Persistence Pays Off: Australia Day Ceremonies Return to 26 January in the Adelaide Hills

After nearly three years of letters, deputations, petitions and persistence, Adelaide Hills Council has changed course. But the story of John and Edna Tate is about more than Australia Day. It raises a larger question about local democracy, equal citizenship and what can happen when ordinary people keep turning up.

Much of my writing over the past year has examined what happens when government becomes difficult to question, when transparency weakens, when consultation becomes something done around citizens rather than with them, or when ordinary people begin to feel that decisions affecting them have already been made somewhere beyond their reach.

This story is different, and I am grateful that it is.

On Tuesday, 8 September 2026, Adelaide Hills Council amended the position it had taken three years earlier on Australia Day. From January 2027, Council will again conduct a citizenship and civic awards ceremony on 26 January, while a new community grant program will allow support for events held on or around the national day. Those who would prefer to receive citizenship or a civic award on another date will retain that opportunity, and Council has also committed to respectful and culturally appropriate engagement with First Nations people, relevant cultural authorities, community stakeholders and the wider community.

In my discussion with John and Edna Tate the following day, John described the division as 10 votes to one, with one councillor absent. The Council media release confirms the substance of the new resolution, although at the time of writing the formal minutes confirming the division have not yet been published.

For John and Edna, and for the residents who eventually joined their campaign, the decision marked the culmination of a journey that began not with a political organisation or professional advocacy campaign, but with two people looking at one another and deciding that if somebody was going to do something, perhaps it had to be them.

When the invitation did not arrive

John Tate had been involved in his Adelaide Hills community for many years. In 2018, at Federation Park in Gumeracha, Adelaide Hills Council presented him with a civic award for community service. He remembers a large Australia Day gathering, flags being waved, families coming together, citizenship and civic awards being presented, and what he describes as an atmosphere of joy and belonging.

At the Council meeting immediately preceding this latest decision, John held that award up before elected members and reminded them of what the occasion had once meant to him.

After receiving the award, John and Edna continued to receive invitations to attend the annual event. Ahead of January 2024, however, no invitation arrived. Edna recalled in our latest conversation that John kept wondering what had happened until he eventually contacted Councillor Malcolm Herrmann and discovered that Council had changed its position on ceremonies held on 26 January.

For Edna, the issue carried its own significance. Now 90, she came to Australia from Yorkshire and still speaks with considerable emotion about becoming Australian. In our latest discussion she described her naturalisation certificate as one of her treasured possessions. Australia was not simply the place in which she happened to live, it was a country she had chosen, become part of, raised her family in and grown to love.

That is worth remembering whenever this debate is reduced to competing slogans about 26 January. For some Aboriginal Australians, the date carries painful historical associations. For other Australians, including many who arrived here from somewhere else, Australia Day can carry a profound sense of belonging. Citizenship itself is partly about that transition from stranger to fellow citizen, and I do not think recognising one of those experiences requires us to pretend the other does not exist.

John and Edna's initial response was not particularly complicated. They were angry, they talked about what had happened and repeatedly returned to the same thought: someone should do something. Eventually Edna supplied the answer that would come to define the next few years: “That someone is us, John.”

They wrote a letter and sent it to Council by registered post, initially expecting that it might disappear into the machinery of local government. Instead, Council acknowledged it and they discovered that they could make a formal deputation.

That was where their involvement properly began.

I became involved early in that process. John contacted me while preparing for his deputation, I helped him work through some of what he wanted to put before Council, and I attended with him. In April 2024, I subsequently wrote about the emerging dispute in Moving Australia Day Ceremonies Did Not Sit Well With This Adelaide Hills Ratepayer. (I'm no longer publishing on that platform)

At that stage none of us knew where the story would end.

What Council had actually decided

Precision matters here, particularly because opponents of Council's position often described it as “cancelling Australia Day”. Adelaide Hills Council did not, and could not, abolish the national public holiday.

