Whether you shed a patriotic tear whenever you are required to sing it at sporting matches or you think any song that uses the word “girt” should maybe be rethought, surely we can all agree that the national anthem is not a banger. It’s not a song you would chuck on because you felt like listening to it. You know what is a banger? ‘Hey Ya‘.
I don’t have the stats to back it up, but I’d be willing to be that Outkast‘s surprisingly upbeat rumination on the transitory nature of love is somewhere up around Daryl Braithwaite‘s ‘The Horses‘ in the most played karaoke songs in Australia. People bloody love that song, and for good reason: it rules.
With that in mind, some of our nation’s most brilliant minds* put together a petition to have our national anthem updated to the seminal 2003 hit. Sure, it might not have anything to do with Australia, but nearly everyone knows the lyrics already, which is a pretty good start.
As genius as that idea was, it has been cruelly shut down by our heartless and unfeeling Prime Minister, who, for some reason, didn’t see it as an appropriate replacement to what we’ve got now:
“Thank you for your letter dated 20 March 2017 regarding petition EN0094, which requests that the Australian Governmentchange the Australian National Anthem to the 2003 song ‘Hey Ya‘ by Outkast.“The words and tune of the Australian National Anthem were adopted only after exhaustive surveys of national opinion,starting in the 1970s, and were proclaimed by the Governor-General of the Commonwealth of Australia on 19 April 1984.“The Australian National Anthem is widely accepted and popularly supported by a majority of Australians. The AustralianGovernment has no plans to change the Anthem.“Thank you for bringing this petition to my attention. I appreciate the important work of the Standing Committee onPetitions in putting community concerns before the Parliament.”
We were absolutely robbed.
Source: Hansard.
Photo: Vevo.
