Labor Ignores Overwhelming Support for January 26, Blows $1.5 Million on Push to “Change the Date”
Labor faces backlash for spending $1.5 million studying a change to Australia Day, despite overwhelming poll after poll showing Australians strongly support keeping January 26.
The Australian Labor Party is being accused of wasting $1.5 million on research into moving Australia Day.
The Australian National University was given the sizeable taxpayer handout to probe the idea of ditching the 26th of January.
This is despite opinion polls repeatedly showing that upwards of 70% of Australians want to keep the date.
As revealed by a Courier Mail poll on Monday, 12 January 2026.
Overwhelming Support
When asked, “Should the date of Australia Day change?”
A massive 97% initially voted to keep January 26th as the day we celebrate all things Australian.
Of the more than 3600 who had reportedly participated, only 3% voted for a different day. A miserly 1% said they didn’t want to celebrate Australia at all.
Using stats from The Courier Mail’s current Facebook poll, of 7,500 participants, 81% are in favour of January 26, with 13% demanding the date be ditched.
Another Courier Mail poll (still active for subscribers) from January 22, 2025, also revealed solid support for keeping the date.
87% of 30,491 voters said no to moving Australia Day, compared to 12% preferring change.
Notably, 86% of 28,000 voters added that they were less likely to support a business that boycotted the national celebration.
78% considered “invasion day” protests divisive, and 77% said they would reject any government that ditched the date.
A significant 84% (roughly 23,000) of those who took the poll told The Courier Mail they would be actively celebrating Australia Day.
According to number crunchers, Ipsos, in 2024, 48% of Australians “disagreed with the idea of moving Australia Day to an alternative date.”
Ipsos said 28% agreed, and 24% – mostly foreign-born citizens – were undecided.
49% of those surveyed said they believed the “date would be changed within the next 10 years.”
Whereas 41% said ditching the date was unlikely.
Notably, “those most likely to support the campaign to change the date are those under 25, and Greens voters.”
This demographic is also the “most likely to think that the date will be changed within the next ten years.”
82% of people said they felt proud to be Australian, even though Ipsos’s survey recorded 54% of Aussies “believing that Indigenous Australians face racism either all the time or frequently.”
Unsurprisingly, those who believe this are younger people and Labor-Greens voters.
Further confirming that a majority of Australians want to keep the date, a 2023 Roy Morgan poll aligned with The Courier Mail and Ipsos findings.
In 2023, “64% of Australians said the day should be called Australia Day, compared to 36% who want it called ‘Invasion Day’.”
Morgan also identified a positive trend among younger Australians who think Australia Day should stay.
In 2024, 58% of those surveyed told Morgan Australia Day should still be celebrated on January 26.
Agitprop
The numbers do not bode well for the Labor Prime Minister’s latest scheme to “change the date.”
Given the clear data, the Albanese government are either being blatantly reckless with other people’s money, or they have a hidden agenda.
To the discerning, the $1.5 million package could be viewed as re-education propaganda posing as a harmless opinion survey.
For instance, as The Courier Mail explained, Change The Date? Australia Day, Reconciliation and the Politics of Division comes complete with podcasts, school resources, and policy recommendation analysis.
Additionally, the $1.5 million appears to benefit race-baiting, perpetual grievance activism.
This could be seen as giving an unfair advantage to already well-funded false narratives from the “Australia is a racist country” Marxian-Woke voting bloc.
One million dollars goes a long way towards helping steer the “debate” hard left.
Measured alongside Albo’s atrocious “hate speech” proposals, the evidence strongly suggests that the Australian Labor Party could be planning to bully Australians into submission.
Outlawing “hate speech”, while pushing Australia Day hate onto a clear majority who want to keep the date, is a clear tell.
___
Image courtesy of Unsplash.
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Its secularism that drives the divide, godlessness. We can say it’s this, that or the other reason but ultimately its godlessness which drives division and hate.
