The surprise PM who made Australia Day

The majority of Australians probably have no idea which prime minister locked in January 26 as a national day of celebration.

I’d venture to claim that the great majority of Australians haven’t a clue that making January 26 a unified national Australia Day celebration is of relatively recent invention.

I’d even more confidently assert that an even more overwhelming majority wouldn’t have the slightest idea of who was the prime minister that locked in January 26, 1788, as the day Australia started.

A PM, who in his address on that first unified national Australia Day, looking out across Sydney Harbour, said: “The view from here, across the harbour to the nation’s birthplace, can only inspire confidence.”

What, surely it couldn’t have been Tony Abbott – they sound like words straight out of his mouth; but surely Australia Day goes back earlier than 2013?

OK, then it must have been either John Howard or Robert Menzies, the two other great Anglophile Liberal PMs, who would obviously want to celebrate that date of British colonisation of the Great South Land.

We...ell, no, it was neither of them. It was actually Paul Keating, who as PM set January 26 as the day of national foundational celebration, and precisely January 26, all the way back just 27 years ago in 1994.

Former Australian Prime Minister Paul Keating. Picture: Justin Lloyd

Before then, each state went its own way, most choosing to tag ‘Australia Day’ on a Monday or Friday, quite irrespective of whether that was actually the 26 th – more to celebrate just the ‘Great Aussie Long Weekend’.

It was Keating who quite deliberately chose to lock in January 26 as not simply an unqualified but indeed exuberant celebration of the arrival of the First Fleet to “start” Australia.

No “invasion day” for him, at least not back in 1994. It was Keating who delivered that sentence, quoted above, on January 26 1994 – and many more in similar vein. “There is no better place to live than this; Australians have created a great, vigorous and rich society” – tying all that success to what happened in 1788. In 1500 or so words, two things were comprehensively absent: any apology for what happened on January 26 1788; or indeed any reference at all to anyone being already here on that date.

Indeed, there wasn’t a single reference to Australia’s First Peoples, either in the 206 years since or the 50,000 years before.

Yes, he might have “done that” in his Redfern Speech and even more with Native Title after Mabo. But that can’t counter what he did in deliberately elevating January 26 as the unqualified celebration of the birth of the nation.

How quickly the ‘cultural zeitgeist’ has changed; I doubt that Keating would give quite the same speech today. Yet in 1994, an exuberant celebration of January 26 – and even more so, just six years earlier in the

Bicentennial, under another Labor PM Bob Hawke – was relatively uncontroversial. A second point: if only Keating had left well enough alone - the disorganised, state-by-state use of January 26 as an excuse for another long weekend – we wouldn’t have quite the difficulty we have today with the date.

As a consequence of locking it in as the national celebration, it’s become that much harder a ‘line in the sand’ – drawn from both sides – to smooth over and away. Although true, if Keating hadn’t done it, the day would have had to survive not being so nationalised through Howard’s term.

Keating of course didn’t just “create” Australia Day; he also, with a little bit of help from his little mate Bill Kelty, also created - no qualifying quotation marks needed - Australia’s now $3 trillion national superannuation.

‘Keating’s Australia Day’ might be essentially if pungently symbolic; ‘Keating’s super’ raises some, huge and I mean huge issues. We’ll get to them next week.