At its meeting of 25 July 2023, Council resolved that it would not conduct citizenship ceremonies, confer awards or support events on 26 January, recognising what it described as the difficulties associated with that date for First Nations people. The Chief Executive Officer was directed to determine alternative dates that would remain compliant with the Australian Citizenship Ceremonies Code.

The decision followed a change announced by the Albanese Government in December 2022. Councils were given greater flexibility to conduct Australia Day citizenship ceremonies on 26 January or within the three days before or after it. The Federal Government nevertheless continued to express a strong expectation that ceremonies remain connected with Australia Day and acknowledged that many new citizens valued completing their citizenship journey on the national day.

The Council's 2023 decision was also not made without any consultation, and that distinction deserves to be acknowledged. The report brought to Council records consultation with the Adelaide Hills Reconciliation Working Group and the three community organisations then conducting award ceremonies on Council's behalf: the Lions Club of Torrens Valley, Lions Club of Onkaparinga and East Torrens Historical Society. The Australia Day Council of South Australia and the Local Government Association were also listed among the external agencies consulted.

My concern was narrower.

Council had undertaken targeted consultation with relevant organisations, but it had not sought broader community views from Adelaide Hills residents and ratepayers before altering a longstanding civic practice. The question was never whether First Nations voices or the community organisations responsible for running events should have been heard. They plainly should have been. It was whether that consultation, important as it was, was sufficient to establish what the wider community Council represented thought about the change.

That question became sharper in April 2024.

At the 9 April meeting, Councillor Pauline Gill moved that Council undertake independent community consultation on the community's views of holding citizenship ceremonies and presenting civic awards on Australia Day, examine attendance at the various January events, and consult First Nations people appropriately as part of the process. Gill's stated rationale was that Council should validate whether its decision reflected what most citizens actually wanted and listen to all sides of the debate.

The Council officer response in the agenda itself acknowledged that further consultation could increase the information available about community opinion, but also warned that broader consultation risked providing a platform for racism and could become divisive or harmful.

Gill's motion was defeated seven votes to two.

That same meeting also reminds us that opposition to John and Edna's position was real. Council received a petition organised by Dylan Russell of Summertown with 116 signatures asking Council to maintain its decision to move citizenship and civic ceremonies away from 26 January, continue its position of respect for First Nations people and reject the proposed broader consultation.

That matters because this story should never be told as though one side represented everyone and the other represented nobody.

When two people became a community campaign

John and Edna kept going. Over the following two years and eight months, John says he spoke from the Council gallery at least a dozen times, while he and Edna also met elected members and Council leadership privately in attempts to find a way through the disagreement.

Other residents began joining them, and what had begun with two people grew into a Council Action Group drawing support from different parts of the Adelaide Hills.

Perhaps the most significant thing they did was simply go outside and talk to people. They door-knocked, sat near post offices, spoke with residents and gathered signatures. John has often described this as attempting to conduct the broader community canvassing he believed Council itself should have undertaken.

On 13 August 2024, Council formally received a petition organised by John Tate containing 1,044 signatories. It asked Council to celebrate Australia Day on 26 January and continue the longstanding tradition of presenting civic awards and hosting citizenship ceremonies on the day. Council's officer report noted that the material supplied with the petition also contained a separate public-consultation analysis, although that analysis did not form part of the compliant petition itself.

By September, the wider Australia Day issue was also attracting more public attention. I covered some of that broader momentum in The Australia Day Issue Is Gaining Traction, including developments in other South Australian councils and the pressure building around Adelaide Hills.

Then another resident, Leone Taylor, organised a further petition. On 22 October 2024, Council formally received 599 signatures supporting reinstatement. At the same meeting it received a 376-signature petition supporting Council's existing position and asking that the decision not be reconsidered for the remainder of the term.

Those competing petitions strengthen, rather than weaken, the democratic point.

They show that genuine disagreement existed within the Adelaide Hills community. A petition is not a scientific opinion poll, regardless of which side collects the larger number, but by this stage it was difficult to argue that the matter was settled or that objections to Council's position could be reduced to one or two disgruntled residents.

