Letter to The Editor - All human beings have shortcomings (‘sin’) and we are wise to acknowledge our own

To THE AGE          Jenna Price asks (‘Day of atonement needed’, 24/1) why we should not change the date of Australia Day ‘if most Indigenous Australians want it’. One reason is that they are only a tiny minority and there is evidence, as in the recent Research Now poll, that the great majority of Australians support the present arrangement, being proud of our intrepid forebears who pioneered the land and of the culture and civilization they brought here.

     A second reason is that she provides no proof that most “Indigenous Australians” actually want the change; and a third is that her terminology is suspect, since many such Australians carry some settler blood, while we of British ethnicity who were born here are also indigenous, in the essential meaning of the word. Her comparison of Good Friday and Yom Kippur is interesting. All human beings have shortcomings (‘sin’) and we are wise to acknowledge our own. However, hijacking this spiritual truth to support one-eyed political propaganda, as Price does, is regrettable.
  NJ, Belgrave, Vic