Scott Morrison, and a vow never to vow with the avowals of Scott Morrison ...

(Above: what've you got, and never mind the blue screen, Marlon Brando in The Wild One).

Female dancer: Hey, Johnny, What are you rebelling against?

Brando: What've you got?

Well the good news is that this week we've got Scott Morrison, prattling on in the usual way with It's time we took our own pledge of allegiance.

On Australia Day 1999 the Coalition Government introduced the reaffirmation ceremony to mark 50 years of Australian Citizenship. It’s a pretty simple idea where natural born Australians join with those who are taking up citizenship for the first time to recite the pledge together:

“As an Australian citizen, I affirm my loyalty to Australia and its people, whose democratic beliefs I share, whose rights and liberties I respect, and whose laws I uphold and obey.”

What, you mean like those dodos who can't remember their original marriage vows, and so feel the need to bolster the wedding industry by trotting off for a vow renewal ceremony? Often Larry David style, after an affair or a break down in marital proceedings?

But isn't it one of the chief pleasures of a democracy that you don't have to learn to act like a parrot and recite simple minded vows, and join in a conga line of suckholes listening to politicians prattling on about community? Even if you're expressions of defiance might get you caught up in all kinds of clever new acts designed to strip away freedoms and rights - roll on the censoring of the intertubes.

Take it away Marlon:

What do you hicks do around here for kicks?"
- "The roses grow. People get married. Crazy as anyplace else."
- "What about TV? Do ya like TV?"
- "Oh, pictures! No, no pictures. Everything these days is pictures. Pictures and a lot of noise. Nobody even knows how to talk. Just grunt at each other."

Well surely Scott Morrison knows how to grunt.

Because deep down you know that when you scratch this kind of political talk, there'll be some kind of perverse pay off. And here it comes:

Last year I trekked Kokoda with a team of young people form the Shire and Bankstown with my friend and parliamentary colleague, Labor MP Jason Clare. What struck me most during those six and a half days of pain, was that we all shared one thing. The diggers died and sacrificed themselves for all of us – none more than the other.

They had no idea about who would be living in Australia in sixty years time. They died to defend Australia’s freedom and values and create a future for our country. A future where today 45% of Australians have been born overseas or at least one of their parents were. We are all part of this future they made possible and we had joined together to honour those that had bequeathed it to us.

Well actually unless you happen to be indigenous and your parents were born overseas some forty thousand years ago, you can pretty well say with some certainty that in the past two hundred years a lot of Australians were born overseas, or at least one of their parents or grandparents or great grandparents were. Mine were born in Ireland, Germany and England. So what's the point?

Well the point to that kind of trolling came in the comments:

I remember my grandfather saying before he died that if he had known what type of country he was defending he would have went home…It destroyed him every Anzac day. Lost good mates and for what he would say. I have been told that in the past by a few other veterans as they shake there heads in disgust. They went to war not fighting for what we are now! They were fighting to keep what we had then.

Make of that as you will but I wonder If I would go to war to defend what we have got now? I also wonder as I look around the ranks just how many new Australians I would be prepared to go to war with? A piece of paper and a nice warm and fuzzy speech doesn’t mean automatic loyalty to this country. Sorry but there is an “us and them”!

Because after all, if you think back to the Australia that kicked the Chinese out of the goldfields, and asserted a white Australia policy, and treasured the idea of a magazine that had as its masthead slogan "Australia for the White Man", you'd be wise enough to know that blathering on about the motivations of Australia and Australians at the time of the two world wars in the way that Morrison does, is, at the least, anachronistic thinking.

Even Tony Abbott in his speech on immigration Address to the Australia Day Council, got that bit right:

Except for the half million or so who identify as Aboriginal, every other Australian is an immigrant or the descendant of immigrants since 1788. Unlike any other, we are a nation of relatively recent immigrants. New Zealand has a proportionately larger indigenous population and North America has been settled for almost two centuries longer. This means, of course, that the immigrant who feels like a stranger in our midst is really at the heart of the Australian story.

And then there comes the presumption that the mainstream of Australia must be joined, rather than the migrant experience woven into the weft and the warp:

I know that many Australians are concerned that there is still a long way to go before all sub-groups within our broader Australian community are flowing effortlessly in the mainstream of Australian society. I agree that this should be the goal. The question is, are we helping or hindering this goal?

You mean everybody should learn the joys of beer, chops and barbecues? But I dance everyday I don't have to eat three vegies and meat, and can instead savour Gỏi cuốn or curry or a tandoor chicken or a nice marinara or ... stop me, I'll start to drool before getting to half the ways.

I know it's trivial, but when you multiply it by the things that matter, the joy of a world where there are things other than narrow nationalism or Wake in Fright parochialism at work is truly pleasurable to behold.

Even Tony Abbott got that bit right, and it seems multi-culturalism is now back on the agenda and all the go:

Australia makes very few demands of its immigrants. There is no ideal of Australian-ness to which they are expected to conform. There is no expectation that migrants will lose their affection for their country of birth. The policy of multiculturalism expressed our willingness to let them assimilate in their own way and at their own pace because of our confidence in the gravitational pull of the Australian way of life.