Democracy does not require unanimity. It requires that disagreement can be expressed, tested and heard without one side being placed outside the bounds of legitimate civic participation.

The compromise that came before the victory

There is another part of this history that I think deserves more attention than the eventual vote.

By April 2025, John was no longer simply asking Council to reverse its position. At the 22 April Council meeting, where the minutes record him speaking in the Public Forum about the Australia Day dispute, he presented what he described as a “potential path forward for reconciliation.

His proposal was straightforward. Council could conduct several citizenship ceremonies throughout the year, including one on 26 January. Civic award recipients could be offered a choice of available dates. Community organisations could hold events on different dates, but Council funding should not be withheld merely because a group chose to celebrate on Australia Day itself. Nobody who objected to 26 January would be forced to receive citizenship or an award on that date.

John went further. He told Council that if an Indigenous group invited him to attend an event on another day, he would willingly go.

His point was not that everyone must think the same way about 26 January. His point was that accommodation should operate in both directions.

As he told councillors: “The only way we're going to fix this is talk about it.”

That moment is important because it changes the character of the dispute. This did not have to become a contest in which one group could participate only by defeating another. People who regarded 26 January as a day of celebration could retain that opportunity, while those who preferred another date could exercise that choice as well.

That is remarkably close to where Council has now landed.

A Council prepared to reconsider

The issue remained alive during 2025 and 2026. John, Edna and other members of the Action Group continued engaging Council, more residents attended meetings and the debate again attracted media attention.

At the final meeting before the decision, John returned to the civic award Council itself had given him in 2018. He held it before elected members, spoke of the Australia Day gathering at which he had received it, and reminded Council of the petitions and other community responses accumulated during the years since its original decision.

His appeal was simple: people had been speaking about this for a long time, and councillors now had an opportunity to listen, and Council did.

From 2027 onwards, Council will conduct a citizenship and civic awards ceremony on 26 January. A dedicated community event grant program will also operate from 2027 for events held on or around the date. Alternative citizenship and award opportunities will remain available, and Council has committed its administration to respectful and culturally appropriate engagement with First Nations people, relevant cultural authorities, community stakeholders and the wider community.

Mayor Nathan Daniell's role deserves acknowledgement. Daniell supported the original position in 2023. He has now been prepared to support a different approach. In Council's statement following the September decision, he acknowledged why he had backed the earlier position, particularly his desire to respond respectfully to concerns raised by First Nations people. But he also made the point that leadership requires representatives to reflect on how decisions operate in practice, learn from experience and be prepared to adjust when they hear from their community.

One sentence in the statement particularly stands out:

“This decision preserves choice.”

I think Mayor Daniell deserves credit for that. Changing one's mind after receiving further information is too often treated in politics as weakness, hypocrisy or surrender. Sometimes it can be those things. But if we genuinely want representatives to listen, we cannot then attack them simply because listening causes them to reconsider.

Accountability cannot mean demanding that politicians admit error while punishing them whenever they do.

The new Council position does not require everyone to agree about Australian history or the meaning of 26 January. It instead allows differing convictions to coexist. Those who value receiving citizenship or a civic award on Australia Day can choose to do so. Those who do not want that date remain free to choose another opportunity.

That looks much more like accommodation to me.

Equal citizenship without demanding uniformity

There is a consistency here with another issue I have examined at length in South Australia.

My opposition to the First Nations Voice has never rested on believing Aboriginal Australians possess less dignity, less worth or less right to be heard. Quite the opposite. Every person bears the image of God, and it is partly because I begin there that I remain wary of political structures that give inherited identity an enduring role in determining our relationship with the state. I developed that argument more fully in The Othering of the Citizen.

The Voice and this Australia Day dispute are not the same policy question, and I do not want to collapse them into one. But both bring me back to a question that runs through much of my writing: how do Australians with genuinely different histories, needs and convictions remain equal citizens of the same political community?

