It’s the International Day of Eliminating Racial Discrimination. Why does Australia call it ‘Harmony Day’?

Businesses, schools and organisations around the country are marking ‘Harmony Day’.It’s touted on the federal government’s website as a day which celebrates “our diversity, and brings together Australians from all different backgrounds”.

While this might seem at first glance to be a worthwhile cause for celebration, the day’s bleaker history (which occurs during Harmony Week) is worth remembering.

A horrific reminder

People demonstrate in Johannesburg against the Sharpeville massacre. 180 people were injured and 69 killed when white South African police opened fire on demonstrators on 21 March 1960. Source: AFP / AFP/AFP via Getty Images

March 21 is observed around the world as the Internationally Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (IDERD). The date commemorates a particularly dark chapter in the history of Black repression, the 1960 Sharpeville Massacre. A protest against the injustices of apartheid in South Africa became a gruesome tragedy when police officers opened fire on civilians, including children, killing 69 and injuring 180 more.

Beginning in 1979, the UN encouraged a week of solidarity by member states with those peoples suffering from the horrors of racism. The date served as a stark reminder of the atrocities that could be perpetrated against racial minorities.

What’s in a name?

But 20 years later, the Howard government created ‘Harmony Day’, which sought to replace the IDERD and portray a unified multicultural society, one that did not need to actively combat racism. This aligned with the personal views of the prime minister John Howard, who always maintained that racism was not an inherent problem in Australia. But critics have said the positively framed ‘Harmony Day’ intentionally obscures the need for systemic change.

“It’s absurd,” said Professor Chelsea Watego.

[It’s] quite telling that this country still insists on erasing the reality of racial violence in this place.

A professor of Indigenous health and the executive director of the Carumba Institute at QUT, Watego says the day is a non-event for her. “I’ve invested my labour in fighting racial violence every day, personally and professionally. “

“It’d be really great to see more people committed to that fight, instead of sanitising the violence of settlers.”

Australia hasn’t confronted ‘the reality of racial violence’

While critical of the 1999 change, Watego says a continuing failure to confront structural racism is a more pertinent issue. “We have a health system that makes aspirations [to be] free of racism, without a strategy for achieving that. We have a Race Discrimination Act which successive governments have suspended specifically in relationship to Indigenous people, on multiple occasions. The parameters for prosecuting a race discrimination case in this country are so narrow, that so few get through.

“And so while we can focus on Harmony Day, and the name change and what it says, it tells us about the ways in which this country and all of its institutions have refused to deal with the reality of racial violence.”

Nonetheless, there is a push for Harmony Week to be returned to its original name and purpose. Many argue that the more pointedly named Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination promotes an active confrontation by citizens and governments of the pernicious effects of bigotry. But with scenes this week of far-right activists performing the Hitler salute in Melbourne’s CBD, Professor Watego says such a name change is the bare minimum.”We’ve had Nazis… at Parliament House in Victoria. We have spectators abusing Latrell Mitchell for just being a Black football player over the weekend,” she said.

“I’m not convinced that this country is committed to eliminating racial discrimination. So perhaps we can’t celebrate [Harmony Day] for that very reason.”