No ideal of Australian-ness to which they are expected to conform? Cop that Scott Morrison.

Or did Abbott get it right?

Even so, the inescapable minimum that we insist upon is obedience to the law.

Ah yes, those pesky migrants, always breaking the law, unlike the currency lads and lasses, who are so law abiding, I goggle at their domesticity.

A corollary of our non-discriminatory immigration programme is our requirement that Australians should treat other Australians with respect even where they disagree with them. It would help to bolster public support for immigration and acceptance of social diversity if more minority leaders were as ready to show to mainstream Australian values the respect they demand for their own.

Funny that. The last time I was threatened by assault it was by a yobbo Australian driving a van. So it goes. But as with the master, so it goes with the parrot, so back to Scott Morrison struggling to cope with the notion of diversity:

In the past we called this assimilation. Today, people get offended by this phrase, just as many dislike the word multiculturalism. These language anxieties are the product of too many politically charged and correct conversations. For me, I believe these words have the same objective.

You don’t have to deny your heritage to embrace your Australian future. But you cannot seek to create an Australia for yourself that simply mirrors what you left behind – isolated from the rest of our great community. Our shared values, culture and laws define what it is to be Australian, and that is what brings us together.

You mean I should embrace Christianity and Islam? In what parallel universe? You mean I should think all's hunky dory and locked down in our great community with our shared values and culture and laws, and I should give up on a secular republic where both sides of politics stop funding loony fundamentalist religious schools?

Live and let live will do me, provided it includes stopping politicians hectoring me about the meaning and obligations of citizenship. But Morrison can't help himself and his pieties.

As Australians, we cannot allow the ‘us and them’ mentality to dominate our thinking. There is no ‘us and them’ if we are truly serious about what Australian citizenship really means.

Australia is an inclusive notion. We are not a combination of unrelated sub-communities who all happen to live on the same big island. We are a great Australian community that shares values, obligations and responsibilities to make what we leave behind, even better than what we inherited, whether by birth or choice.

So this year on Australia Day why not renew your vows. Go to the website @ http://www.australianaffirmation.org.au to learn more about it. It’s probably too late to get involved in any formal ceremony. So why not just do it around your BBQ with your family and your mates as an act of thanksgiving for the carcinogenic bounty you are about to receive.

Around the bloody barbecue as an act of thanksgiving for carcinogenic bounty? I presume that passes for laconic political humour, but what if I wanted to have a yum cha, or perhaps 'roo with a nice schezuan sauce? What if people wanted to shove the carcinogenic bounty where the sun don't shine and have a nice bottle of red?

But by then I'd realised, in that quintessential way that only people like Scott Morrison can manage, he was writing not to inspire consensus in diversity, but simply to provoke. In much the same way as Abbott in his speech attempted to sound reasonable, while at the same time recycling John Howard and dog whistling to his constituency and Australians being able to say who'd come here and when and how many and in what order and while stating serial number and rank. While I wonder how the blacks missed out on that simple rhetorical device when the British first landed here.

And at that point the thought of renewing my vows to Australia struck me with the force of a rising gorge. Renew my vows to sharing a life with Scott Morrison?

I'd rather be a rebel, and don't tell me to love it or leave it. Because then I'll be telling you that if you don't like diversity, how about you bugger off from whence your great grandparents came? And so it goes, another cacophonous summer where the loons make less and less sense, but the squawking of pieties grows louder by the day.

Kathie: Where are you going when you leave here? Don't you know?
Johnny: (scoffing) Oh man, we just gonna go.
Kathie: Just trying to make conversation. It means nothing to me.
Johnny: Well, on the weekends, we go out and have a ball.
Kathie: And what do you do? I mean, do you just ride around? Or do you go on some sort of a picnic or something?
Johnny: A picnic? Man, you are too square. I'll have to straighten you out. Now, listen, you don't go any one special place. That's cornball style. You just go. (He snaps his fingers.) A bunch gets together after all week it builds up, you just...the idea is to have a ball. Now if you gonna stay cool, you got to wail. You got to put somethin' down. You got to make some jive. Don't you know what I'm talkin' about?

Actually Marlon, I don't think Scott Morrison would have a clue. And he probably doesn't like The Crystals either:

He's a rebel and he'll never ever be any good
He's a rebel and he'll never ever be understood
And just because he doesn't do what everybody else does
That's no reason why I can't give him all my love
He is always good to me, always treats me tenderly
'Cause he's not a rebel, no no no
He's not a rebel, no no no, to me

He's a rebel and he'll never ever be any good
He's a rebel and he'll never ever be understood
And just because he doesn't do what everybody else does
That's no reason why I can't give him all my love
He is always good to me, always treats me tenderly
'Cause he's not a rebel, no no no
He's not a rebel, no no no, to me