That is partly why I find Council's new approach encouraging. It does not demand uniformity. Someone who does not wish to receive citizenship or a civic award on 26 January can choose another opportunity, while someone for whom becoming an Australian citizen on Australia Day carries deep meaning can choose that date.

Difference is recognised without requiring separation. We do not have to pretend we are identical in order to belong to one another.

What I take from John and Edna's story

John and Edna are unlikely political campaigners in one obvious respect. John is an octogenarian and Edna recently celebrated her 90th birthday. They could quite reasonably have decided that there were easier and more comfortable ways to spend the past three years.

Instead, they wrote letters, attended meetings, waited in galleries, knocked on doors, sat near post offices, gathered signatures, met councillors, encouraged others to become involved and kept returning after losing votes and receiving answers they considered inadequate.

Their language was sometimes assertive, and readers do not need to agree with every argument they made along the way to recognise what their persistence demonstrates.

The campaign I observed and documented remained civic and peaceful. It used letters, petitions, deputations, meetings, persuasion, elections and the mechanisms of local democracy available to ordinary citizens.

That matters because I increasingly encounter Australians who believe government has become simply too large, too remote or too entrenched to challenge. Whether the subject is local council, state government or Canberra, people can begin to feel that the best they can do is complain privately because nothing they say will alter an institutional decision.

John and Edna's experience does not prove that persistence will always prevail. It will not. Sometimes citizens will make their case and government will remain persuaded that the original decision was correct. Sometimes a minority will remain a minority even after it has been properly heard.

But this case invites a reconsideration of the assumption that an ordinary citizen is powerless simply because an institution is larger than they are.

There is also a responsibility on the other side. Council was not the enemy in this story. Its elected members are people, every one of them bearing the same image of God as John, Edna and those who disagreed with the original decision. Some genuinely believed the 2023 approach was the more respectful and inclusive one.

A Christian understanding of political engagement does not permit me to transform those people into villains simply because I think they got a decision wrong.

Christ calls Christians to faithful stewardship of the places in which we have been planted, not unquestioning loyalty to a nation or political institution. That stewardship includes speaking when we believe something is wrong, listening when others challenge us, remaining open to correction ourselves and seeking peace where peace does not require abandoning truth.

Paul puts that responsibility simply:

“If it is possible, as far as it depends on you, live at peace with everyone.”— Romans 12:18

Peace does not require uniformity. It requires learning how to disagree without ceasing to recognise one another as neighbours.

Edna spoke openly in our latest discussion about praying before the final Council meeting. She asked that God's will, rather than merely theirs, be done. When the motion eventually passed, her instinct was to give thanks rather than claim the achievement entirely for herself.

Near the end of the same conversation, John returned to something he has spoken about many times: moral courage. Edna reduced it to a simple encouragement for anyone confronting something they believe is wrong:

“Never give up. Never surrender. Never give up what you firmly believe. Stand for what you believe regardless.”

I would add one qualification of my own. Persistence needs humility beside it, because none of us has perfect knowledge and conviction alone does not make us right. The discipline is to speak, test what we believe against the evidence, listen to those who disagree, accept correction when it comes and continue to act according to conscience when the argument still stands. That may be the larger lesson from the Adelaide Hills.

What happened on 8 September was more than one side of an Australia Day argument winning a vote. Ordinary citizens persisted, elected representatives eventually reconsidered an earlier decision, and the policy changed. Not every disagreement disappeared, nor should we expect it to. Instead, the democratic process remained capable of responding because citizens continued to use it and elected representatives were ultimately prepared to listen.

Nearly three years ago, John and Edna looked at one another and asked who was going to do something. Their answer was:

“That someone is us.”

Perhaps that is the question this story leaves with the rest of us. When something in our own community needs scrutiny, when an institution needs to be questioned, or when neighbours need someone willing to do the slow and often frustrating work of civic engagement, are we waiting for somebody else to act?

Or might that someone sometimes be us?

Thank you for reading.

God bless.

Mark