Warped Australia Day ban will promote hatred, by Andrew Bolt.

YARRA council has showed how easy it is to ban Australia Day and create exactly the racial division our mad Left claims to be fighting. This Greens-led council voted unanimously on Tuesday to scrap January 26 as Australia Day and replace the usual citizenship celebrations with an Aboriginal smoking ceremony. …

First, being of the bullying Left, it brazenly trampled over the wishes of the vast majority of Australians.

Even a McNair poll commissioned by the Left-leaning Guardian Australia last January found only 15 per cent of Australians wanted Australia Day shifted from January 26, the date the First Fleet arrived in 1788. Even 46 per cent per cent of Aboriginal Australians didn’t want it moved or didn’t care, despite years of nagging by activists and the ABC that January 26 marked “invasion day”.

So how did Yarra council’s hipster revolutionaries get around that embarrassment?

Easy done! It tricked up its own data. First, it stacked a survey of Aborigines. It held an online poll of members of activist organisations or “individual community members with whom council officers have existing relationships”.

Since the council is run by four Greens, two Labor members, two independents and a Socialist Alliance extremist, you can guess which Aboriginal “community members” the council has “relationships” with. Many, it turned out, did not even live in Yarra. Yet despite this shameless manipulation, the council still got only 88 responses from Aborigines around the state and only 72 wanted Australia Day moved.

Second, the council held a street survey, but this, too, was dodgy.

Which street did its pollsters go to? Who did they choose to approach? How were people badgered? And why did it poll only 281 of its 80,000 residents?

Despite all that, fewer than half — 45.9 per cent — said they’d back a campaign to have the date of Australia Day changed.

And on those rubbish polls, the council has now scrapped our national day? Here’s more proof the Left really is the home of bullies and authoritarians.