It is a public holiday in Australia today celebrating our national day – the day that the colonial powers of Britain first decided to set us up as a penal colony because they had run out of prison space in the old country due to the massive incarceration rates following the enclosures. The impoverished small scale farmers who relied on the open ‘commons’ to survive were dispossessed by the privatisation of the communal lands. They were then criminalised as a result of their poverty and starvation and shipped off to what is now Australia. A sorry start to white settlement. However, the country was settled at least 30 thousand years prior to white settlement by the first nation peoples. They call today ‘invasion day’ as do the whites who are sympathetic to their oppression (such as me). Today is thus a highly conflicted one – big street marches recognising the invasion, competing with traditional white Australia Day events, and, then, being challenged more recently by the so-called March for Australia movement rallies which are a front for neo-nazis who hate immigration and most nearly everything else. The call to abandon today as our national day and instead shift it to a date that would not cause the first nations people such angst falls on deaf ears. Anyway, today I am not writing any more but am promoting a recent discussion I had with the RadioMMT program on Melbourne’s community radio station 3CR. I will be back on Thursday with some analysis of the upcoming Japanese national election, which is providing lots of opportunities for education.