For hundreds of years, Aboriginal people in Australia have been discriminated against and treated as second class citizens - or worse. There are now 258 flag emojis but the Aboriginal flag is not one of them - and a request to create it has been declined. The reason? ‘Other flags have been proposed for addition, such as an aboriginal flag.... In general, flags are often not recognized outside of a relatively small community, and even in those communities often do not have very high frequency usage. So it is often hard to justify their inclusion except in very limited cases.’

Flags emojis which are available include the Vatican City (population 1000) and Liechtenstein (population 38000) - so why not the Aboriginal flag (650000 people)? It is discriminatory that this flag is not available for the use of those people who identify with it - and for Australians and tourists who wish to recognise the country’s diverse population and complex history. It is appalling that this is not possible because Unicode.org have decided that it’s ‘hard to justify’!