way of life. That and insensitive use of disposable plastic plates at Australia Day barbecues. Only last week I was pumping iron, listening to an amusing podcast about Middle Eastern intergenerational hatred and marvelling at the muscles on my left leg. I went, ‘Wow’, but my inner loather asked,  ‘Is it enough? What would Chris Hemsworth make of this?’ More subversively, ‘Has Nicole Kidman ever done a decent movie and is Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis the best cinematic retelling of Aussie boy made good since Graeme Blundell removed his Y-fronts and got it on with Abigail in Alvin Rides Again?

Alvin Purple is a good example of our cultural cringe Abbott may wish to dissect if his Catholicism allows. Our new social media laws are working hard to ensure we can no longer access Alvin on You Tube unless you are over 35 and don’t have an erection. But they’re missing the redemptive benefits of illicit filth. 1970s Blundell starred as the giddily oversexed Alvin in this I-can’t-believe-its-not-porn Australian classic yet now writes earnestly sensible television reviews for the Australian. In biblical terms he’s our prodigal son.

I really need to manage this carping self. It’s not good for my personal development though a quintessentially Aussie thing to do. Not wanting to sound like a jaunty Nikki Gemmell column about taking your fur babies to brunch so you can agonise with your friends about the No vote but I’m well-aware this problem isn’t me – it’s you.

If we want more positive Australian stories we should celebrate humble council cleaner Shaun Turner who this week humiliated Trotskyite Darebin Council by winning his Fair Work case after they tried to sack him for criticising the rote use of Acknowledgment of Country at council team meetings. If we can build a statue to Dan Andrews surely a bronzed Federation Square installation of a street cleaner with operating windscreen wipers to keep young children interested, as a monument to bravery in the face of a 500-word HR memo, isn’t too much to ask.

My therapist says complex negativity doesn’t happen much in Sydney because since the introduction of State of Origin, nobody up there reads, plus they have harbour yachting, Malcolm Turnbull and other superficial icons of self-pleasure to distract them. Up there they call it self-love, and it has launched the careers of many television journalists and celebrity dentists. But as a Guardian editorial on Gen Z materialism might ask once you get past the deeply ironic for Marxists donation pop-up: are they really happy?

He says Australians should surround themselves with positive things – like Hillsong affirmations about wealth generation or one of those Ponds Institute positive body ads featuring fat people dancing in their underwear to Fat Boy Slim’s ‘Praise You’. I’ve even created a positive vibe Spotify playlist. Hearing Beach Boy Brian Wilson has died, I added ‘Wouldn’t it be nice?’ – a song about teenage sexual frustration and surfboards. I now learn Wilson struggled with being happy his whole life and couldn’t really surf. He was in effect deconstructing misery which is a good title for a first-year Australian history unit.

There is a theory about Aussie self-loathing I read in Robert Hughes The Fatal Shore. He said the colonising convicts and prison guards were torn between a resistance to authority and desire to escape versus a desperate dependence on that same prison state to survive in a terrifying new colony 17,000 kilometres from home.

This explains the tall poppy syndrome and why we feel conflicted and love-hate everything. We love to hate our football teams – if they are Carlton and lose, they are honest battlers and sack-the-coach; if they win we celebrate but don’t want them to be up themselves like Ben Cousins and his enhanced state of podium jubilation at the 2006 grand final. We want everyone to win… but only a bit, and without too many drugs in the system that might show up in Wada mandatory urine testing.

Perhaps it is even more primordial. Nato’s Secretary-General said Donald Trump is Nato’s Daddy. And everybody needs a daddy. He may be onto something as the sensible Dutch often are. I think back to all those wretched first convicts, dumped and alone without family and friends or daddies. Maybe our history of loathing is just that. A generational cry for help as we try to figure out who our daddy is.