If you type the terms ‘Australia Day” and “ABC” into Google, you’ll get almost 800,000 hits.

Most of those relate to the national broadcaster’s extensive coverage of Australia Day over the years, and it would take you until Australia Day 2019 to read through them all.

But a small proportion of those search results will take you somewhere else entirely. They’ll take you to a series of recent stories accusing the ABC of betraying the community and the nation by turning its back on Australia Day.

The argument goes that, by moving the triple j Hottest 100 competition to a new date, the ABC has made a political decision to oppose January 26 as our national day of celebration and commemoration. The national broadcaster has declared war on our national day, and joined the campaign to shift that day to a new date.

Now, all of this raises some quite interesting issues about the role of the ABC in Australian public life, and where the line should be drawn between celebrating, our nation, critically examining it, and being ‘unAustralian’. But before I get to that, it is worth reminding ourselves why the Hottest 100 competition was moved at all.

As Editorial Director, I provided advice and input into the decision along with many others, and my main concern was to protect the ABC’s impartiality and editorial integrity. I started with what I consider to be a fact – there has been growing public debate over the years about whether Australia Day should be celebrated on January 26th. No matter what your personal view is on the issue, it seems to me to be self-evident that as a society we are debating the issue. Some people are happy for things to stay the way they are, some people are campaigning for change, and many more don’t care strongly one way or the other, but to pretend there is no debate would be silly.

The debate itself is real, and one of the reasons I accept that so readily is because the ABC has found itself unwillingly drawn into that debate. Over time, the Hottest 100 competition had come to be run on the Australia Day public holiday, and that made it a pawn in that debate. A campaign began to have it moved, on the grounds that growing numbers of Australians (in particular Indigenous Australians) felt unable to participate on a day they considered a day of mourning.

But here’s the thing: the Hottest 100 has never been about Australia Day. It wasn’t conceived as an Australia Day event and only gravitated to that time of the year because it was a convenient public holiday. So in order to keep the Hottest 100 focussed on music and to prevent it from being increasingly overshadowed by an unconnected and polarised debate, the simplest solution was to once again move it (as it had been moved in the past) to a different date where it would stand on its own merits.

In doing that, the ABC realised that some would see it as a political decision to throw our weight behind the case for changing Australia Day itself, just as a decision to leave it in place would have been seen as ABC support for keeping Australia Day on January 26. In reality, neither of these are true – the ABC simply took steps to prevent its music competition being used as a weapon in the polarised debate each year.

But with that issue resolved, what is the role of the national broadcaster on Australia Day? Are we there to get behind it as proud Australians and celebrate it, or to question it and run the case for change? Is it unAustralian to knock Australia Day, or is it jingoistic and insensitive to ignore those citizens who feel excluded?

The first thing to say, of course, is that no broadcaster does more to cover Australia Day than the ABC. From our role as broadcast partner of the Australian of the Year Presentation to our live coverage across all our platforms of the Australia Day Flag Raising and Citizenship ceremony, the ABC takes seriously its role in bringing these national moments to our national audience. Interestingly, moving the Hottest 100 to its own separate date means we are now free to provide even more coverage of Australia Day, including a greater focus on the young Australian of the Year and the meaning of the occasion for younger audiences.

After all, the ABC’s Charter includes a responsibility to contribute to a sense of national identity, and what better way to do that than to comprehensively cover our celebrations and reflections on our national day?

But none of that precludes our responsibility to also reflect the concerns and objections some Australians have to the date and what it signifies for them. You will find that in our coverage as well, whether it be commemorations of a different kind at the Yabun Festival or more overt protests and demands for change. Far from being ‘unAustralian’ to question Australia Day, it would be unAustralian to demand a single, rigidly enforced view on what our national day means for our citizens.

The ABC’s Editorial Policies have always made clear our commitment to impartiality and a diversity of perspectives, but there is one area where we do take an editorial stance. We are committed to ‘fundamental democratic principles including the rule of law, freedom of speech and religion, parliamentary democracy and equality of opportunity.’ Those are the Australian values we embrace on Australia Day and across the rest of the year too, for they underpin our role in ensuring all Australians have an opportunity both to listen and to be heard, to participate fully in the freedom of speech that is one of our fundamental democratic principles.

Alan Sunderland

Editorial Director