Australia Day 2026 violently exposes deep national divisions

If the aim of Australia Day is to promote national unity and social cohesion, writes Dave Donovan, then it ain't working.

THERE'S AN old saw about tourists in Ireland pulling up to the side of the road to ask a local yokel how to get to Galway, to receive the reply, “Well, I wouldn’t start from here.”

And so it is with Australia Day. If the aim of this annual holiday is to promote national unity and that new buzzword “social cohesion”, then we certainly wouldn’t start from where we are now. Because clearly, as a nation, we’ve gotten a bit off track and now we’re lost.

This week’s Australia Day “celebrations” were a sure sign of that and have been, to use the local vernacular (dutifully imported from America), “an absolute shitshow”. Nazis were peeling off Nazi salutes, being arrested for spouting antisemitic hate at “March for Australia” anti-immigration rallies and bashing peaceful anti-racism protesters all over the country.

This charming day was attended by several politicians, including White supremacist One Nation leader Pauline Hanson. She was interviewed by famous broadcasting drunkard Karl Stefanovic, who used the opportunity to defend Australia Day as a “great event”, deride “woke culture” and tell dissenters to “lighten up”. This was met by widespread approval on social media by the “Love it or Leave!!” crowd, accompanied by millions of Australian flag emojis, and even more exclamation marks and spelling errors.

The sun finally set on all this family fun in Perth, when a bomb of shrapnel and nails was lobbed into a crowd at an Indigenous “Day of Mourning” event. A 31-year-old White man was arrested. Mercifully, the “device”, as it was demurely described by authorities, didn’t go off. Nor was the incident described by investigators as a case of domestic terrorism, possibly because it wasn’t directed at White people.

Looking back on the holiday, it seems clear Australia Day is not really doing a very good job bringing us together, except perhaps for lovers of Western civilisation to share insults, fists, hobnailed boots and potentially deadly ordnance with less pale Australians and their allies. So much unity, one could literally explode!

Of course, if you wanted to get to Australia Day being a one of widespread social inclusion and national unity, you certainly wouldn’t celebrate it on the 26^th of January, or as it might be more accurately known, the anniversary of the Botany Bay British Convict Colony Establishment Day in 1788.

It was the day that the New South Wales Colony could trace its birth, certainly, but not Australia. Australia was Federated as a dominion (not a nation) by an Act of the British Westminster Parliament on 1 January 1901.

Various events have happened since then that convince most people we are now a nation, such as Gallipoli, the Statute of Westminster and the Australia Act, amongst others. But we aren’t really, not quite, since we still retain the British monarch as our head of state and keep the Union Jack in the corner of our flag. This flag is, technically, a blue British ensign with some stars on it. In fact, it is almost identical to the New Zealand flag and was once described by comedian Jerry Seinfeld as “Britain at night”. Just the thing to wave on our “national” day.

In any case, for a national day, you certainly wouldn’t celebrate the anniversary of a day when invading imperialists lobbed up on one of six Australian colonies with a few boatloads of minor criminals in chains, took possession in the name of the King and planted that flag we still keep in the corner, so to speak.

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Most especially, given that it is seen by the original inhabitants of the land as the day of their dispossession. A day of calamity, which thereafter led to the collapse of their ancient and deeply spiritual 60,000-year culture, calamitous genocidal wars, heinous massacres and ongoing abuse, privation and persecution. If you wanted to promote healing and national cohesion, it is hard to think of a worse one. Downright disrespectful and overtly divisive, most impartial observers would surely say.

Especially given it hasn’t even been the day on which we have always celebrated Australia Day and, in fact, only because of uniformity in Australia in 1994. It isn’t even traditional! So, you wouldn’t start on 26 January if you wanted to get to national unity and social cohesion.

But let IA tell you a little secret, which you probably knew anyway. The people who seem to love that day the most and demand it must be celebrated on 26 January aren’t interested in social cohesion at all. In fact, they want less national unity, not more.

If you wanted national unity, you would not have a Federal Government appoint an antisemitism envoy with close links to a group that lobbied against an Indigenous Voice to Parliament. And you would not pass laws to outlaw antisemitic hate speech specifically, ignoring other forms of hate speech which are demonstrably far more prevalent in our society.

This focus on Jews has made them not less of a target, but rather more of a target in our society, for the perception of having a privileged position in the corridors of power. Of course, these laws, as discussed in last week’s editorial, led to the break-up of the Coalition, at least partially due to many in their group wanting the option to engage in vitriolic speech against those they see as the enemy, such as Indigenous Australians and immigrants — especially those of the Islamic faith.

This has been amply demonstrated by the arrest of the Nazi spouting antisemitic hate speech at the March for Australia. It has been shown by two former Australian Prime Ministers, Tony Abbott and Scott Morrison, spouting hateful anti-Islamic rhetoric over the last week. Of course, both these Anglophile Christian lay-preachers were notable for their pitiless persecution of immigrants in offshore detention facilities in office.

Right when we need positive leadership that brings us together and unites us, here’s Scott Morrison scapegoating the entire Muslim Australian community again. pic.twitter.com/qNMkth4HRS
— Kon Karapanagiotidis (@Kon__K) January 29, 2026

It has also been shown by criminal trickster James "Ashbygate" Ashby, Pauline Hanson’s sidekick in her anti-Indigenous, anti-immigrant One Nation party, this week praising Trump and condemning Islam as a hateful ideology, and calling for Muslims to be expelled from Australia in their hundreds of thousands. Read Dr Abul Rizvi’s article on these pages about this exercise in “national unity” HERE.

If these people want a unified nation, they want it to be a unified White Australia, like it was prior to the 1970s. But that will never happen, so in fact what they want is not “One Nation” but a divided nation, in which they can spout their rhetoric and attract the ignorant to their divisive dog-whistling hyperbole and harmful rhetoric.

If you wanted a unified nation, you would not start with politicians expressing these hateful views for cynical objectives, showing an utter lack of civic responsibility and good faith. They don’t love Australia. They love power. And to get power, they will rip this land apart.

We can’t get all the way to national unity easily, not from here. But the first thing we should do is head towards changing the date. After that, let’s get the map out, not listen to some loudmouth idiot on the side of the road, as we have been doing in recent times.

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This is an excerpt from the Independent Australia subscribers editorial. To receive this in full in your email inbox weekly, along with links to all the other stories published during the week, subscribe HERE.

Follow IA founder Dave Donovan on X/Twitter @davrosz and Bluesky @davrosz.bsky.social, Independent Australia on Bluesky @independentaus.bsky.social, X/Twitter @independentaus and Facebook HERE.