“Stuff the British Stole”: ABC’s Propaganda Machine Turns High School Kids Against Their Own Heritage

An ABC program called Stuff the British Stole has now stooped to recruiting high school students to redesign the Australian flag, stripping out the Union Jack and replacing it with green and gold, kangaroos, indigenous suns, and ocean symbols, all in the name of being "more inclusive" and "more multicultural." One student explained they removed the Union Jack because Australians today "don't really associate ourselves with the British that much." This is not education. It is ideological grooming.

The segment, from the latest season hosted by Marc Fennell, features students from Perth Modern School dutifully parroting the approved line: the British inheritance must be erased to make room for a new, supposedly more enlightened national identity. The ABC happily broadcasts this as thoughtful youth engagement. It is nothing of the sort. It is the public broadcaster using children as props in a long-running campaign to delegitimise Australia's founding British culture.

These people want to reshape the next generation's understanding of history so that the British contribution, the rule of law, parliamentary democracy, the English language, the institutions that actually made modern Australia possible, is remembered only as theft and oppression.

"Inclusive"? It Excludes the British from the Start

Let us be precise about the language. The students and their ABC handlers claim the new designs are "more inclusive." Inclusive of whom? It explicitly excludes the British strand of our national story. The Union Jack represents the legal and cultural foundation laid down from 1788 onward, the common law, the Westminster system, the Protestant work ethic and Enlightenment values that shaped our Constitution and our success as a nation. Removing it is not neutral. It is a deliberate act of historical erasure aimed at one specific heritage: the Anglo-British one.

This is the dirty secret of much contemporary multicultural zealotry. It presents itself as warm, welcoming diversity. In practice, it functions as anti-British, anti-Anglo racism dressed up in progressive clothing. Every other cultural tradition is celebrated and protected. The British founding stock and its legacy are singled out for deconstruction and guilt. That is not multiculturalism. It is selective historical vandalism.

The ABC has form here. For years it has acted as a taxpayer-funded megaphone for the view that Australia's British inheritance is something to be ashamed of rather than built upon. The education system has done the same work for decades, from kindergarten stories that frame settlement as pure dispossession, through school curricula heavy on critical theory and light on the civilisational achievements of the British world, right through to universities where decolonisation is the dominant religion. By the time these kids reach high school, many have absorbed the script: Britain bad, everything pre-1788 romantic and pure, the flag itself a symbol of exclusion.

Then the ABC steps in to film the results and call it progress.

This is how cultural self-loathing is manufactured. It is not organic. It is the product of a sustained ideological project that begins in early childhood and is reinforced at every stage. The ABC's role is not to question it but to normalise and amplify it. Public money is used to teach Australian children that the very civilisation that gave them their freedoms, prosperity, and stability is the problem that must be dismantled.

The hypocrisy is glaring. These same voices never suggest redesigning the flags or institutions of countries with far bloodier imperial records. They do not demand that non-British migrant communities abandon symbols of their own ancestral homelands. The target is always and only the Anglo-British core of Australia. That is not fairness. It is anti-white, anti-British animus reframed as virtue.

Time to Defund the ABC

Enough. The ABC has forfeited any claim to impartiality on cultural and historical matters. It is an activist broadcaster that uses public funds to wage a one-sided war on Australia's founding identity. Programs like Stuff the British Stole do not inform, they indoctrinate. They take impressionable teenagers and hand them a prefabricated narrative of guilt and erasure, then film the results as if it were spontaneous youthful wisdom.

Australians deserve a national broadcaster that reflects the full story of this country, its British foundations, its remarkable achievements, and its capacity to integrate newcomers into a coherent national culture, not one that systematically undermines the first and flattens the second into grievance.

Defund the ABC. Cut its budget, strip its activist charter, and force it to compete in the marketplace of ideas like everyone else. Until that happens, it will continue to do exactly what it did in this flag segment: recruit the next generation to dismantle the civilisation that made Australia worth living in.

The British did not merely "steal" things. They built the framework within which Australia became one of the most successful, free, and prosperous nations on earth. Teaching kids to erase that truth is not inclusive. It is cultural self-sabotage. And the ABC is all too happy to broadcast it.

https://www.abc.net.au/listen/programs/stuff-the-british-stole