Happy Australia Day!

As the ongoing debate over Australia’s national day has seen a recent shift back towards support for 26 January, it’s worth taking a moment to reflect on the immense utility of the celebration, which for too long has been obscured by the controversy.

Robert Menzies viewed Australia Day as a moment to celebrate the remarkable nature of the Australian achievement – building one of the world’s most successful, prosperous and egalitarian liberal democracies out of a forsaken penal colony – and thus to draw positive inspiration for the future from the hard work and initiative of our forebears. But amidst record levels of post-war immigration, he equally saw that it was a tremendous opportunity to inculcate Australian values and thus promote social cohesion.

The link between Australia Day and citizenship ceremonies is as old as the concept of Australian citizenship itself. For the Chifley Government’s Nationality and Citizenship Act was deliberately timed to come into effect on 26 January 1949. However, under Menzies this link was taken to new heights with the introduction of the Australian Citizenship Conventions. The first of which was opened by Menzies 75 years ago.

These were near-weeklong events, in which hundreds of community groups, employers, media and government officials gathered in Canberra to develop ‘ways and means of stimulating a love of citizenship among the population’, and to find ways to integrate recent migrants into the community. They featured grand exhibitions of artworks from such migrants celebrating Australian values and were a way of reassuring the public that recent arrivals should not be viewed as a threat but as a national asset. In some ways, they reflected assimilationist sentiment, but over the years the rhetoric evolved to focus on ‘integration’ – the idea that you could maintain distinctive cultural practices and be proud of your heritage, as long as you became resolutely part of one Australian community.

The elaborate conventions were not cheap, hence Treasurer Arthur Fadden once tried to cut them from the budget. Only to be rebuked by Immigration Minister Harold Holt, who argued that there was ‘still too much anti-immigration and anti-alien sentiment to abandon the best weapon we have yet found to combat it’. At a time when Australia’s social cohesion is at the lowest ebb in recent memory, maybe we need to re-arm ourselves to fight for it.

For more information on the Citizenship Conventions click here.