Amid the AVC ‘ban’ outrage, is there room for more nuance in how pubs address contentious cultural debates?
Last week, Australian media was in a spin with news leaking that Australian Venue Co. had “banned” Australia Day festivities at all 200+ of their pubs. The directive to venue managers had been leaked to the newspapers, who took up the mantle of heavily criticising the pub group for it. The news permeated through the media to social media, with the pub group receiving an absolute bollocking on a national level for days.
Now, I couldn’t find the actual directive published on news sites anywhere and haven’t seen it myself, but AVC’s original response to the news was that “Australia Day is a day that causes sadness for some members of our community, so we have decided not to specifically [ed’s emphasis] celebrate a day that causes hurt for some of our patrons and our team.”
The word ‘specifically’ suggests to me that if you rocked up to an AVC pub with Australia Day paraphernalia, no one would stop or discourage you from entering or celebrating; but rather that the venues themselves wouldn’t be decked out in Aussie flags and putting on Australia Day specials.
Is it so unreasonable to want to spare a portion of our communities from what is painful to them?
The condemnation of AVC’s decision was swift and brutal, with claims of cancel culture being alive and well, the term “woke” being used as a pejorative, and the group being dubbed anti-Australian. Predictably, the group’s majority stake owners based in Hong Kong were then thrown into the discussion for good measure – as if they’d be involved in this kind of granular decision-making instead of just being the money men.
In all of this immediate outrage and pearl-clutching, we’ve missed the opportunity to have a more nuanced conversation about the reasoning behind AVC’s initial decision (AVC has since walked back the directive).
As per the statement above, the pub group acknowledged that Australia Day is not a day of celebration for all members of the Australian community, and they are not the first to do so. This is not new information. There has been a sustained campaign to change the date of Australia Day, with 26 January having painful connotations for our First Nations peoples.
Is it so unreasonable – or unthinkable – to want to spare a portion of our communities from what is painful to them? Particularly in the case of pubs, where the foundational concept is to be a place for communities to gather?
AVC has a Reconciliation Initiative with a First Nations Committee and are not the only pub group to be working through a Reconciliation Action Plan. Surely more pub groups are looking for ways to be sensitive to the needs of First Nations communities.
Putting aside moral and ethical arguments, I would also think from a commercial standpoint – as publicans continue to worry about how to engage a younger, sub-Millennial demographic who are less interested in drinking, and frequent the pub less – that acknowledging and responding to the fact that not everyone feels the same way about Australia Day would be a smart business decision. An Ipsos poll for The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age in 2021 found that 47 per cent of people surveyed aged 18-24 were in support of changing the date of Australia Day, as compared to 19 per cent of those aged 55 and up.
The need to default to a binary position – businesses and people are either for or against Australia Day, and therefore are either for or against Australia – is not reflective of the country we live in. We are a multicultural nation that is made up of different perspectives and attitudes, and it benefits us all to show empathy and compassion to people whether their experiences match our own or not.
So whether you’re waving an Aussie flag or not on 26 January, surely there’s enough space at the pub for all of us?
Lead image: istock/spukkato