Labor and others can do all the studies and polls they like, they can stand there and make rule after rule for hate speech and images and writing or whatever but its their very own godless policies, their purposeful eradication of anything God based in society that fuels hate and divide. No God = no true love. No true love = hate and divide. They will never eradicate hate in any form as they are the very ones inflaming and creating it blindly chasing their own tail for the answer.
Writing this took 3 minutes and zero dollars to discover.
I know our Church are having a BBQ and fun day for the ‘January Long Weekend’. We’ve been calling it that for a few years now.
I think we got the idea from Salty’s at Bondi. And you can’t get any more Australian than them! https://saltysbondi.com.au/whats-on/january-long-weekend/
https://www.harriganscameronpark.com.au/event/january-long-weekend/
If New Zealand celebrates itself as the land of the long white cloud, we can celebrate ourselves as the land of the long weekend.
What about a PM’s Birthday holiday? An Aussie sentiment. April 1st has been suggested.
Hear! Hear! – Thank you Albert.
Changing the name to January Long Weekend is caving into wokeism taking Australia out of it. Let’s not offend anyone with the words Australia Day! Now let’s add a 2 hour bottomless drink your brains out to it at Saltys and away we go.
Come celebrate January Long Weekend with bottomless booze ups.
Doesn’t get anymore Christian than that! 🫤
Life was better back in the days before they forced it upon us. It was always thought of as a NSW day more than anything else.
I preferred it better when Jan 26 wasn’t a public holiday. The long weekend was always better. Watching the cricket from Adelaide, watching the Superbowl.
But oh no, NSW had to flex its muscle and force all us to celebrate their founding as our ‘national’ day.
Bring back the good old days. Or even better, let’s make June 6 a public holiday – the day we broke away from NSW in 1859. We’ve been celebrating that much longer than we’ve been celebrating Jan 26.
Albert has suggested a PM’s Birthday holiday, with April 1st. as the appropriate date. But he doesn’t identify the fool(s). Is it the PM, or those who elected his lousy government?
I think the great thing is that for many Australians who either have public sector jobs or work for big companies they can still work on Jan 26, but have a more important day off.
And it would seem the majority would seem to do that these days. Where I live, the Feb 6 celebration always attracts crowds of around 10,000 every year – dwarfing anything that we have locally for Jan26. Others have Paniyiri off, or St Pats or whatever. All far more important for us locals than some NSW celebration.
It’s great, people are now working on Jan 26 but having other days off that are more meaningful to them.
And maybe that’s what we should be made available to everyone. Jan 26 legislated as Australia Day – the day Australians get to chose what Australia means to them – that way those who still have an affinity to NSW can celebrate it on that day, if they want to, and the rest of us get to choose when we have our day off.
Pretty sure that’s how it is for most of the workforce at the moment, I’d just like to see it rolled out nationwide.
If you still want to celebrate it on Jan 26, go for it, just let the rest of us take it when we want. If you offered this people, you’d pretty soon see those poll figures shift (and polls can shift very quickly – just look at the polls for the Voice – they went from 80% to a minority in no time!)
26th is good for me. Any change will be an attempt by the left to bring in more woke control.
And yet it was the left who brought it in!
Australia Day only became a thing under Paul Keating and Wayne Goss. Please don’t try and make out it was ever some great conservative tradition. Not here it wasn’t. Sir Joh didn’t want a bar of it.
So you’re the woke one if you’re trying to impose your Labor Party inspired public holiday onto the rest of us!
There’s plenty of us conservatives who want to change the date. Warren Mundine, Mark MacFarlane et al.
Sure we don’t have the numbers in the polls right now, but neither did we at the start of 2023 with the Voice vote.
Time to turn the tide against you woke people who don’t want Australia Day to stand for our traditions and nationhood.
We are sick and tired of celebrating NSW and all your progressiveness and wokeness on Jan 26. You lefties got your wish when you imposed your woke holiday on us under Keating.
It’s time for us conservatives to break free from you left wing liberals and claim our own day, and it sure ain’t gonna be Jan 26.
I love 26 January -Australia Day . I wear my top and shorts which feature the Flag .