The Compact.

There are not many national days where Australians agree on the rules, but Anzac Day is one of them. Or at least it used to be.

Stand still. Keep quiet. Don't clap at the wrong time. Don't treat it like a sporting event. If you're not sure what to do, follow the person in front of you who looks like they've been there before. It's not complicated. Which made this week's outbreaks of booing at commemorative services across the country feel less like a protest and more like someone bringing an air horn to a funeral.

The services that were interrupted this week are meant to recognise the service of all Australians who went to war. That includes Aboriginal soldiers who enlisted despite being excluded on paper, fought in the same units, and came home to fewer rights than the men beside them.

In Melbourne, Sydney and Perth, Welcome to Country and Acknowledgement of Country were booed by people who had decided that dawn was the moment to make their stand - while everyone else was trying to remember the dead.

You can argue about Welcome to Country. Plenty of people do. Some think it belongs at every public event, while others think it has been overused, poorly understood, or awkwardly delivered. That argument has been running for years, unresolved, and both sides know it. But booing it at an Anzac service is something else. It doesn't read as thoughtful dissent. It reads as impatience with the idea that this country has a history that didn't begin in 1915.

That is why the reaction was so swift. Veterans groups, politicians, even the RSL, which is not known for chasing culture wars, all landed in roughly the same place. Wrong day. Wrong place. Wrong behaviour. And importantly, no shift in policy.

Despite the noise, the national RSL position has not moved. Acknowledgement of Country remains part of official guidance. It is still described as a standard element of commemorations. The institution most closely tied to the day is not backing away from it. That leaves a gap between what some people are loudly rejecting and what the organisers of the day are actually doing.

You can see how we got here. Over the past few years, Welcome to Country has drifted from being occasional and specific to being routine and sometimes formulaic. When something becomes routine, people stop listening. When they stop listening, they start resenting being asked to. That doesn't justify the behaviour. But it does explain why a small number of people think they are speaking for more than themselves.

The problem is that Anzac Day is not built to carry that argument. It is one of the few civic rituals in Australia that still runs on a shared understanding of restraint. You don't improve it by injecting more opinion into it. You improve it by knowing when to keep your opinion to yourself.

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The views expressed are those of the correspondent. Factual claims draw on publicly available sources.