Bob Carr set Australia Day tone for others to follow

‘January 26 is the day the whole brave, self-mocking, patient, largely successful exercise in nation-building began,’ Bob Carr wrote in 2000.

At the turn of this century, amid growing progressive and Indigenous hostility towards January 26, then NSW premier Bob Carr penned an impassioned defence of the rightness of the date as our national holiday.

Rereading his piece 24 years on, Carr presaged the national self-loathing behind the campaign to axe January 26 with an honest and historically based ­argument in support of the status quo. His piece argued that like any colonised country, Australia’s history was not without brutality or pain, but that none of that hardship could be air-brushed via some symbolic adjustment to the holiday calendar.

Carr also stated that all citizens in the modern nation created by the arrival of the English had benefited collectively from the introduction of the rule of law, noting that it was English law that saw the seven perpetrators of the Myall Creek massacre hanged for the murder of 28 Aboriginal men, women and children in 1838.

“January 26 is the day the whole brave, self-mocking, patient, largely successful exercise in nation-building began,” Carr wrote in Sydney’s The Daily Telegraph on January 22, 2000.

“It is the one day that speaks of all that happened: the good and bad, the inspiring and shaming. The story of us all.

“There is no alternative. It is altogether appropriate. Well used, it will tell future generations what really happened – the brutality, the heroism, the tenderness, the patience. It will teach the ­humility as well as pride. Advance the Australian fair go and its inevitable symbol, Australia Day. There is no other day that says it all.”

Greens Senator Lidia Thorpe takes part in a march from Parliament House to Flinder's Street Station during the Treaty Before Voice Invasion Day Protest on January 26, 2023 in Melbourne

Fast forward to 2024 and the job has fallen to another Right Faction NSW Labor Premier to keep the ALP in touch with mainstream sentiment on the January 26 question.

In marked contrast to the Labor Left’s ambivalence – or private support – towards attacks on January 26 by councils, corporates and sporting bodies, NSW Premier Chris Minns reflected popular opinion in denouncing Cricket Australia over its dropping of the term Australia Day for the Gabba Test.

More so than anyone on the Labor side, Minns opened the shoulders in his blunt assessment of the impertinence of Cricket Australia in taking it upon itself to extinguish the term, taking his message direct to voters in suburban Sydney via radio station 2GB.

Reading that audience well, Minns had this to say: “The idea that you would take a national day away from any country, particularly Australia, is a strange one. We should be trying to pull each other together, and this is the day that we’ve set aside to ­celebrate what it means to live in the greatest country on earth.”

Others within the conservative Labor tradition have been notably unenthused by calls to jump on the January 26 abolitionist bandwagon.

South Australian Premier and lifelong Right Faction loyalist Peter Malinauskas made it clear this week that he regards Australia Day as a lower order issue on which his government will play no role. Asked on Tuesday whether he believed the date should be changed, Malinauskas said only that the nature of the debate around January 26 was simply a reflection of what made Australia such a strong and democratic nation.

“We live in a liberal democracy,” he said. “We should not be afraid of people expressing their views. That’s what in essence makes our country so special.”

The refusal of premiers such as Minns and Malinauskas to jump on the left-wing bandwagon points to a growing Red State/Blue State divide between state Labor governments Australia wide.

Premier of South Australia Peter Malinauskas.

Victoria last year witnessed an internal left faction baton change from Premier Dan Andrews to Jacinta Allen; in Queensland, former premier Annastacia Palaszczuk, often accused of being beholden to the Left, has now been succeeded by Steven Miles, who hails from the Left.

Both the Palaszczuk and Andrews governments faced sustained criticisms over their economic management, with Palaszczuk accused of being too ready to acquiesce to public sector pay demands, and Andrews slated for cost blowouts on infrastructure and his shambolic and costly cancellation of the Commonwealth Games contract.

It was on Covid where both governments happily endorsed a massive expansion of state power, Victoria the most spectacular example with one of the world’s longest lockdowns, and Queensland giving us the unforgettable spectacle of orange crowd barriers being erected to keep families apart on Father’s Day just north of the Tweed.

Barely two years old, the SA Labor government has already provided contrasts to that approach, with Malinauskas winning vast business support by demanding a windback of Covid restrictions ahead of his 2022 victory. Since his election, Malinauskas has fought high-profile battles against the John Setka-led CFMMEU and resisted Australian Education Union demands for a profligate pay rise that would have bankrupted SA.

But it was Minns’ comments this week in the context of Australia Day that demonstrated the view among Right Faction figures that Labor needs to remain in the centre on social policy and avoid being sucked into the culture war vortex of gesture and identity politics which plays well in the inner-city but leaves suburban voters cold, especially amid continuing cost-of-living concerns.

The extent of the Labor Right’s alarm over the party’s politically correct drift was underscored with a droll joke doing the rounds at last year’s South Australian budget lockup, where new Treasurer Stephen Mullighan made good on his promise to introduce no new taxes and reduce existing ones.

That budget document was in stark relief to the previous month’s effort from Tim Pallas in Victoria, which slugged business and investors with a raft of new taxes to pay for the economic impact of that state’s marathon Covid lockdown.

Promising to use the SA budget to lure business and investors from Victoria, SA Labor figures joked that they had coined the marketing line “SA: Pro-jobs, Victoria: Pronouns”, in sly reference to the LGBTIQ-friendly stylings of the Victorian bureau­cracy under almost a decade of sustained Labor Left rule.

In SA, Malinauskas has even found himself being attacked from the Left by the state’s Liberal Opposition over his championing of the Saudi-backed LIV gold tournament, staged for the first time in Australia last year at the Grange Golf Course and ­returning again this April for a second time.

SA Liberal Leader David Speirs surprised many in the Liberal Party by attacking the Premier on human rights grounds, saying it was morally wrong to deal with the Saudis and labelling the event an exercise in sport-washing.

Malinauskas almost lapped up the criticism, especially as the biggest fans of LIV are conservative South Australian men, many of whom now applaud Malinauskas for giving the state some spark through LIV and the AFL Gather Round, while also keeping taxes down and avoiding pet causes normally associated with the Labor Left. And as Malinauskas said, it seemed weird that Australia could trade with the Saudis – and devote much of its diplomatic efforts for the past 12 months trying to restore trade with China – yet the job should fall to golfers to make a unique stand in the name of human rights by boycotting a golf ­tournament.

As the party that gave Australia political knockabouts such as Bob Hawke and Peter Beattie, figures such as Minns and Malinauskas will be of increasing value in reminding the ALP that it must remain in step with mainstream suburban sentiment if it is to ­continue to govern.

And in a week when most federal Labor figures proved themselves wholly incapable of expressing a coherent opinion on January 26 – save for the banal observation that while some people really like it, others seem not to – the clarity brought by Chris Minns is a reminder that conviction politicians succeed for a reason. And that if you stand in the middle of the road long enough, you eventually get run over.

Bob Carr was premier for a decade and saw off four Liberal leaders in that time. Towards the end of his tenure he reflected privately that he saw his role within the Labor tradition as reassuring voters that the party could be trusted to govern soberly and sensibly. After the financial calamities that destroyed the governments of Brian Burke in WA, John Cain in Victoria and John Bannon in SA, Carr and his ­parsimonious treasurer, Michael Egan, reined in spending and paid down debt.

This week, Carr’s heir in Minns used his new authority to send a signal of his own – namely, that Labor should keep away from those who fret and obsess about trendy causes, and instead reflect the sentiments of those many thousands of suburban ­voters who were kind enough to elect them.