Symbol of the People - What Does a Flag Represent and Should Citizens Burn Their Flag in Protest?

Board/Bored Monkey
Reflection Large Sticker by TET.
Available on Redbubble.

Recent reports in the Australian media, of university students creating flag burning kits to sell as a way of protesting government policy, have sparked the debate about whether flag burning should be a criminal offense, and highlighted people's misguided understanding of what the Australian Flag represents.

First and foremost, our flag is not a symbol of a specific government. It represents us. No matter how far we travel an Aussie flag helps connect us to other Aussies abroad and it reminds us of home. It is a symbol of the people.

Some say that our flag represents freedom. Quite often people who say this will attempt to deny you of your freedom to burn the flag.

Australia prides itself on being a tolerant society. It is our ability to tolerate criticism without resorting to violent retaliation that helps makes us strong. It's one of the things that hold us together as a community. I don't want to be represented by violent individuals that can't handle criticism. I can't support violence even when I agree with the perpetrators point of view.

I certainly don't encourage flag burning - especially not as a way of protesting government policy. It's misguided and divides people who are proud of their country. At the same time I can't support making flag burning a criminal offense. If our flag does represent freedom then not being able to burn it is as 'un-Australian' as you can get.

I saw on the news that the university students were banned from selling their kits by the university administration. I also saw images of so called 'patriots', right in the faces of the students, verbally bashing them about how many people died under our flag so they could have the 'freedom' they enjoy. Two totally disappointing responses.

Impressive though, was the response of some Liberal party student representatives, who took it upon themselves to sell water to people who may need it to extinguish potentially dangerous burning flags. Nice to see a sense of humor. How very Australian is that.

Comments

Movie Opinion: The Michael Keaton Batman Trilogy - Batman (1989), Batman Returns (1992), The Flash (2023)

The Michael Keaton Batman Trilogy on DVD. Despite its questionable CGI, troubled star, and the turmoil surrounding the DCEU's future when it was released, 2023's, The Flash does give us a new, and probably final, installment in Michael Keaton's run as Bruce Wayne/Batman. With that in mind, this holiday season, I had a real itch to spend a day binge watching what is now The Michael Keaton, Batman Trilogy . To give you some context, I own every Batman movie (except Pattinson's The Batman ) on DVD, and every DCEU movie up to The Flash. The ones I don't own are only missing because I haven't gotten around to buying them, and they're likely still available on a streaming service I'm subscribed to. I've had Keaton's first two Batman movies in my collection for the best part of two decades but I can count on one hand how many times I've watched each. The last time was more than a decade ago. Before I watched them recently, if you'd have asked...

New Cat Art Collaboration: TET's Cats Paintings and OpenArt AI Model Workspace (Photobooth)

TET's Cats AI generated art trained on my own art style. Way back in the early 2000's I started painting stylized cat artworks to illustrate some cat themed poems I'd written, that I exhibited and sold online in an exhibition titled 'Sleeping Cats' in 2004. You can see all these early works in my Flickr Album . Many are also available to buy as prints in my RedBubble Store . Leading on from that I began selling my paintings on ebay where the cat themed works were almost guaranteed to sell over any other subject I painted. As a result I became some what known for my cat art to the point where people would commission me to create images of their own pet cats in my cartoony style. Flash forward a decade (almost two at this point) and I haven't painted any cat themed art in years. To be honest I haven't done any traditional painting at all in years. In the last couple of years AI image generators have really caught my attention. Specifically that they are able t...

Tesla Unveils Optimus Robot Prototype and Second Generation Prototype - Movie, iRobot, May Be a Documentary?

