Australian national anthem scrapped for Horn-Mundine fight

Anthony Mundine didn’t sit for the Australian national anthem after all.

In fact, he didn’t even have to hear what he calls ‘a white supremacist song’ before stepping into the ring with Jeff Horn.

Advance Australia Fair was ditched to rush the two fighters into the ring after the undercard ran overtime by one hour – eight of the nine undercard fights went their distance at Suncorp Stadium.

Slated to begin at 9.30pm AEST in Brisbane (10.30pm AEDT in Melbourne and Sydney) the main event didn’t start until 10.30pm local time.

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Thanks to Horn’s quick victory it all ended about on time anyway but organisers did shuffle things around – namely, cutting the anthem.

“If I had it my way, the anthem would not be sung, they’d play Yothu Yindi’s Treaty, give us something, what are you going to give our people?” Mundine said in October.

“You want to play a white supremacist song, but you’re not going to play something for us.

“And you condition us to think that it’s our song, our way – that ain’t our way, that’s your way to separate and say you’re superior.

“That song was a theme song for the White Australia policy, which was that no one was allowed into the country except white fellas.”

Mundine did get part of his wish, walking out to the ring with Treaty playing over the stadium speakers and avoiding Advance Australia Fair.

Brisbane Broncos star James Roberts held up the Australian Aboriginal flag during Mundine’s entrance.

Mundine also had in his corner the nine-year-old Queensland student Harper Nielsen.

The grade four student was given a detention and criticised by Australian politicians for sitting during the anthem at a school assembly in September.

“It says ‘Advance Australia Fair’ and when it was originally written it meant advance Australia for white-skin people,” Harper said at the time.

“And when it says ‘we are young’ it means that it ignores the Indigenous Australians who were here before the English for over 50,000 years.”

Horn entered second to the White Stripes’ adapted sports anthem Seven Nation Army.