Changing the date of Australia Day is inevitable so get used to it, writes Michael McGuire

It’s become so divisive that sooner or later the date of Australia Day will inevitably be changed from January 26, writes Michael McGuire. Do you agree?

It’s over. It’s OK to admit the inevitable. January 26 as Australia Day is finished. Maybe not next year, maybe not in five years even. But some time in the next decade or so the date will be changed.

And it will be done so with the support of the vast majority of Australians. And then, as with every major social advance, look at legalising same-sex marriage, we will wonder what all the fuss was about.

It’s hard to believe many Australians are genuinely that attached to Australia Day. It didn’t become a public holiday until 1994. The first Australia Day was held in July.

January 26 is the most divisive day you could possibly pick on which to hold a national day of unity. There are probably 364 better days you could choose. It’s a day that represents loss and death, destruction and devastation to indigenous Australians. Why we want to inflict more grief on indigenous Australians is never made clear. Or maybe it is.

Every year the clamour will grow to change the date. It will come down to compassion, to respect, to an acknowledgment of history and how Australia was founded on a lie. The lie that the continent claimed by the British was empty, that it was terra nullius – ‘land belonging to nobody’. That the indigenous people who had been here for 60,000 years didn’t count.

The difficulty is that like just about everything else in these increasingly polarised times, the common-sense idea of changing the date, has become hostage to the culture wars.

Those against changing the date will wail and scream and claim some kind of victimhood.

Phrases such as “cancel culture” will be used, skipping past the obvious point that no culture has been as systematically cancelled by so many for so long as indigenous culture.

Brain-dead, intellectually bereft words such as ‘woke’ and ‘unAustralian’ will be used.

It was depressing last week to hear Prime Minister Scott Morrison dismiss Cricket Australia’s decision to drop any reference to Australia Day in promoting its Big Bash games on January 26. Morrison called it a “pretty ordinary decision” and said CA should “focus more on cricket and less on politics’’.

Protesters gather at The Domain for an Invasion Day demonstration on January 26. Picture: Wendell Teodoro

Which is laughable for a bloke who never misses a chance to use sport for political purposes, whether it’s wearing rugby league gear, taking about his love for the Cronulla Sharks to prove he’s an ordinary guy or running around on the field with Australian cricketers.

Then again Morrison also tried to equate the suffering of those who arrived here on January 26 in prison ships to the slaughter of the indigenous people that followed.

The notion of what makes Australian identity has become wrapped up in all this. You see it in the Australia Day Awards. What’s the awarding of the nation’s highest award to a divisive bigot like Margaret Court but a sign that Australia’s old guard in still in charge and is no mood for change.

The Australia Day Awards are a confused mess anyway. They would be automatically enhanced if politicians no longer received them or if we could find politicians with enough dignity to turn them down.

Change is needed. It’s not about tearing down Australia. It’s about acknowledging the actual history of the nation and learning from it. It’s about admitting that the effects of the colonisation of Australia are still deeply felt by a significant number of Australians.

Those against the change say it will be do nothing to change entrenched indigenous disadvantage. The incarceration rates, the domestic violence, the early deaths. No one is claiming it will. It’s possible to have more than one discussion at a time.

They say that changing the date is merely symbolic.

Strangely, often the people that make that claim cling tightly to their own symbols, the monarchy, the flag. Symbols are important as well.

The question is what do we lose as a nation by changing the date of Australia Day? Nothing vitally important.

The other side of the equation is – what do we have to gain? A great deal. Possibly even a better Australia.