Aldinga Beach Australia Day photo should sound alarm bells for Anthony Albanese | David Penberthy

Who do you think the people in this viral Australia Day picture will be casting their vote for, writes David Penberthy.

Last Sunday as is usually the case on Australia Day I spent the day with my family and a group of friends at Aldinga Beach in Adelaide’s south.

When it comes to beaches Aldinga is the opposite of a well-kept secret. On Australia Day it’s become a tradition for tens of thousands of people to descend on Aldinga and adjoining Sellicks Beach to make a day of it.

They descend not by foot but by car, with this beach being almost unique in Australia in that you can drive on it.

People set themselves up in their cars parked three deep along the shore with their barbies and eskies while the kids play cricket and swim.

You couldn’t craft a more Australian scene if you tried.

There was a Facebook video made last Sunday by SA media personality Andrew “Cosi” Costello showing the size of the Aldinga crowd. I have only met Cosi a couple of times but he strikes me as a genuinely nice person who has a sincere love for his home state.

I am sure he has political views but I wouldn’t know what they are, nor would anyone who isn’t close to him.

As a media figure he doesn’t have a political bone in his body.

Australia day, huge amount of cars on the beach at Aldinga . 26th January 2024 Picture: Brett Hartwig

The post Cosi put up on Facebook showed cars as far as the eye could see stretching the full 7km drivable length of beach between the southern Sellicks ramp and the northern Aldinga ramp.

“I’ve never seen Aldinga like this,” Cosi said without a word of exaggeration in the Facebook post which as of last Wednesday had been watched on Facebook more than two million times.

That’s correct – two million.

And of everyone who watched the video, thousands liked and agreed with Cosi’s simple assessment of the day, how great it was to see so many people having a good time.

Cosi might not be a political person but I saw that Aldinga crowd very much in the context of two things.

The debate about the future date of Australia Day and the looming federal poll.

I’ve never been a big fan of January 26 as the date for Australia Day for two reasons.

It’s emblematic of the Sydney-centric nature of government in Australia where the creation of the colony of New South Wales has been shoe-horned into a day of celebration.

Mainly, I have never liked it because I totally get why it upsets many Aboriginal people, and have always thought we could easily have another date that doesn’t upset them when we are all meant to be celebrating.

But it feels now that public support for January 26 is much stronger than it has been in many years, as evidenced by that de facto focus group at Aldinga last weekend and the proliferation of Aussie flags draped from cars and painted on people’s cheeks.

This is because white Australians feel that the much narrower debate around January 26 has ballooned into a more generalised guilt trip, as if our country is not worth celebrating at all.

I am sorry if it offends Indigenous people but I reckon that overall there is plenty to celebrate in Australia.

And I do wonder whether if Australia Day were held on January 27 whether the likes of Lidia Thorpe would turn around and say: “Well, thanks, that’s that sorted then, now we can all get along”.

The field of grievance is so wide that a form of exhaustion has set in.

People have a yearning to sit around with their friends and have a couple of quiet ones without being harangued about their intergenerational culpability for the undeniably bad parts of our history.

And this is where the progressive side of politics might want to rethink its tactics over the past few years.

The growth in support for January 26, born out by the national poll conducted by News Corp last month, comes after a period of sustained corporate lecturing about how we should think and act when it comes to questions of reconciliation.

All of that has had the reverse effect, where people are hardened in their views, more tired and irritated by elite tut-tutting about something as innocuous as burning a few snags on a certain date.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese. Picture: NewsWire / David Geraghty

Despite my own long-held ambivalence about the date, I found myself groaning last week reading about some of the shame-driven events being impertinently staged by local councils (without ratepayer input or support) to observe the darkness of our history on January 26.

There was one event held by a council in the Adelaide Hills which promised a day of mourning with the added cheery bonus of face painting and music.

What a combination.

You can head up to Mount Barker to hear an angry dissertation about what a pack of genocidal bastards we are, then dance to the local cover band playing Twist and Shout while the kids get painted as tigers. The ideal combination of fun and shaming.

It is the least surprising thing in the world that the response to this sustained sanctimony – most of it coming from well-meaning whiteys – is to pack the Esky and head to the beach.

And as for all those people on the beach.

If they were a Newspoll, how would they vote?

Are they Albo people, or Dutts people?

My guess is they are diverse, but not as diverse as Anthony Albanese would hope, and becoming less so in this Trumpian world.

As a Labor-aligned friend of mine said last weekend talking about the Aldinga crowd, he noted his wife said she’d never seen so many Australian flags on display as last Sunday.

His take: Peter Dutton is about to ride “an anti-woke wave” all the way to The Lodge.