Vikki Campion: Retailers shun Australia Day but embrace Halloween

Do you know what’s truly horrifying about Halloween, asks Vikki Campion? It’s that retailers are so keen to embrace it while doing anything they can to avoid celebrating Australia Day.

If you found an individual who hated themselves as much as some corporate elites hate Australia, you’d send them straight to therapy for help.

It’s this self-loathing that’s led to a loss of our cultural identity, no better personified than by the fact that Australians have embraced a festivity as superficial and trinket-baiting as Halloween with great gusto, while our own Australia Day is shamed and banned.

What does it say about our communities, corporations and councils that we are more inclined to honour an American celebration of commerce rather than our own national day?

Woolworths, Aldi and Kmart, which refused to stock anything bearing a Commonwealth star and a Union Jack in January, have been bursting with plastic pumpkins, foam graves and hanging ghouls since September; while councils that cancelled Australia Day festivities, referring to it as Invasion Day, are throwing ratepayer-funded Halloween discos, movie nights and “trick or treat” events.

I’m not holier than thou on Halloween. I’m guilty of playing dress-ups with my kids, but I want to celebrate Australia Day too, with the same energy we once did — with swaggie cork hats, Aussie flags, stamp-sized temporary tattoos on each cheek, soapy slip-and-slides in parks and beaches, with concerts and ceremonies, parades and fireworks.

Our kids won’t have those memories. They’ll have Halloween, and it’s not out of respect for the Celtics ending their harvest, the Irish, or All Hallows Eve.

It’s purely a commercial decision driven by corporate giants.

The modern-day embrace of Halloween highlights our need for celebration rather than shame. Picture: iStock

Bayside Council, which won’t respect Australia Day, now hosts a Halloween movie night; Sydney City Council throws trick or treating at the library with “ghost story time”, and the Australian vernacular of “lollies” doesn’t even make the advert, spruiking “candy” instead.

Nature abhors a vacuum. Some 10, 20, 30 years ago, councils paid for fireworks to commemorate how great this country is on Australia Day. Now that money is for a festival vaguely based on a Celtic end-of-harvest, modified by the Catholic Church, adapted into a US concept of “trick or treating” and commercialised within an inch of its life.

Ruby, 3, and Max Blackshaw, 8, sport temporary tattoos to celebrate Australia Day in 2014. Picture: Evan Morgan

Australia Day was, we were told by our corporates, such as Woolworths, which posted a $1.7bn net profit after tax in the financial year ending 2024, a total commercial failure.

Let’s remember what these corporates said when they ran down Australia Day.

It was about “being respectful and inclusive to all”, said Kmart.

It was a commercial decision of “mostly imported stock”, “made on the basis of steeply declining sales” said Woolworths boss Brad Banducci.

Imported plastic junk is only a problem if it’s got an Aussie flag printed on it; apparently, a skull or a spider is fine.

According to the US National Retail Federation, Halloween spending in 2024 is projected to reach $US11.6bn ($17.6bn), of which $US2bn goes straight to what the US and Sydney City Council call “candy” and the rest of us in Australia call lollies.

Retailers no longer sell Australia Day merch, like the flag Ben Stanley, 10, was proudly waving in 2014.

If you ask any kid what it’s about, they have no clue beyond idiot greed. It is for buying garbage made vastly cheaper than what it is sold for, which lasts a few hours and goes straight into the bin.

How else does Woolies sell a cheap mask for $20, or Big W, a plastic reaper for $50 in a cost of living crisis? For all their posturing about net zero, it doesn’t apply to this landfill.

What is more relevant to Australians? Is it that a forlorn group of people turned up with no services or social infrastructure and from that miserable ground, a productive garden has grown, or a party that is just about profits?

If you believe that the Irish invaded Australia in chains, then so did the American Irish, as they fled the great potato famine and brought the beginnings of Halloween to America to signal the start of winter. The Irish American “invader” treated native Americans as severely, if not worse, than the Irish Australian “invader”.

Now, in Australia, 50 per cent of the continent is held by native title or First Nations land owners, while in America, the Indigenous people own about 1 per cent of the land they historically occupied.

So why aren’t the councils and corporate elites banning Halloween as they did Australia Day? We should be actively ashamed of our Australian Irish invading ancestors, according to our corporate overlords, while we mass consume the festivity of the American Irish invader.

If bureaucrats and corporations were true moral arbiters, wouldn’t they be saying no to immigrants who moved to America as they have to immigrants who moved to Australia?

We won’t honour our heritage, but we’ll honour the supermarkets.

The only reason these companies can post near multibillion-dollar profits today is on the back of drovers and bushmen and Diggers, who first ploughed scrub to feed a young nation and then defended it in the worst of wars.

The only reason Coles and Woolworths can today defend themselves against price gouging charges is because we have created a nation that allows it.

Embracing Halloween does not negate our responsibility to engage with our national history; it highlights our need for celebration rather than shame.

We are simply in the wrong hemisphere for any significance beyond secular materialism.

It’s not Halloween down under, it’s Hallowoolworths.

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