BEERS, barbecues and beaches are hallmarks of Australia Day. So is the fight surrounding the national holiday. Every year Australians get tangled in an argument over the celebration, on January 26th, which marks the landing of the First Fleet of British convicts in Sydney Cove in 1788. To many Australians, the day is the foundation of their successful and genuinely multicultural nation. To many indigenous Australians, celebrating colonisation feels like a slight. Atrocities that came with European settlement seemed intended to drive their peoples to extinction.
For years, the question of whether to move Australia Day to a less contentious date has loomed over the festivities. Thousands of Australians now join annual protests against what they call “Invasion Day”. Companies increasingly allow staff to swap their holiday if they do not observe the date. In 2022 the centre-left Labor government revoked a conservative-era directive which forced councils to hold citizenship ceremonies, patriotically, on Australia Day. Dozens of local governments have since moved their events, citing solidarity with indigenous populations.
This infuriates conservatives, who complain that pious lefties are dismantling Australian traditions and shrouding the country in shame. They have inserted the debate into the campaign for the next federal election, due by May. “I don’t want to be told by woke CEOs…that I can’t celebrate Australia Day,” grumbled the opposition leader, Peter Dutton, this month. His Liberal (ie, conservative) Party would go back to insisting local governments hold ceremonies on Australia Day as “a sign of pride and nationalism in our country”.
Mr Dutton likes to rail against wokeness. As defence minister, he identified a “woke agenda” in the armed forces (he was exercised by tea parties held in support of gay rights). He now complains about banks that set environmental targets, objecting to one that denied, on environmental grounds, a loan to a forestry group. And he warns that children at school are being “preached to and indoctrinated on all sorts of agendas”. The Trumpian tone is clear.
As a strategy, stoking culture wars only gets Australian politicians so far, however. The country’s compulsory voting in elections means that they have to appeal to the kind of moderate voter who might not bother to turn out in other countries. This has helped protect the country against the worst populist convulsions that have racked America and Britain, for instance. Yet Mr Dutton is not the first Australian political leader to whip up anger against elites, Greg Barns, a former Liberal adviser, points out. John Howard, a successful conservative prime minister, built his base in the 1990s by pitting Aussie “battlers” (working-class folk) against affluent urbanites. Voters struggling to make ends meet may be drawn to anti-woke arguments. On the question of Australia Day, at least, polling suggests that a majority of Australians, and growing, want to keep the national holiday as it is. ■