Recent comments from the NSW Police Commissioner about Ned Kelly remind us of the lack of consensus about Australia’s history.

Andrew Scipione opined that the bushranger – a beloved and romantic figure to so many – was an inappropriate folk hero for this country.

He made the comments in the context of the current series of Underbelly which, he said, glorified thugs and criminals. Mr Scipione is not alone in his lack of adulation for Ned Kelly.

The most common criticism is that the bushranger is a ‘cop killer’, a thug who was mythologised by bleeding hearts.

Those who dislike the elevation of Ned Kelly as folk hero tend to express their view with irrational venom.

Was he an enemy of the state or a whistle-blower on a corrupt and prejudiced regime?

This diversity of opinion about Kelly also shines a light on a unique fault-line in the Australian culture.

To Irish ears, it is reminiscent of the argument about IRA hunger strikers in the 1980s. Were they political prisoners or, as Margaret Thatcher asserted, simply criminals?

Key to the Kelly legend is the issue of motive.

Scipione and his fellow travellers apparently give no currency to the notion that Kelly was provoked, that he, and his community, had little choice but to fight back against a system that discriminated against them.

As Christy Moore sings in Natives, “only the very safe can talk about wrong and right, of those who were forced to choose, there are some who choose to fight”.

It’s clear that Australia’s fault-lines have never been properly resolved. Redcoats versus convicts, aristocrats versus ‘les miserables’, the English versus the Irish. Nor has the nation come to terms with its indigenous history.

Unlike other colonised countries, Australia never had its revolution. The icons of its colonisation remain and have been embraced by many Australians as their own.  The flag, for instance, has enjoyed a massive increase in popularity over the past 20 years.

The establishment was never overthrown so it became necessary, for the purposes of social cohesion, for it to be embraced.

Ned Kelly’s helmet is, in contrast, the symbol for the revolution that never came.

It is a beacon for those who could never embrace the crown and the British monarch and the Union Jack. To many, it represents freedom and independence even if Commissioner Scipione sees it as a mugshot of a criminal.

Ironic then that Australians often paint themselves as instinctively rebellious.

This country remains one of the most over-governed and over-policed in the western world. Civil disobedience is rare and discouraged.

Many Australians see the state as essentially good and acting in their best interests. This feeds the anti-Kelly argument.

Contrast this with the Republic of Ireland where most people are instinctively disobedient, especially to the state, a reaction perhaps to the shared memory of colonisation when the state was not just to be mistrusted but undermined.

Kelly inherited this instinct from his Irish parents. He was political. He saw the injustice suffered by his people as political.

The enduring debate over Ned Kelly’s status may not directly impact on Australia’s constitutional future but it reminds us how the old prejudices endure.

But then, police chiefs will always talk about law and order ahead of corruption in the force.