Woolworths needs to rethink its half-baked Australia Day ban

Coles, the Reject Shop and Chocie stores will continue to sell Australia Day merchandise.. Picture: NCA NewsWire/Tertius Pickard

Fairy bread hot cross buns went on sale on Boxing Day in Woolworths, the supermarket chain that is as true-blue, you-beaut Aussie as the rest of them when it wants to be.

This year Woolworths launched a novel adaptation of what it called “an iconic staple at Australian kids’ parties” sold with its own little packet of hundreds and thousands, allowing customers to butter and sprinkle to taste.

In a further gesture of pretend patriotism, Woolworths announced the return of apple cinnamon-flavoured hot cross buns made with 100 per cent Australian-sourced Pink Lady apples. These will sit alongside the Cadbury Caramilk range made with confectionery 100 per cent sourced from Chicago-based Mondelez International, the proud custodian of the Cadbury® brand.

The expansion of Woolworths’ hot cross bun range was announced in a 569-word press release that neglected to include the word “Easter”. It would be comforting if that were an oversight, but we know it probably wasn’t, since Easter, like Australia Day, comes with cultural baggage Woolworths, in its mealy-mouthed way, would rather avoid.

The decision to de-Easterise the spiced, fruity bun was presumably a response to the same kind of “broader conversation” that prompted Woolworths’ decision to denationalise January 26. It will sell cancer-causing, coronary-inducing sticks of tobacco to adults who produce their ID, but won’t sell Australian-themed summer entertaining merchandise to anyone under any circumstances in deference to the sensitivities of the virtue-signalling elite.

Discussion about the meaning of Australia Day is anything but broad. It is depressingly narrow. Participants are drawn from the same restricted circle and the conservations restricted to the same prescribed boundaries as the Aboriginal voice to parliament.

Leader of the Opposition Peter Dutton. Picture: Richard Dobson

Woolworths got that one wrong too, incidentally. Management ordered staff at Big W to make excruciating announcements affirming “support for the Uluru Statement from the Heart, and its calls for a First Nations voice to parliament enshrined in the Constitution”. Woolworths sensed the change in the wind and dropped the announcements three months before the referendum. “We recognise and respect our team and customers have varying views and perspectives,” a spokesperson said.

Indeed, they do. Six out of 10 Australians voted no to the referendum. Woolworths hasn’t told us if it bothered to ask its customers before turning its back on Australia Day. If it did, it must have confined its sampling to its Marrickville and Carlton stores. You don’t have to venture far into HiLux land to learn that few outside activist circles want change, any more than they wanted the voice. Australia Day serves as the full-stop to January, a final day of indulgence with family and friends that is too precious to waste wringing guilty hands. The verdict on the voice reflected the widespread sentiment that nothing good can come from picking at the scabs of history.

The annual assault on Australia Day has noticeably intensified this year. We have long passed the point where it was possible to have a measured discussion about other possible calendar slots or linking it more overtly to Federation rather than settlement, the Australian commonwealth being a great civic success story well worth celebrating.

It is not just January 26 some object to but Australia Day itself. What purports to be an argument about dates has morphed into something more frightening, an argument about the legitimacy of the nation itself. Like the clowns behind the 1619 project in America, the invasion day movement wants to assassinate our national character. Advocates want to strip our founders of any noble intent and portray them as beyond redemption.

Which is why Peter Dutton should not heed the contemptuous commentators who criticised him for buying into the argument last week. When our shared sense of national pride is being deliberately eroded, we need leaders who are prepared to shout “ stop”.

Australia Day flags in Fairfield, in Sydney.

Dutton captured the popular sentiment as he did on the voice by suggesting Woolworths customers boycott the store until the decision is reversed. That is easier said than done, given the company holds 37 per market share, but many of us are prepared to keep on trying in the faint hope that market forces might come to the support of common sense.

The Prime Minister knows better than to dive headlong into the invasion day rhetoric. Last year, he described January 26 as “a day to show respect to First Nations people”, which is an awkward choice of words. Does that mean it is a day to disrespect non-Aboriginal Australians or that the obligation to respect Indigenous Australians does not apply on other days of the year?

It was a rejection of special privilege and the politics of identity, and a declaration of equal respect for all as fellow citizens.

The case against Australia Day, like other social justice causes, rests on faulty but emotionally tempting logic: we should avoid overt pride in Australia, we are told, out of cultural sensitivity to our multiethnic and Indigenous population. Yet it is precisely because we lack a shared common racial identity that pride in nationhood is so important.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and Vitalii Tcyba, Valeriia Kucher and Katherine Tcyba during a citizenship ceremony. Picture Grant Viney

That hasn’t been something we’ve had to work too hard to sell up to now since most migrants are attracted by the freedom, prosperity and opportunity a successful liberal democracy has on offer.

When permission to migrate to Australia is difficult to obtain, migrants arrive with a sense of having won life’s great lottery. They arrive pre-primed to become proud Australians and to defend its values.

One wonders if any of those responsible for Woolworths’ soft-headed decision have ever been to an Australia Day citizenship ceremony and watched newly minted citizens from every corner on Earth raise their right hand in a pledge of allegiance. They would have to search hard to find anyone adopting citizenship through gritted teeth, burdened with even the slightest degree of national shame towards their adopted country.

I write this out of personal experience, as someone who looks back to January 26, 1992 as the day when I made one of the most consequential decisions of my life.

Good columnists should avoid using the singular first-person pronoun where possible. On this occasion, however, I seek the readers’ indulgence to express my offence at the trashing of an anniversary I hold so dear.

No amount of fairy bread buns can redeem Woolworths for its un-Australian decision or its thinly disguised disparagement of a country almost every migrant regards with undiluted affection.