Tesla Optimus Prototype One, Development Platform. September 30th finally rolled around along with Tesla A.I. day and the unveiling of not one but two Tesla Optimus Robot prototypes. Which was quite a bonus since we hadn't heard anything much about these robots when I wrote about them in July of 2022. Before revealing the first prototype, Tesla CEO, Elon Musk, made a point of managing everyone's expectations, just in case anyone was thinking they were about to see anything close to the actual human concept 'robot' we saw last year. I honestly don't think anyone was expecting that. Prototype One - Development Platform The prototype that walked out on stage, for the very first time without ever being tethered to anything (apparently), was still incredibly impressive despite not being streamlined and highly refined in its capability. It walked quite well - eerily similar to the first generation robots in the 2004, Will Smith movie, iRobot , and even did a bit of a dan...

"Ya Mum Reads it..."

You'l find my own Photography in this blog too. Quite a while back I did a survey that tells you what kind of audience credibility your blog has. I'm not sure what the score was but I do remember the commentary which boiled down to "Your mother reads your blog regularly but you probably don't have much wider appeal". Fuck you survey! (Hi Mum, sorry for cursing! I do appreciate you reading, really I do!) I don't know how many regular readers I have, if any, but I do know, on average this blog receives more than 4000 page hits per month, much of it coming from search engines like Google. Perhaps of some interest is my new current top search entry point of all time, people looking for Bert and Ernie, who I wrote some commentary about when it was officially announced that the Sesame Street Characters were not gay . Which is quite a departure from Krippin Virus from a few years back when the movie I am Legend came out. The thing about this blog is t...

The World Economic Forum, Globalization, Bringing People Together - TET Rambling on World Issues

Julie Bishop, Member of Parliament of Australia during the Session "Opening Plenary: Globalization 4.0" at the World Economic Forum, Annual Meeting of the Global Future Councils 2018. Copyright by World Economic Forum / Benedikt von Loebell Did you know that you can join The World Economic Forum ? True. You don't have to be a billionaire, CEO of a corporation, or even a high level member of your government. You can sign up for free on the WEF website and be kept up to date with what this mega evil, mustache twirling, elite organization is doing. If you want to keep an even closer eye, and maybe even have some input into what the WEF is doing in your part of the world, they have some very affordable paid subscriptions (which you can even trial, free for 30 days - imagine... a whole month free of keeping your beady little eye on this very shady organization that wants to control what toilet paper you buy... probably? #notsponsored). While much of the high level partner/mem...

Movie Review: Project Hail Mary (2026) No Spoilers

T his wasn't a movie I particularly wanted to see even though it's right in my wheelhouse, realistic Sci-fi. However, after Project Hail Mary did so well in theatres it became a movie I wanted to check out once it reached streaming. In this case I watched it on Amazon Prime Video. It wasn't really on my radar because, on the surface, it's not anything I haven't seen before, even quite recently. Lone astronaut goes on some kind of mission, mission fails, astronaut tries to salvage the mission and somehow finds a way home. However, in my opinion, what makes this film different is in the detail. There are a lot of often seen tropes here presented in new ways, that may capture your imagination. The movie opens with science teacher, Ryland Grace (Ryan Gosling), waking up from deep sleep on a spaceship, far from Earth, with no memory of why he is there. Presumably a side effect of basically being put in storage while the spaceship travels across vast distances. From the...

The Lego Man - He's got all that!

Who would have thought that owning one of the worlds largest, private Lego collections could take you so far. Tom Lucieer of Angaston, South Australia, not only has met the Queen (of England) but is a frequent guest of her majesty and family when they are in Australia. He's also met Prince Charles, Lady Diana and Camila Parker-Bowles. Not only that, he grew up with TV Vet, Dr Harry, and is a friend of the Irwin family (yes, that's Steve Irwin's family). Tom will happily tell you all this as part of the guided tour of his collection, which, aside from Lego, includes much railway memorabilia and colourful anecdotes about days gone by, his achievements and more. Frequently he will finish each particular monologue with the phrase, "Have you got that?", just to check that he hasn't confused you because, as he points out, his display and the stories behind it are a lot to take in at once. In the photo you can see Tom holding a special award, which I think is for bei...

TET.Life (The Extraordinary Tourist Life)

Search This Blog