Merry Christmas is not a hate crime!!

How Australia learned to fear its own culture in December.

Here is a short 5 dot point summary of my thoughts…

• It’s Christmas not “the holiday season” December 25 marks the birth of Jesus Christ, whether the culture police like it or not.

• Australia was built on Christianity our laws, freedoms, and institutions didn’t come from nowhere.

• The West’s morals come from Christ, human dignity, charity, forgiveness, and limited power all trace back to Christian teaching.

• Offence is selective, everything else must be celebrated, except Christianity.

• Christmas belongs to everyone and that’s exactly why some want it erased.

Here’s a Christmas idea, deport anyone who refuses to say Christmas.

I’ve had enough of people undermining the most important event in the Christian calendar with their limp “Happy Holidays” greetings or vague references to the “Festive Season”.

It’s Christmas, if you can’t even bring yourself to say the word, you probably shouldn’t be in this country. Flights leave daily, off you go.

If you insist on using a beige, culture free greeting that sounds like it was approved by a corporate risk management committee, you really should be packed onto the next flight to whichever country specialises in joyless seasonal neutrality. Brussels comes to mind.

Australia is a predominantly Christian country. I know this is deeply confronting for people who faint at the sight of a nativity scene in a public park, but it remains stubbornly true.

If you doubt it read the preamble to the Australian Constitution.

And if you haven’t read it don’t worry, neither has anyone currently serving in Parliament.

What the Constitution does say without blinking, trembling, or demanding a trigger warning, is that the people of the Australian colonies humbly relied on Almighty God.

That’s Almighty God. Not the Almighty “Universe”. Not the Almighty “Energy”. Not the Almighty “Season of Inclusion”.

They meant the Christian God, the one whose Son’s birthday we’re now apparently too frightened to mention in December, lest it create discomfort for someone who once walked past a church in 1997 and felt “unsafe”.

Let’s be honest the only reason you say “Happy Holidays” instead of “Merry Christmas” is because you dislike Christianity and everything it represents or you’re a coward, which in my opinion is arguably worse.

Even if you’re not a Christian, you should still be able to say “Merry Christmas”.

It’s not a baptism. It’s not a confession of faith.

It’s a greeting. A courtesy. The bare minimum of cultural participation.

When someone hands you a coffee, you don’t say, “I’m not personally invested in Arabica heritage, but I acknowledge the beverage placed before me,” you say thank you, because that’s what normal people do.

Meanwhile outside our fragile Western bubble, life proceeds with remarkable clarity.

No one in Saudi Arabia refers to Ramadan as the “festive fasting season”.

And if you did, you wouldn’t be gently corrected, you’d be shut down. Literally. You’d probably get kicked out of the country, and rightly so!

Yet here in Australia, the land of mandatory tolerance, we tolerate the steady undermining of the foundations that gave us Western Civilisation.

Have you noticed that the people most offended by “Merry Christmas” are the same people who insist we celebrate absolutely everything else?

Diwali. Lunar New Year. Juneteenth. World Vegan Day. International Pronoun Appreciation Week. The alphabet soup season, it never ends. How many genders are we up to now? At last count it was more than 70! Ugh.

But mention the name Jesus Christ and suddenly these woke idiots need an emotional support animal and three days off work.

What’s remarkable is that we’ve reached a point where people are genuinely afraid to utter the most common seasonal greeting in the English speaking world.

I once watched a shop assistant attempt to say “Merry Christmas”, panic halfway through, and ricochet into a confused slurry of syllables that sounded like, “Mer… happ… fest… enjoy December!”

Imagine being so terrified of offending someone that you can’t even finish a sentence.

And what exactly is offensive about “Merry Christmas”?

It’s cheerful. It’s generous. It’s rooted in the heritage that built this country, and yet we’re now told we must apologise for having a heritage at all.

Apparently, even acknowledging a shared tradition is an act of cultural imperialism. Only in Australia could celebrating the holiday that half the world is actively celebrating be considered controversial.

The truth is that Christmas isn’t under threat because it’s exclusive. It’s under threat because it’s inclusive, too inclusive. It’s for everyone.

You don’t even have to be Christian to enjoy presents, ham, lamb, backyard cricket, and pretending you like relatives you only see once a year.

Christmas is one of the few things that still belongs to the whole country.

And that’s precisely why it must be dismantled by the people whose favourite pastime is ruining anything universally enjoyed.

So no, we shouldn’t tolerate the creeping, cowardly erosion of Christmas.

Not because everyone has to be a Christian but because everyone should be able to acknowledge reality.

This is Australia. December 25 is Christmas Day. It marks the birth of Jesus Christ whose life, teachings, and sacrifice laid the foundations of Western civilisation as it exists today.

From our understanding of human dignity to the idea that all people are equal before the law, from the concept of charity to the belief that power must be restrained by moral limits, the West is built on Christian soil. Our legal systems grew out of Christian moral reasoning. Our parliaments emerged from the belief that authority is accountable to something higher than the state. Our hospitals, universities, charities, and systems of care were born not out of bureaucracy, but out of the Christian command to love your neighbour.

Even the freedoms we now take for granted, freedom of conscience, freedom of speech, the presumption of innocence, the value placed on forgiveness and mercy, are Christian inheritances, whether modern Australians acknowledge them or not.

We did not arrive at these principles by accident. They did not fall from the sky, nor were they delivered by activists or HR departments. They came from a civilisation shaped by the radical idea that every human life has value because it is made in the image of God.

That is what Christmas represents. And that is why it matters.

And if someone insists on replacing “Merry Christmas” with “Happy Holidays”, they deserve a one way ticket out of here.

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