‘Just chill out’ on Oz Day, PM urges Peter Dutton
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has told Opposition Leader Peter Dutton to “just chill out” about Australia Day controversies.
Albanese was asked after a speech to the National Press Club of Australia in Canberra on Friday whether he supported calls to boycott pubs and businesses that don’t back the national celebration on January 26.
It came after polling in the Nine newspapers on Friday showed public support for marking the national holiday on that date had risen from 47 per cent to 61 per cent in the past two years.
“I sometimes think that Peter Dutton every year has a fight with an imaginary friend over something that most Australians are just getting on with,” Albanese said.
“One of the things that Australia Day celebrates is the fact that we’re not a Soviet-style command system. You know, like just chill out, get on with life.
“The debates over which company has thongs in it. Last year, it was… boycotting Woolworths, Australia’s largest employer. Did I support that? No, I didn’t support that. I support Australia Day.”
Albanese said he would be in Canberra for national events on Australia Day, and again urged Dutton to join him.
His comments followed Education Minister Jason Clare calling speculation over the Australia Day date a distraction.
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“The date’s not changing … we have the same fake fight every year,” he told Seven’s Sunrise.
“We’re the best country in the world. Australia Day is a great opportunity to celebrate.”
Earlier, Dutton had said Australians should contact a major pub and hospitality group that has decided not to hold official celebrations.
“I just say to patrons who know the pubs this company owns, I would encourage them to call the company and express their view and express that they don’t support this abandonment of our national day,” he said.
“What other country, what other Western civilisation, abandons its national day? We shouldn’t and Australia Day should be a great celebration of an amazing country.”
The Hong Kong-owned Australian Venue Co, which has more than 200 pubs and restaurants across the country, has decided to acknowledge the long weekend rather than the national holiday.
There was a furore in December when the same company said it would ban Australia Day celebrations over the “sadness” and “hurt” the day can cause. Days later, after a wave of criticism and threats of boycott, the Melbourne-based company apologised.
Dutton accused the company of profiting from the public holiday, and not honouring the wishes of a “vast majority of Australians”.
“[Why should a business]reap a huge profit off the back of hard working Australians, when they would shun the wishes of those Australians?” he said.
Dutton has also pledged to reinstate mandatory citizenship ceremonies on Australia Day if the Coalition wins this year’s federal election.
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Police ‘out in force’ amid fears of racist attacks
Meanwhile, NSW Police Minister Yasmin Catley fears the public holiday could become a flashpoint for heightened community tension amid a wave of antisemitic attacks and public shows of Islamophobia.
State and federal authorities have launched major investigations into a spate of high-profile incidents, many of which have targeted Jewish sites such as synagogues.
Most of the attacks have been in Sydney, including the latest major incident in which a childcare centre near a synagogue in the city’s east was set alight and sprayed with anti-Semitic graffiti.
Catley admitted that tensions could rise further on Sunday for Australia Day, which has been the focus of large-scale protests in recent years.
“But let me tell you this, the NSW Police will be out in force in this city, in Sydney,” she told ABC Radio.
NSW authorities have made 10 arrests, but charges are yet to be laid over the childcare centre attack and an arson and graffiti strike on the former home of a prominent Jewish community leader.
Federal police have identified that foreign actors recruiting local “criminals for hire” could be behind some of the incidents.
State and federal leaders also agreed on Tuesday to set up a national database of antisemitic incidents to better track the crimes, which have also included the firebombing of a Melbourne synagogue.
Muslim community leaders have identified rising cases of Islamophobia following Hamas’s attack and Israel’s subsequent war in Gaza, complaining that the incidents often go under-reported.
A week ago, offensive slogans targeting the Islamic community were graffitied on a wall in a south-west Sydney suburb with a large Muslim population.
Officers in NSW’s central-west are also investigating spray-painted of swastikas on a campaign billboard for Sam Farraway, the National Party’s candidate for the federal seat of Calare.
“Far-right extremism and neo-Nazism has no place in our country,” he posted on Facebook on Tuesday, along with a photo of the defaced billboard.
– with AAP
