The Indigenous Affairs minister, Nigel Scullion, says no Indigenous Australian has told him the date of Australia Day should be changed other than a single government adviser.

Speaking on the ABC’s AM program on Friday, Scullion was asked about comments this week from the government adviser Chris Sarra that the date was dividing the nation and ought to be changed.

Scullion said Sarra was a good friend but he was the only Indigenous Australian who had said that to him. “I’ve just spent the last week in different communities around Australia, and it never comes up as an issue,” the minister said.

“This is one of those things that comes up from time to time [in Australia, but] what people are telling me is that they want their kids to get a good education, what about more opportunities for access to the health system?”

The ABC AM radio host Kim Landers sought clarification, asking: “So not a single Indigenous person has ever expressed to you as the Indigenous affairs minister that they want the date changed?”



Scullion: “That’s correct, absolutely correct. This is not something that comes up at all. And outside of Chris, I can tell you, there would be no one, as a fact.

“So you know, in the bubble around our tea trolleys we might sort of say, ‘Well, I’ve heard,’ and therefore we have a discussion, but no one’s brought that to me.

“We have Naidoc Week, we have Sorry Day, we have Reconciliation Week, we have Mabo Day, and if you want to divide the nation this is how we go down that line.

“This is a very low priority, certainly on my agenda.”

The debate about changing the date of Australia Day has flared up in recent months.

In August Yarra city council in Melbourne was stripped of the power to hold citizenship ceremonies by the federal government because councillors voted unanimously to stop referring to 26 January as Australia Day and to stop holding a citizenship ceremony on that day.

In September a Guardian Essential poll found 26% of Australians supported changing the date, while 54% opposed changing it.

But a few months later, after continued public debate, a poll of 1,417 voters conducted by the Australia Institute found 56% of Australians did not mind when Australia Day was celebrated.

Sarra – who was last year appointed co-chairman of the prime minister’s Indigenous Advisory Council – intervened in the debate this week, saying most Indigenous Australians wanted the date changed.



“Regrettably I don’t think Australia Day, and what it represents, is a day that most people in the Aboriginal community want to celebrate,” he said.



“I say that mindful that you get one or two Aborigines who say what people want to hear, but that’s not a true and accurate reflection of what most of the Aboriginal community thinks.”

An Alice Springs town councillor, Jacinta Price, told ABC radio on Friday that she did not think Australia Day needed to be changed because it was a day for all Australians to come together.

She said she believed she was speaking on behalf of Indigenous Australians who did not have a voice.

“The most marginalised people of this country, you know, a lot of my family are the most marginalised, whose first language is not English, who live in remote communities and town camps around the Northern Territory, and I speak for many of my constituents who voted me in in the last council election on a landslide number of votes,” she said.

“Up in the Northern Territory, we want to get on with one another, blackfellas and whitefellas.”

Another Indigenous Australian, Carla McGrath, a director of GetUp, said no one thought Australians should not celebrate a national day but there ought to be a date that was more inclusive than 26 January.

“The one we have unfortunately holds a really traumatic place for many people as a day of mourning,” she said. “It doesn’t represent a day of unity.”

Rod Little, the co-chair of the National Congress of Australia’s First Peoples, said it was possible no one had raised the issue of changing the date with Scullion, because time with the minister was limited and focused on specific issues.

But he said that did not mean it wasn’t an issue, and Scullion should have made it his business to find out what Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people thought. “We know that January 26, Australia Day, conversations come up every year and have since 1938,” Little told Guardian Australia.

“It’s not new, so you would know that this conversation would come each year, so inform yourself … Go and ask people.”