Right-wing campaign groups and Coalition MPs are again using Australia Day to drive petitions, wedge politics and anti-elite rhetoric. This year’s campaign is being amplified by paid digital ads, ARC grant outrage and calls to “legislate the date”.

While some may be dozing on the beach, for others January is the time for firing up the culture wars. Advance, the digital campaign organisation, is telling us ‘It’s time to take back Australia Day from the people who hate it – the activists and elites’.

In 2024 Opposition Leader Peter Dutton was at the forefront of this culture war – urging ‘patriotic Australians’ to boycott Woolworths for not stocking Australia Day merchandise and trying to cancel Australia Day. Liberal MP Andrew Hastie joined that campaign, paying for ads saying: ‘It’s our day. Don’t let corporate elites change it’.

This year Liberal culture war warriors already have their Australia Day ads up and running on Meta and Instagram. On 13 January the Meta ad library showed the multiple ads already paid for by Coalition MPs. Garth Hamilton, LNP member for Groom had different versions of his anti-immigration message ‘Put Australians First This Australia Day’ while Rick Wilson, Liberal MP for O’Connor wanted viewers to ‘Sign the petition to ban burning the flag’.

Advance, which tripled its income after its success with the ‘No’ campaign on the Voice, has the most ads. There are many different versions of its Australia Day message and a video seen 469,465 times asking ‘Who will put Australians first?’ Its current petitions are on immigration, net zero and protecting or taking back Australia Day.

The Institute of Public Affairs (IPA) is promoting its latest opinion poll showing 50 per cent of Australians believe it is wrong for employers to allow Australia Day to be a day that can be swapped for another day off. According to the IPA Deputy Executive Director, allowing staff to do this ‘is an insult to every patriotic Australian’ and ‘young Australians are leading the charge against our woke corporations’.

The Sir Bertram Stevens Institute (launched in 2025 by Tony Abbott) also has a petition to Save Australia Day – one of its two initial projects along with No Net Zero. It has learned from the Daily Telegraph that Labor has funded a research project to explore changing the date: ‘$1.5m to kill Oz Day’. This Indigenous-led project, funded by the Australian Research Council, addresses polarised debates over Australia’s national identity, with Australia Day as one of the case studies.

The discovery of the ARC grant has caused predictable outrage on Sky News, where it was said to run counter to the way Trump has brought back national pride. Meanwhile, Pauline Hanson’s Please Explain post on the subject ( ‘paying academics to figure out how to dismantle Australia Day’) attracted 1,500 supportive comments. Ironically the ARC project sought to ‘identify common values that unite’ in the context of the politics of division.

Funding of Indigenous research has more than once been the subject of such outrage. In March 2025 the Liberal Party’s Menzies Research Centre released its _Stop the Bloat_ report. Top of its list of wasteful expenditure was a ‘Decolonising breastfeeding’ project, intended to help increase breastfeeding rates among Indigenous Australians. This research project became a lead item in the Advance’s ‘Weak, Woke and Sending us Broke’ 2025 federal election video.

Henry Pike MP

Another Coalition MP incensed about the current ARC grant and the ‘ massive waste of taxpayer funds’ is Henry Pike, MP for Bowman and Opposition Whip. He has become the lead champion of keeping the 26 January date and is responsible for a Private Member’s Bill to prevent it being changed without a referendum.

Pike’s Australia Day Bill, first introduced in 2023, stayed on the notice paper in parliament for two years before lapsing when parliament was prorogued last year for the election. On 1 September he reintroduced it, claiming he had the support of 50,000 Australians for his campaign to give Australia Day legal protection. Coincidentally or not, 1 September is often put forward as an alternative date for Australia Day. Its history as Wattle Day has long been associated with promoting patriotic sentiment.

However, Pike’s ‘Legislate the Date’ campaign claims there is only one possible day, 26 January: ‘We have one day, one culture, one country’. While he doesn’t mention ‘one flag’ its presence in his videos suggests this is a supporting element for a monocultural identity. His legislation is needed because ‘every year we see Canberra elites trying to weaken our national day and our national identity’.

He began 2026 by calling out ‘corporations, media, activists and woke inner-city lefties’ for trying to spread guilt about celebrating our national day and wanting the Voice to do their dirty work and kill it off. He has been very consistent in this message since his First Speech in the Australian Parliament when he committed to upholding ‘suburban values’. He suggested there were ‘many in this building’ who held these values in disdain and ‘conspired to change our flag, our head of state, our national day and our service of remembrance’.

Despite the strong support from Advance for ’legislate the date’ there is little chance that Pike’s Bill will proceed to debate any time soon. This doesn’t mean we won’t hear a whole lot more in the run up to 26 January about inner-city elites trying to ‘steal our day’. Time to use those noise-cancelling headphones that were such a popular present this Christmas.