The loss leader none of us needs

Not Peter Dutton apparently.

And he will never darken the doorstep of Woolworths ever again. Management there is probably pleased. No-one wants a downer in dishwash.

The story so far? The Leader of the Opposition Peter Dutton is incensed Woolworths is not selling Australia Day crap.

You know, the tacky plastic flags, made anywhere but here.

The plastic yellow and green bunting, made anywhere but here.

The plastic beer coolers with G'Day Mate emblazoned, using insulation material made anywhere but here.

Apparently, he's all up for pointless landfill to further bolster the sheer sham of celebrating our national day.

He thinks Woolworths is woke, pandering to Blackfellas who call January 26 Invasion Day.

Now, let me get this straight in my own mind.

The man who leads the party which adores capitalism is unhappy that a company has made a decision it won't sell products because those products don't sell.

I mean, I get that sometimes it's useful to have loss leaders, products sold at a loss to attract consumers.

In fact, you could call Dutton a Loss Leader. I reckon that suits him.

And guess what? Now Woollies plans to fly the Aboriginal flag at some of its key stores. Jokes on LL.

What he sells is cheap and nasty division and it's clear from the referendum result that he could make a living selling blunt steak knives if he wanted. Terrible products leading to worse outcomes.

That's not what most of us want.

Can I tell you a secret?

Most of us only love Australia Day because it is a day off. It is particularly lovable when, as it is this year, it falls on a Friday or Monday because then we get a long weekend.

Various think tanks publish various iterations of questionable research which say what the tankers want it to say. Yay! Or Nay!

We don't think of Australia Day as a day to celebrate colonisation. We think of it as a day to celebrate freedom from routines (and yes, health workers, we salute you and acknowledge you don't get days off when the rest of us do).

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people mourn on that day. And many of us now know exactly how Indigenous people feel about Australia Day - and indeed, Australia in its current form.

We had months-long tutelage in the catastrophes that befall people born black in this country but we still ignored that evidence and the majority of us voted No in the referendum.

I will be honest with you. I didn't always get that Australia Day wasn't a great day to be celebrating this country.

As I've written before, my parents were just so pleased to be accepted into a country where Jews weren't shot on sight or gassed in secret. Australia Day was a day to express gratitude and joy at just being here.

I'd argue every day felt like Australia Day to them.

It was on a holiday with friends, an anthropologist and a lawyer, back in the mid-eighties that I learned more about black history than I ever had in my entire life and I'm grateful to the school system that my kids, all in their thirties, have a much better understanding than I did at their age.

It took me a long time to think about how we might better commemorate Australia than by celebrating its invasion. Australia Day should be a day of atonement, not a day of drunken revelry, a day to rethink how we are as a nation.

As I wrote in these pages six years ago, can't we agree that a day when a genocide began is not a day to celebrate? Can't we ignore those who deny genocide took place?

There is no longer any debate about the mass killings of Indigenous Australians.

Just ask veteran author David Marr. In his latest book Killing for Country: A family story Marr finds a "professional" murderer of Aboriginal people in his own family.

Or ask Tamworth Regional Council's Marc Sutherland. I read this week in the Northern Daily Leader that Sutherland "will abstain from participating in Tamworth's Australia Day celebrations partly out of respect for his 'old grandfather' [Peter James Cutmore], the sole survivor of one of the region's most infamous massacres".

Like all history, written through the lens of the victor, the number of murdered Gomeroi people is contested - somewhere between 40 to 300 killed during a three-week "expedition" from present-day Manilla up to Waterloo Creek.

How and why are we celebrating this? Want a party? Find another day to do it on. I'd suggest January 1 but we already have a day off then. Or if we want to keep it on January 26, change it up. And keep Peter Dutton's pontificating far far away.

None of us needs more instruction from politicians about January 26. We don't need Peter Dutton lecturing us on capitalism, woke or otherwise.

In fact, politicians instructing us on how we might be better Australians is the last thing we need because the majority of them have no clue.

Instead, in the search for the niche which will deliver them power, they try to exploit our anxieties and our differences, instead of celebrating what we have in common, instead of mending our rent fabric, they rip us further apart.

Dutton's calling for a boycott of Woolworths. How utterly ridiculous. Companies make a decision based on their understanding of consumers.

That particular supermarket chain recognised that no-one wants cheap and tawdry tchotchkes to celebrate a day that has no innate meaning, just the one which hurts Aboriginal people.

I'm no fan of supermarkets but seriously, in this instance, I'm team Woollies.