We need more than tinkering with our national anthem

Our PM’s call for Australians to embrace the change of a word to our national anthem from ‘young’ to ‘one’ is sensible. But it is hardly inspiring, nor does it give us a visionary anthem.

The words ‘wealth for toil’ is another example of how irrelevant our anthem is. This phrase belongs in a bygone period. Ask any farmer today if their ‘wealth’ from this year’s crop was due to ‘toil’ and you would be told it had much more to do with technology, science and marketing. China for example has already abandoned ‘wealth for toil’ as its goal, preferring to work ‘smart’.

What Australia needs now is not simple tinkering with one word of our anthem, but rather a new anthem; one that inspires us. And a PM who also has the courage to ask us to join with him in clearly defining our place in Asia, by being a truly independent nation, with its own identity (and flag) and the confidence in who we really are; a small but a highly advanced, friendly, smart and Asia-savvy nation whose people are all, proudly Australian.