Australia Day verdict in the trolley

Australians all let us rejoice – which in 2025 includes Woolworths. The supermarket giant has announced that it is on board with our national day in 2025, that there will be Australia Day-themed products and promotions in stores.

Commonsense commerce such as this should not be news but it definitely is, marking a change from 2024 when Woolworths made clear it did not want anything to do with the national day because “there has been broader discussion about January 26 and what it means to different parts of the community”.

It followed gratuitous virtue signalling the previous winter about where the grocery giant stood on the Indigenous voice to parliament referendum, when a supporting statement was played on the PA in subsidiary Big W stores until people got sick of being told what Woolworths thought they should think.

But in 2025 Woolworths is on board with everybody else who calls Australia home and is proud to do it. This is the only respectful decision a public company could have made after the 2024 debacle when community response to the Australia Day denial was very clear – that Woolworths might have spoken for some customers, just not many.

As a result, woke retailing has been put out to the remainder bin and what matters to middle Australia is back up in lights. The great Australian success story is that what unites us matters.

“We will be celebrating Australia Day as a team, and with our customers,” a company representative told our journalist Eli Greenblat. They got that bit right.