In the aftermath of the Voice referendum, Australia Day seems both ever more untenable and ever more entrenched. Doubtless, a large proportion of the 39.9 per cent who voted yes in October would have had misgivings celebrating January 26, if they marked it at all. There are “no” voters, I dare say, who felt the same. But it is hard now to foresee a change in the date of the national day even though it will never be truly national.
In what feels like an increasingly fragmented country, it is the 60 per cent who rejected the Indigenous Voice to parliament who effectively hold the pen when it comes to drafting the terms and conditions of nationhood. Australia Day will therefore stay, even though it continues to cause so much anguish for First Nations people and commemorates a moment of British conquest. Any attempt to change the date will be framed by Peter Dutton’s Liberal Party as an expression of elite contempt for Middle Australia, and an attempt to rob ordinary Australians of their cultural heritage – the modern-day playbook of the global populist right.
New faultlines are opening up between Australians, not just along generational lines. Credit: Summer Lamb 2024
Nor is it just the Voice referendum and its aftermath that reminds us of Australia’s continental divides. Evidence abounds of the fraying of the country. The High Court detention ruling underscored how immigration remains such a fissile issue, and how understandable concerns over headline cases involving alleged perpetrators of dreadful crimes can easily lead to the othering of new arrivals as a whole.
This week’s storm over stage 3 tax cuts has shown how income brackets can be so delineating – the taxation equivalent of whether you turn left or right when stepping aboard a long-haul flight, or whether you can afford international travel at all. This kind of stratification is especially consequential because income polarisation, the gulf between rich and poor, usually tracks closely with political polarisation, and fuels populist anger.
In this polyglot country, the atrocities of October 7, and the unrelenting brutality of Israel’s response, have heightened community tensions. They have come to the fore on the steps of the Sydney Opera House, Australia’s national building, during a curtain call at the Sydney Theatre Company, at Carols by Candlelight in Melbourne when protesters rushed the stage, and also at the cricket after the Test opener Usman Khawaja wrote on his boots “All lives are equal” in the colours of the Palestinian flag.
The first Muslim ever to represent Australia at cricket, Khawaja was heralded in his younger years as a potentially transcendent figure. But in these polarised times, it has become harder to achieve that kind of universality, even when you have ended the calendar year with more runs than any other batsmen in the world and speak with such calm authority.
Cricket is worth dwelling on because, more so than the other codes, it has traditionally been the sport that cemented Australian nationalism. Yet the baggy green is not such a binding emblem in the era of Pat Cummins and Usman Khawaja as it was in the less complicated days of Steve Waugh and Mark Taylor. The sordidness of “Sandpapergate” doubtless played a part, but so, too, has the team’s advocacy of issues such as climate change which has mired it in the quagmire of the culture wars.
Even though Cummins and his teammates responded to sledging that “wokeness” had undermined its performance in the most eloquent way imaginable – by winning the World Test Championship, retaining the Ashes on English soil, hoisting the 50-over World Cup and pummelling Pakistan – Australia’s cricketers are not the unifiers of yore. Only this week, Cummins demonstrated his refusal to be cowed by his right-wing detractors by calling for the date of Australia Day to be changed – thus making himself more of a target.
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