Left-Wing Melbourne Council Votes to Stop Holding Citizenship Ceremonies on Australia Day

Jetski’s fly the Australian and Aboriginal flags during Australia Day celebrations at Circular Quay, in Sydney, Australia, on Jan. 26, 2021. AAP Image/Dan Himbrechts

A Melbourne council led by the left-wing Greens Party will cease holding citizenship ceremonies on Australia Day on Jan. 26 and instead host a “day of mourning” event for Indigenous Australians starting in 2023.

The Merri-bek council in Melbourne’s north will be the third council in the city after two other inner-north Greens-led councils, Yarra and Darwin, to abolish the citizenship ceremonies on Jan. 26.

The January date is the day when Captain Arthur Phillip’s First Fleet arrived in Sydney Cove (now known as Circular Quay) and claimed Australia for the British Crown. It is perceived by the majority of Australians as a celebratory occasion where Australians commemorate the birth of their liberal country and democracy.

However, in recent years the day has become the focus of Indigenous rights activists who view the day as the start of an invasion of the homeland.

The Merri-bek council has chosen to take the latter standpoint about Jan. 26, with notes from the council’s Dec. 7 meeting agenda declaring that the day “marks the beginning of the British Invasion of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander lands and oppression of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people and this therefore not an appropriate date for the inclusive national celebration.”

The council’s First Nations Advisory Committee also recommended that the council hold an annual event to welcome new citizens and “develop First Nations cultural knowledge.”

Councillor James Concern on Wednesday night criticised the idea of celebrating and welcoming new Australian citizens on Australia Day, saying it was “pretty shameful.”

“In a deeply twisted irony .. the council asks First Nations elders to conduct their culturally significant Welcome to Country ceremony on a day that signifies their own disposition.”

First Nations is a term originally used to describe Aboriginal people in Canada, but it has been widely adopted in Australia to refer to Indigenous Australians.

However, critics have argued that the use of “First Nations” in the Australian context was misleading as the concept of ‘nations’ didn’t exist in traditional Aboriginal culture and that the term paints a sanitised picture of Aboriginal history.

Council Risks Losing Citizenship Authority

Under the Citizenship Ceremonies Code amended by the previous centre-right Liberal government, councils are required to hold citizenship ceremonies on Australia Day, and refusing to do so risks losing the authority to host citizenship ceremonies.

But Merri-bek council said the new Labor minister “may choose to take no action, or review or amend the Citizenship Ceremonies Code so that Jan 26 citizenship ceremonies are no longer compulsory.”

The council’s decision comes after the new centre-left Labor government said it supported implementing the Uluru Statement from the Heart in full, including a referendum on the Indigenous Voice. However, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has not publicly supported changing Jan. 26 into Invasion Day or Mourning Day.

Changing the Date Divides Australians Academics Argue

The push to abolish Australia Day has met with backlash from intellectuals who said it divides rather than unites the country.

Gabriel Moens, emeritus professor of law at the University of Queensland, wrote in a commentary on The Epoch Times that it’s part of a progressive movement driven by critical race theory (CRT).

“The infiltration of CRT into the curriculum of Australia’s higher education sector is often paired with the demonisation of Western civilisation and allegations of ethnocentrism,” he wrote.

“Also, statues and monuments of historical figures, who are deemed to have contributed to, or benefited from, racial discrimination, are dismantled or destroyed.”

Meanwhile, Kevin Donnelly, a leading Australian conservative public intellectual, said Australian students are often presented with a sanitised picture of Indigenous histories and cultures due to the impact of woke ideology on the education system.

“In schools and universities, as a result of neo-Marxist inspired critical race and post-colonial theories, students are taught Western societies are inherently racist, there is nothing beneficial about Western civilisation and, if they are white, told they must atone for past crimes committed against People of Colour (POC) including exploitation, cruelty, slavery, dispossession and genocide,” Donnelly argued in his new book ‘The Dictionary of Woke.”

This is despite Australia owing much to Western civilisation and Judeo-Christianity, he said.