Last week, Steyn referred to former Australian PM John Howard’s desire to teach his country’s past as part of a “heroic national narrative.” Well, it turns out the lefties now in power Down Under don’t really care whether newcomers learn that past at all:

Australia is to modify a test for prospective new citizens to exclude questions on history and culture, and specifically cricket legend Sir Donald Bradman, a government minister said on Saturday.
Immigration Minister Chris Evans said that following a review by seven eminent Australians, the Labor government had decided to modify the test, saying it should not be a “general knowledge quiz.”
The test was introduced under conservative former prime minister John Howard, and originally included a controversial section on Australian history and culture.
This has now been relegated to a non-testable section of a book for prospective citizens, Evans said in a statement.
Evans said the focus of the new test would be on a pledge of commitment that new citizens are required to make.
“The pledge is about our democratic beliefs, our laws and the rights, responsibilities and privileges of Australian citizenship,” Evans said.

I’ve never heard of this cricket guy, Bradman, but then I’m not asking the Australian people to admit me as one of their own; but if you lived in Australia and were seeking citizenship but had never heard of him, then it seems clear you weren’t paying attention.

Obviously new citizens need to learn about democracy, rule of law, freedom of the press. But there’s nothing distinctively Australian about any of that — you might as well be seeking citizenship in Chile or Belgium (well, Belgium’s no longer a democracy, really, so maybe Denmark). Because prospective citizens — whether in Australia or here or anywhere else — aren’t just becoming participants in self-government, they’re becoming members of a specific self-governing people, and that people has a unique past that they should be expected to be familiar with. Conservatives are right to chide libertarians that a nation is not just a market, but it’s also not just a political system. That’s why our new citizenship test has at least some of that sort of thing, in addition to the civics — what territory did we buy from France in 1803? What ocean lies off the west coast? (For links to all the questions, scroll down here.) Will The One’s immigration people ditch these questions?