With Australia Day just around the corner, the far-left are gearing up to trash patriotic Aussies proud of our history and culture as “racist colonial oppressors”.

As is usually the case with the perpetually offended, their pronouncements are inconsistent with reality.

Instead of being ashamed, as the activists want us to be, Australians have every right to be proud of our past.

Not only was Australia founded on the great principles of Western civilisation such as democracy, free markets, the rule of law, social pluralism and individual rights, but there’s arguably no country which has upheld these ideals more consistently than ours.

If we have sometimes failed to live up to these ideals, on the whole, we’ve given it our best shot and done our best to correct our mistakes.

From the very beginning, Australia sought to be the very opposite of an oppressive, racist colonial state.

Unlike America, where there was a Declaration of Independence, the establishment of New South Wales by our founding father Governor Arthur Phillip was codified by correspondence between Phillip and the British Home Office.

For example, after Phillip was appointed Governor in 1786, he wrote up a manifesto detailing his plans for his new colony, in which he declared:

 “The laws of this country [England] will, of course, be introduced in [New] South Wales, and there is one that I would wish to take place from the moment his Majesty’s forces take possession of the country: That there can be no slavery in a free land, and consequently no slaves”.

Phillip’s objection to slavery was well ahead of his time. It was radical.

While he established New South Wales as a settlement without slavery, the merchant fleets of Liverpool were transporting slaves to the Americas, Britain’s Caribbean colonies were dependent on slave labour, and slavery was rife in the Raj.

Even more impressive is how Philip wrote his anti-slavery proclamation eight months before the leader of the British abolitionist movement William Wilberforce even took up the issue.

And it doesn’t stop there. 

After Phillip was ordered by King George III to “endeavour, by every possible means, to open an intercourse with the natives, and to conciliate their affections, enjoining all subjects to live in amity and kindness with them”, he announced that “any Man who takes the life of a Native, will be put on his Trial the same as if he had kill’d one of the Garrison.”

And even when speared through the shoulder by an Aboriginal warrior at Manly Cove in September 1790, Phillip refused to retaliate, resulting in the re-establishment of good relations, with Bennelong coming to Sydney with his wife in November 1790.

You don’t hear about all this on the ABC, do you?

Australia is not a country founded on racist colonial oppression, but one founded upon Christian morality, equality in the eyes of the law, and the primacy of inalienable rights.

Our nation is now comprised of over 300 ancestries simply because our values made this nation such an attractive place to live.

And our national spirit lies in “this continent's shared 40,000-year history comprising its ancient past, Western civilisation, British institutions and cultural richness from two centuries of immigration,” to use the words of proud Australian Aboriginal Warren Mundine.

Its time the far-left leaves those Aussies who want to celebrate our history and culture on Australia Day alone.

Although history is a complex story of conquest and pillage, our founding fathers were some of the first to try and reverse this norm.