Mocking a prime minister for wishing Chinese Australians a happy new year says less about foreign policy than about how national identity is being weaponised in domestic politics.

When Sky News again mocked Prime Minister Anthony Albanese for posting a Chinese New Year greeting, the segment carried the gravity usually reserved for interest rates or submarine contracts.

Why, the host wondered, was the PM wishing people a happy Chinese New Year while apparently neglecting Lent and Australia Day?

“The Australian PM wishing everyone a happy Chinese New Year,” he said. “I can’t wait until 25 April when Xi Jinping posts videos celebrating Anzac Day.”

And, for strategic seasoning, he added that perhaps the PM could update us on the Port of Darwin while he was at it.

What’s next? Should festive greetings now be added to the list of strategic signals, with every ‘Xin Nian Kuai Le’ treated as though it carried geopolitical intent?

The simple fact is Chinese communities exist in Australia, and they celebrate Chinese New Year.

The greeting, awkwardly for the narrative, was directed to the Chinese community here in Australia, to people living in suburbs like Box Hill, Burwood and Sunnybank – people who run businesses, raise families, vote, pay taxes and complain about mortgage rates with the same enthusiasm as everyone else.

But apparently, to some people, celebrating this means you do not love Australia enough.

The fact is that Australian politicians have been saying “Happy Chinese New Year” for decades without the republic collapsing.

In February 2001, Conservative media’s favourite politician, then PM John Howard attended a Chinese New Year banquet in Sydney. He praised Chinese Australians as “a precious and treasured part of our community” and wished them “a very happy Chinese New Year” on behalf of his government.

Two decades later, Scott Morrison and Alex Hawke used almost identical language in a Chinese-language media briefing during Chinese New Year. Hawke cheerfully opened with “Happy Chinese New Year and Kung Hai Fat Choi” (“Wish you rich” in Cantonese) Morrison followed with “Xin Nian Kuai Le”.

The Commonwealth did not collapse. The constitution survived. Markets opened the next morning. No one suggested he had drifted into the orbit of Beijing. The Port of Darwin remained undramatically in place. No Chinese leader issued an ANZAC Day video in response.

But if we watch that Sky News video again, one thing becomes clearer. The segment is less about China itself than about Labor’s positioning on Australia Day and national identity. Chinese New Year is not the central argument. It is the exhibit. The prop rolled onto the stage to prove a broader thesis about “imported rituals” and a supposedly embarrassed political class.

And that is precisely where the problem lies.

Chinese Australians are not the formal target of the critique. But they are being used as the vehicle through which that critique is delivered. Their traditions become rhetorical evidence in a domestic culture-war argument that has very little to do with them.

When Chinese New Year is framed as an “imported ritual” or a “borrowed calendar,” the implication quietly shifts. It is no longer simply about Labor’s messaging. It becomes a hierarchy of culture: some traditions are treated as part of Australia’s natural inheritance, while others – even after generations of practice on Australian soil – remain permanently foreign, permanently provisional, permanently on loan from somewhere else.

The people celebrating them may be citizens, taxpayers, neighbours and colleagues. But their cultural expressions are recast by Sky News as external to the national core. Decorative, perhaps welcome when needed, but never quite foundational.

That is an extraordinarily narrow way to imagine a country like Australia.

We are a confident multicultural country, we don’t panic when our leaders wish one of our largest multicultural communities a happy traditional holiday.

And Chinese New Year is not a celebration of foreign policy. It is a celebration of values that Australians claim to admire: hard work, family cohesion, respect for elders, sense of community, and love for a good, hearty meal. These are not alien concepts parachuted into Australian life. They are virtues routinely praised in our own political speeches, school mottos and civic ceremonies.

And that’s why Chinese New Year is celebrated by many, regardless of their background, faith or politics in Australian suburbs, by Australian families, alongside barbecues, school terms and mortgage repayments.

Wishing that community a happy Chinese New Year is therefore not a concession but a sign of ease. It signals that their traditions sit comfortably within the national story, without requiring geopolitical footnotes or loyalty disclaimers.

Strip away the drama and what remains is a rather familiar scent: insecurity.

It would be naive to ignore the commercial logic as well. To some media outfits, lecturing the nation on Australian values drives traffic, comments and engagement, especially among audiences primed to hear “Chinese” as a geopolitical alarm bell. The formula is simple: provoke, polarise, monetise.

The social cost is paid elsewhere – by communities that did nothing wrong except exist visibly and celebrate proudly. Each repetition leaves a mark. Over time, those marks tell a generation of Chinese Australians that their belonging remains conditional.

Luckily, most Australians – and most of our media – understand that the Chinese community is not an appendix to the national story, to be torn out whenever geopolitics becomes fashionable. It is one of its chapters, written over decades of migration, contribution and belonging.

If a broadcaster wishes to debate Australia Day, national identity or Labor’s political messaging, do that directly, like a true Aussie. But stop using Chinese Australians as vehicles in that argument, and stop implying that traditions long rooted here remain somehow external to the country they call home.