Australia Day - The Holiday That Divides A Nation

Happy Australia Day.

That’s not a phrase that you hear very often, but I genuinely wish you a great day. I hope wherever you are and whatever you are doing, you get the chance to sit down and celebrate the things that are great about being in Australia. Because let’s face it – there are plenty and they deserve to be celebrated.

?Here’s the thing – Australia Day, January 26th, is kind of an odd day to celebrate our national day. It wasn’t, for example when the First Fleet arrived. That was between the 18th and 20th of January; it wasn’t when we first got to Sydney Cove – that was January 21, it wasn’t when we formed our Federation which was January 1, 1901?and we didn’t even celebrate Jan 26th as a national day until 1994 so in many ways it’s something of a curious choice.

?The way we celebrate it too is curious. In Sydney we run fleet arrival re-enactments – the bravery of people sailing to the other side of the world in small boats shouldn't be misjudged – but it’s also a hell of a thing because some people that’s a symbol of invasion and we ought to think about that. It feels at best tone deaf.

?In the main we celebrate it in the way that we like to celebrate these things in Australia, by being outside, by being together, by drinking slightly too much and by relaxing – but it’s become a day which divides the nation.

?Here at CoreData we are very interested in the way that people think, how they choose, what they believe and how the conduct themselves – in attitude, behaviour and belief and we are always looking for patterns that are useful.

We mostly focus on what that means for Financial Services - but increasingly this year we have found we are drawn into doing research on Social Services - for Governments, for Legal firms and other service providers.

So we thought Australia Day – a day which divides the nation would provide some insight – and we conducted ?a survey of our Australian Panel of 150,000 Mass Affluent Australians and asked them what they thought and then we split it by gender and by generation and the results are really interesting.

In two days we had responses from more than 1250 Australians aged 18 and older and very quickly found there are real difference by generation and by gender.

We found that older Australians are less likely to believe Australia Day should be moved to another date, more likely to mark the day as a celebration of Australia’s past achievements, and less likely to support a day to reflect upon Australian and Aboriginal history.????????

Younger Australians are less likely to celebrate the day, more likely to support changing the date and more likely to have recently changed their plans for the day based on their perceptions of the political overtones.

?Overall, Australians are split on whether to celebrate Australia Day at all, with 54 per cent saying they will celebrate it and 46 per cent saying they will not.

?Men are more likely to celebrate the day than women (64% to 47%) and are less likely to support changing the date of Australia Day from January 26 (38% to 53%). Men are also less likely than women to support a day to reflect on Australian and Aboriginal history (70% to 85%).

But the starkest differences exist across the generations.

Almost seven in 10 (69.6%) of Gen Z say they do not intend celebrating Australia Day and three in 10 (30.4%) say they will. The proportions are revered in the Pre-Boomer generation, where two-thirds (66.1%) say they plan to celebrate the day and a third (33.9%) say they do not.

The older and younger generations are at odds on the question of changing the date of Australia Day from January 26. Eight in 10 (80.4%) Gen Z and seven in 10 (70.7%) Gen Y support the move, while almost seven in 10 (68.8%) Baby Boomers and three-quarters (75.0%) of Pre-Boomer oppose the idea.

Almost a quarter (23.9%) of Gen Z and one in five (20.3) Gen Y believe it is extremely important that the date be changed, while three in 10 (29.5%) Pre-Boomers and a quarter (24.1%) of Baby Boomers think changing the date is not at all important.

The political overtones attached to both the day and its meaning have given younger generations of Australians pause to think. Almost four in 10 (39.1%) Gen Z and three in 10 (30.0) Gen Y say their plans have changed in recent years due to their perceptions of the political meaning of the day, while the same is true for only one in 20 (5.4%) Pre-Boomers and fewer than one in 10 (8.2%) Baby Boomers.

The younger generations are also more likely to consider it important that the date of the day be changed for the sake of improving relations with Australia’s Indigenous populations. Almost three in 10 (29.3%) Gen Z believe it to be extremely important and more than a quarter (26.3%) of Gen Y say the same thing, while only around one in 10 Pre-Boomers (8.0%) and Baby Boomers (10.3%) think it’s extremely important and around one in five (22.3% and 18.7% respectively think it is not at all important.?

The research is interesting and provides a snapshot of a nation increasingly divided along age and gender lines.

There is of course a great deal of complexity in this data and there are real clues that the complexity is to do with how the different cohorts see history, how they frame decisions, the role that the past plays in decision making and even in the area of what Sigmund Freud would have called the narcissism of small differences. (1) ( See Civilization and its Discontents 1929)

Here's the challenge for us as Australians: While it's important to celebrate what has been achieved here, it is also important that we work out how to do better with our indigenous Australians and how we embrace and acknowledge our history without painting over the parts of it we should be ashamed of.

(1) This is a book written in 1929 and published in 1930 - arguably Freuds most important work and probably his most famous - it focuses on the stress between the struggle in humans between the desire for individuality and the desire to fit in. If you want to learn more here's a decent YouTube Summary - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gUqnkShKQI4&ab_channel=%F0%9F%A7%AALaure%27sDigitalDiaries%F0%9F%8C%BF