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The Grinch that is the ALP has stolen not just Christmas, but also Anzac Day and Australia Day from the state’s official calendar.

“Merry 25 December” doesn’t quite have the same ring to it. But that’s now the official name of Christmas in South Australia, thanks to a woke Labor government that has also scrubbed Anzac Day and Australia Day from the state’s official public holiday act.

With less than a month before Santa Claus comes to town, the Malinauskas government passed the Public Holidays Bill 2023 which repealed the state’s Holidays Act 1910 and scrubbed the names of most public holidays, replacing them with simply the calendar dates on which they fall.

Labor’s Lame Defence

The Act, which comes into effect on the first day of the new year, has been defended by the state’s left-wing government as important to “protect the penalty rates of workers,” according to SBS News.

Just how penalty rates are better protected by erasing the names of South Australia’s cherished public holidays — whose history is variously decades, centuries or even millennia old — was not explained by Mr Malinauskas or his colleagues.

The only holiday names to avoid the woke chopping block when the bill passed last week were the four Easter holidays from Good Friday to Easter Monday.

In a bizarre tit-for-tat on X (formerly Twitter), staffers behind the official SA Labor account used the sparing of Easter as evidence the party did not harbour a woke agenda.

“Yeah we kept Good Friday, Easter Saturday, Easter Sunday and Easter Monday but we secretly want to abolish Christmas Day. Geniuses!” the account sarcastically scoffed.

However, the dates of Easter are the only annual holidays that are set by the lunar cycle and therefore cannot be rebadged with fixed calendar dates. In other words, if the name ‘Easter’ could have been conveniently abolished in the Act along with all the other holiday names, there’s no doubt Labor would have done so, too.

Erasing Western History

Among those critical of the Act’s wording was former Liberal MP Nicolle Flint, who called the Malinauskas government “un-Australian” in an opinion column for Sky News. She took particular aim at their erasure of Anzac Day, writing:

We did not send Australian men and women to fight for our freedom and make the ultimate sacrifice in World War I, World War II, Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan and peace-keeping operations to have virtue-signalling Labor MPs erase one of our most nationally significant days of commemoration.

We did not put families through the trauma of losing loved ones, and coping with the life-long injuries of those who returned home, to have the day when we remember them reduced to a mere date on the calendar.

Ms Flint noted that even the “most left-wing state Labor administrations in Victoria, Queensland and Western Australia” haven’t gone as far as the ALP in the Festival State.

“You really have to wonder if South Australia is trying to outdo their interstate Labor mates in the battle to see who can destroy western civilization most quickly,” she wrote.

Labor Doubles Down

After Ms Flint shared her column on X, the official account of SA Labor accused her of lying about the party’s desire to scrub important history from the state’s legislation.

However, as pointed out by federal Senator from South Australia Alex Antic — who has also been highly critical of the change — Labor explicitly rejected an amendment put forward by the opposition that would have seen the names of the holidays retained in the Act.

“When the state Libs, led by Nicola Centofanti and Heidi Girolamo MLC… tried to put those names back in by way of amendments this week, they said don’t be silly, we’re not doing that,” Senator Antic told Sky News.

“You have to ask yourself the question… Why would they not allow those names to go back in?” he pressed.

What’s In a Name?

One might argue that renaming Christmas to ‘25 December’ and Anzac Day to ‘25 April’ is no big deal. However, as Ms Flint argued in her column:

Removing words and definitions from legislation is exactly how the Gillard Labor government began Labor’s attack on women back in 2013 when they passed the Sex Discrimination Amendment (Sexual Orientation, Gender Identify and Intersex Status) Act 2013, which in subsection 4 (1) (definition of woman) repealed the definition of a woman.

At the time literally no one realised the gravity of this act and the impact it would have.

Women are having to fight to restore the very definition of the word woman, to protect single-sex spaces in bathrooms, jails, domestic violence shelters and rape crisis centres, and women are having to fight for the right to female-only sporting competitions.

This is a fight women have not yet won.

Ms Flint went on to recount the struggles of Sall Grover, who is waging a legal battle in the Federal Court to run a women’s-only social media business, and Victorian MP Moira Deeming, who is still trying to clear her name after being smeared for attending a ‘Let Women Speak’ rally.

If there is one thing the woke left has taught us in recent years it’s that, in their desperate attempt to win the culture war, they will always launch their first attack in the realm of language.

Indeed, if woke Labor MPs were hoping to ultimately see the date of Australia Day moved or the holiday abolished altogether, erasing its name in legislation is an obvious first move — and at this point, only the wilfully blind refuse to see it.

As Ms Flint so aptly concludes:

Erase the names of these days, and the meaning behind them, and you have precisely what Labor and the left of politics want; an empty meaningless date on the calendar that pretends Western civilisation never existed.

Image via Unsplash.