The decision of the Government of Australia, through its Permanent Representative to UNESCO, not to vote in favour of the Proposal for the Recognition of the International Day of the Greek Language, every year on 9 February, the day of the death of our National Poet Dionysios Solomos, at UNESCO (14 April 2024), is a historic HYBRIS to our ancestral and homeland Greece.
Moreover, it is a humiliation and trivialises the only language in the world, Greek, with a living duration of 3,500 years. The Proposal was ultimately voted in favour by the UNESCO Executive members countries, with the exception of the Australians, after our Australian Ambassador preferred to abstain from the vote.
Now, in retrospect and due to the election campaign and the uproar caused to the Greek Diaspora by the Formal Complaint, our Prime Minister and the Minister of Foreign Affairs enthusiastically declare that they will celebrate February 9, 2026, together with the Hellenism of Australia, congratulate them on the vote in favour and declare the amicable relations between the peoples of Greece and Australia.
However, the government authorities avoid stating that the initial approach to vote in favour of the Proposal for the Recognition of the Greek Language had begun in Australia by the Australian Institute of Macedonian Studies and the Australian Institute of Hellenic Research in May 2024 and dozens of consultations with academics, politicians, Ministers and Church leaders followed. Also, the Permanent Representative of Greece to UNESCO, Georgios Koumoutsakos, had approached his colleague, the Australian Ambassador in Paris, many months earlier and was trying to change her refusal to vote in favour of the Greek proposal, in vain.
This decision of the Australian Government from June 2024 (according to the letters we have from our own Foreign Minister, Penny Wong, who in the letters drafted by her assistant advisers, systematically and unswervingly) has been negative. The Australian Government has been refusing to support the Greek proposal for ten months. This negative predisposition and decision of the Australian political and diplomatic leadership offends and denigrates the 500,000 Australian citizens of Greek origin, whose Greek language is a key component of their cultural identity and betrays the feelings of friendship that distinguish the peoples of Greece and Australia.
I would like to remind that the Executive Council of UNESCO points out that the Greek language is the linguistic cradle of the basic concepts of world culture, science and philosophy. UNESCO also emphasises that the Greek language holds, according to historical and objective criteria, a special place among the languages of the world.
The Executive Board of UNESCO also emphasises that historically the Greek language occupies a key position in the intellectual, linguistic expression and formulation of fundamental concepts and words of the European and wider intellectuals, which are declared, perceived or reduced to words-concepts of the Greek language.
All those virtue and exclusive characteristics of the Greek language were not enough to influence the Australian decision in the affirmative. The Australian Ambassador to UNESCO and the leadership of Australian diplomacy preferred to humble the Greek language and Greeks and Australians who are linked by origin/ancestry or culture to Greece and the Greeks, preferring that history should condemn them forever as deniers and critics of the language of Homer and the Gospels. The responsibility for the humiliation of our language lies with the Government of Australia. It was heard by party organs of the Labor Party and the Australian Foreign Ministry, that the government is supposedly acting as Caretaker Government and therefore could not take a position, it is ridiculous, provocative and unsubstantiated.
Since last June, our letters have been on the offices of both the Prime Minister and the Minister of Foreign Affairs, and we already had their negative response in July 2024, dressed in a decent style, claiming that “the Greek language is important, and Greeks should be proud to speak it”. But so far as for the request to vote in favour of the Proposal, they did not respond. They did not enter into the difficulty of expressing neither affirmation nor denial, the path of affirmative denial known to diplomats “I do not anticipate, and I do not exclude“!!
And how will the Greek pioneer immigrants, the settlers who made Australia economically and culturally stand out and their children, and how will their grandchildren and the unborn feel? And how will they wash away the shame they felt and feel when the country in which hundreds of thousands of Australians of Greek origin vote, stand humiliated by those we elect. We give them the power they have, we put them in positions of dignity and power to protect our culture, faith, customs and core values; we elected them Prime Minister and Minister of Foreign Affairs; the Australian Ambassador to UNESCO in Paris is paid with our taxes. So instead of them being held responsible and accountable for their actions and decisions, we will beg for their forgiveness in order to extract from those who were elected by us to serve us a ridiculous excuse, a political stunt about a supposedly caretaker government, a few days before the elections on May 3, which will determine their re-election.
The truth is one, as Aristotle said, and it does not allow for interpretations and diplomatic acrobatics. The Australian Government, from June 2024 until April 14, 2025, constantly humiliated the Greek language, humbled the language of Sophocles, the language of Pericles and Alexander the Great. They degraded our language, from which their own mother tongue language is constantly being enriched, because their negative decision to support the discrimination of the Greek language was not made out of ignorance, nor by electoral restrictions, and it is a shame to invoke them.
For a year now, Mr Koumoutsakos, our Ambassador to UNESCO and academics and intellectuals in Australia, Greece and France have been trying to convince the Australian Ambassador and her head of authority, the Australian Government, Ms Wong and our Prime Minister, in vain. The Archbishop of the Anglican Church, His Eminence Dr. Philip Freier and with him Australian Ministers of State, intellectuals, university professors sent letters of support for the Greek language to the Australian Government, in vain. The government was under siege, a year before the elections, and they consciously decided to humble us, humiliating the language of our ancestors, our mother tongue.
*Professor Anastasios M. Tamis taught at Universities in Australia and abroad, was the creator and founding director of the Dardalis Archives of the Hellenic Diaspora and is currently the President of the Australian Institute of Macedonian Studies (AIMS).
