Irish comedian Graham Norton, who is one of Britain's most prominent Eurovision ambassadors, declared to a British newspaper this week that the competition should "get rid" of Australia. Guy Sebastian performs at the Eurovision rehearsals. Credit:Nigel Treblin Well, it was The Sun, so perhaps it shouldn't be taken too seriously. After all, somewhere in its august pages we also find bumptious Sally from Clerkenwell who doesn't wear bikini tops and wants to become a nuclear physicist. After she graduates from beauty school. "I just do not understand why they are in the Eurovision Song Contest," Norton told The Sun. "I know some countries aren't technically in Europe but, come on, Australia is on the other side of the world." Norton added that there is no malice intended, but observes that it's simply "kind of stupid."

Even the respected publication The Guardian got in on the act, summarising Australia's connection to Europe as this: "two centuries of British colonial history". Australian fans at The Australian Eurovision 2015 party in Vienna. Really? Well, there's a few million migrants who came to this country in a succession of waves since the 1950s who might disagree with that stunningly shallow summary.So let's tackle this with some basic maths. According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, around 6.7 million Australians were born in other countries. Jessica Mauboy was the first Australian to perform, but not compete, at Eurovision. Credit:Peter Green

And a formidable slice - more than a third of those from the top 50 countries - came from the UK, Italy, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Netherlands, Croatia, Poland, Macedonia, Malta, Turkey, France, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia, Russia, Hungary and Cyprus. Do those countries sound familiar? They should. That's almost half of the countries which are participants in Eurovision. Australian fans show their support in the rain for Guy Sebastian at The Eurovision Village in 2015. Between them they total about 2.2 million reasons why we're in Eurovision. That's more viewers than the Graham Norton show. And more readers than The Guardian. It's even a larger number than the current circulation of The Sun, which was the platform Norton used to try and shoot down Australia's place on the Eurovision stage.

Australia is a relatively young participant in Eurovision - this is just our second year in official competition - and there are of course no guarantees that we will be there forever. We've had two "wild card" invites, and there is no confirmation a third is coming. This year's addition of live telecasts in the USA and China, and the addition of Justin Timberlake to the broadcast, points to the fact that this is as much about Eurovision's ambition as as our own. Perhaps the problem is that all they see when they look at Eurovision is a stage full of singers, and a map full of borders. And if that's the case then all of them, Norton included, fundamentally misunderstand the point of the competition.

When it was first proposed in the late 1950s, the Grand Prix Eurovision de la Chanson Européenne - as it was then known - was a means of mending the broken pieces of Europe. In the present, in a world ravaged by a war in a very different way, the need for those connections - within Europe, or between Europe and its communities elsewhere in the world - has never been greater.