Who really divided ANZAC Day?

Not the Australians who objected, but those who inserted race based rituals into a day of shared sacrifice.

Short on time? Here is a 5 dot point summary of my thoughts:

• The claim that Australians were booing ANZACs or veterans is a lie. They were responding to the politicisation of a sacred national ceremony.

• Inserting a race based ritual into ANZAC Day undermines its core purpose of unity and shared remembrance.

• The contradiction of honouring those who fought for Australia while simultaneously suggesting their descendants are merely “visitors” who require permission to be here is not just absurd, it is an insult to their sacrifice.

• The real source of division is not the crowd’s reaction, but the deliberate introduction of identity politics into a unifying national event.

• ANZAC Day should transcend race and politics, reminding us that we are one people, united by sacrifice, not divided by ancestry.

The same crowd now clutching their pearls over booing at ANZAC Day ceremonies are, not coincidentally, the very people who have spent the past decade tearing down our national symbols and spraying graffiti on our memorials.

Victorian authorities (to my knowledge) have failed to arrest a single person for the destruction of our national monuments. Not one. Yet somehow, we’re told the real source of division is Australians who object to being treated like visitors in the country their forefathers fought and died to defend.

Let’s be honest about what actually happened.

People were not booing the ANZACs. They were not booing veterans. They were not even booing individuals.

They were reacting to the deliberate insertion of a political, race based ritual into what is supposed to be the most unifying day on the Australian calendar.

No one wakes before dawn, stands in the cold, and gathers in silence just to heckle servicemen and women. That claim is not just wrong, it’s wilfully dishonest.

What Australians were responding to was something else entirely.

A ceremony that by its own definition, is about granting “permission” for people to be on land they already belong to.

Think about that for a moment.

We send Australians overseas to fight, bleed, and die for this country. And then on the one day we honour them, we tell those same Australians and their descendants that they are visitors who require a welcome.

If you were designing a ritual to divide people by ancestry, you could hardly do better.

There is an irony here so thick you could spread it on toast. We are asked to unite in remembrance, only to be immediately separated into categories, those who can “welcome” and those who must be “welcomed.”

That is not unity. That is racial segmentation.

And it is deeply out of place on ANZAC Day.

We’re told the booing is “divisive.” That it “betrays the spirit” of the day.

No.

What betrays the spirit of ANZAC Day is turning it into a platform for identity politics.

What betrays the spirit of ANZAC Day is reframing a day of shared sacrifice into a lecture about historical hierarchy.

What betrays the spirit of ANZAC Day is inserting a ritual that implies some Australians are more native, more legitimate, or more entitled than others.

The boos didn’t create the division. They exposed it.

Even senior Defence figures understand this. The very freedoms being defended, freedom of speech and freedom of expression, include the right of Australians to reject political messaging, especially when it intrudes on something sacred.

But the political class doesn’t want to hear that.

Enter Premier Jacinta Allan who rushed to condemn the crowd, claiming the disruption was a betrayal of ANZAC values.

This is the same sleight of hand we’ve come to expect.

Redefine the problem. Blame the reaction. Ignore the cause.

She says ANZAC Day is “not a stage for division.”

On that point, she’s absolutely right.

But she’s directing her criticism at the wrong people. The division didn’t come from the crowd. It came from the microphone.

It came from a ceremony that had nothing to do with Gallipoli, nothing to do with Kokoda, nothing to do with sacrifice or service, and everything to do with modern race politics.

And here’s the deeper problem.

The very people who champion these ceremonies are the same people who insist on viewing Australia through the lens of race.

They divide us into groups. They rank us by ancestry. They tell some Australians they belong more than others.

And then astonishingly they accuse everyone else of being divisive.

If you genuinely wanted unity, the formula isn’t complicated. You don’t divide the audience by race. You don’t tell Australians they need permission to be here. And you certainly don’t do it on the one day that has always transcended politics.

On ANZAC Day, we are not hyphenated Australians. We are not categories. We are one people. Red, white and blue.

That used to be enough.

And if those in power continue to push these ceremonies knowing full well they provoke division, then let’s stop pretending this is about unity.

Because it isn’t. It’s all about division and it always was.

Senator Ralph Babet, Senator for Victoria, United Australia Party.