Nine Entertainment’s Channel Nine surprised its Melbourne audience last night watching its hour-long city New Year’s Eve broadcast that began at 11 pm.

It wasn’t that this broadcast was an odd advertorial for the City of Melbourne, the local government running Victoria’s capital.

It wasn’t that, as these New Year’s Eve broadcasts go, it was also boring. Viewers only stick around for footage of the fireworks display along the Yarra River, skyscraper roofs and parks.

And it wasn’t that, in all honesty, Nine still tried, while most Australians turn to a rival channel for Sydney’s iconic fireworks.

Rather, it was what occurred only a few seconds after the stroke of midnight came.

At zero hour “Happy New Year” filled a graphics-decorated blue screen. Then it happened.

The screen changed to some strange writing without translation.

Some knew it was Arabic.

Abruptly the fireworks took over.

A Google search translates this script, pictured here, as “Happy New Year”. The question is why?

And why not Mandarin—Australia’s second-most spoken language? Why not Punjabi, Hindi, Vietnamese, Cantonese, Greek, Italian, Spanish all popularly spoken with a similar frequency as Arabic. Why not Cyrillic or even Hebrew?

The reason is important: No other ethnic minority in Australia’s long multicultural history has ever asked for it.

Indeed, the general commentary around the world I’ve seen since is “WTF Australia?”

Nine has been approached via X for an explanation and none has yet come.

The answer then, is that potentially one of four things has happened:

  1. Nine Entertainment was hacked—unlikely.
  2. Someone at Nine Entertainment went rogue as occurred at Ford USA a day ago.
  3. The City of Melbourne requested it as a sponsor.
  4. Qatar, ever throwing money at its global influence, paid for it.

In 2024 Australia took in one of the world’s largest influxes of Gazans, to immense controversy. Why did Egypt next door block its Gazan border instead? Visa preparation in Australia was rushed, yet Hamas remains a proscribed terror organisation.

If this Arabic message was an effort to make these people feel welcome, then it has backfired as Islam does not recognise New Year’s Eve.

If, however, it was part of a larger global trend in legacy media to push the Palestinian cause while Hamas refuses to release Israeli hostages and end the suffering it brought on itself for Gaza, it is something that will need to be watched closely as 2025 unfolds.

Since Israel defended itself with the West’s urging after the pogrom of October 2023, Hamas’s leadership is dead. Hezbollah is neutered. Syria is overthrown. Iran is on the verge of regime collapse. Russia is bankrupt. Saudi Arabia is talking peace with Israel. UAE celebrates its relationship with the Jewish State. Yemen, Iraq and Syria are being bombed by a US coalition. Only Qatar, the former home of Hamas, remains the outlier with its propaganda arm Al Jazeera disgraced alongside the BBC, Guardian, Sky UK, NYT, WaPo, ABC Australia, Reuters, AP and all who have pushed the Hamas line.

Today, wars of Islam rage across the globe in Sudan, Nigeria, Yemen and Bangladesh. Afghanistan and Pakistan are on the verge of massive aggression. Turkey is rampaging through Kurdistan. The streets of the West remain subject to Marxist marches proclaiming a “global intifada”, jihad and support for terror. Mobs call for the downfall of Canada, France, Germany, Israel, Ireland, Norway, Sweden, UK and the USA.

Australia does not need to further join this club.

Australia has always been a country where Buddhists, Christians, Druze, Jews, Muslims, Sikhs and others live side-by-side adding to the base Anglo fabric of Common Law, pluralism and cultural respect that has been its enrichment and success.

What happened at Nine Entertainment a few hours ago cannot be minimised nor waved away.

Not since 1914 or 1938 has the world found itself in so precarious a state as 2025 promises.

Talk of nuclear weapons enrichment in Iran follows the tongue to talk of tactical nuclear weapons release in Europe by Russia, while three nuclear-armed countries have their borders in jeopardy: India, Israel and Pakistan. Only years ago, Russians and Ukrainians fought in the radioactive wastelands around Chernobyl to the devastated health of Russia’s troops.

The world is a powder keg, and it must be calmed. Allies must be protected. And pandering to one ethnicity over another is not the way to do it.

© 2025 Adam Parker.

Main picture: Arabic writing appears on TV screen, Channel 9, midnight January 1 2025. Author’s photo.