Public opinion about Australia Day is changing. According to a recent poll by the Australia Institute, 56% of Australians don’t mind when the national holiday is held, so long as we have one, while 49% said it should not be held on a day that is offensive to Indigenous Australians and only 23% chose 26 January as the best available day.

So, how do you talk to someone who is on the fence into supporting a change in the way we celebrate Australia Day? We have compiled this handy guide.

They say: It’s tradition!

You say: Actually, the Australia Day public holiday has only been held on 26 January since 1994. Prior to that it was held on the Monday closest, because Australians love a long weekend. That makes the official tradition of holding Australia Day on 26 January one year younger than the high court decision overturning the doctrine of Terra nullius, which undermined the whole premise of British settlement of Australia.

They say: 26 January 1788 was the foundation of modern Australia.

You say: Was it, though? It was the day the British navy pulled into a bay that would become a penal colony for a country with a poor social safety net and ignored express instructions from the crown to establish a treaty with the native people. Hardly the illustrious birth of a nation. Besides, that date really only has significance for Sydney, or New South Wales at a stretch. Given that Australia is home to 65,000 years of human history and the longest continuous cultures on the planet, it seems odd to hang all our national pride on the day some prison ships arrived.

They say: I don’t want to be made to feel bad about something that happened years before I was born.

You say: If that is your approach to history you probably don’t need to celebrate something that happened years before you were born, either. But the main objection to this argument is that it is falsely suggests that the negative impacts of colonisation suddenly stopped when we got an Australian prime minister. The impacts of colonisation are ongoing and manifest as the high rates of Indigenous incarceration and child removal, and paternalistic policies such as the Northern Territory intervention.

That the devastation of generations of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people has been compared to the potential rescheduling of a national holiday is also evidence that colonial power structures are still in play.

They say: I’m proud to be an Australian. Why do you hate Australia?

You say: Pushing for a change to Australia Day does not mean that you hate Australia. It just means that you want Australia to be a fair, inclusive, accepting society with a national holiday that everyone can enjoy. Being a great country does not excuse Australia’s poor history of dealing with its first peoples nor justify continuing to hold a national celebration on the date most insensitive to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. If we truly are a great country, then we should do better.

They say: OK, fine, then when should we hold Australia Day?

You say: Yeah, that is a bit of a problem. The colonisation of Australia was incremental and bloody pretty much the whole way around, so finding a date free of any specific atrocities is quite difficult. Some have supported changing it to 9 May, the day the Australian parliament sat for the first time, or 1 January, the day of Australia’s Federation, but Australia’s first parliament was pretty racist and terrible as well. Its first act was to pass the white Australia policy. As historian Ben Wilkie pointed out, Australia’s early prime ministers were as big on racism as their colonial forebears.

Yeah, nah. Deakin: “the Commonwealth of Australia shall mean a white Australia, and that from now henceforward all alien elements within it shall be diminished. We are united in the resolve that this Commonwealth shall be established on the firm foundation of unity of race' https://t.co/NBsJGFTLXb — Ben Wilkie (@benvwilkie) January 21, 2018

Also, opposition to Australia Day is rooted in opposition to the dispossession, death, cultural destruction and injustice wrought by colonisation and those concerns are both ongoing and constant. Changing the date will not fix them, though many Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people say it would be a good start. Others, such as tent embassy founder Michael Anderson, say that until Australia becomes a republic and signs a treaty with its first peoples, it has no cause for celebration. The Liberal MP and Yamatji man Ken Wyatt also thinks we should hold off on changing the national day until Australia becomes a republic, while others say the date of a referendum to recognise Indigenous people in the constitution – assuming that such a referendum takes place and is successful – should be the new, inclusive, national holiday.

They say: I just like having a public holiday at the end of January.

You say: Look, this is fair. It’s a good time to have a day off. But, let’s be honest, you’d also prefer it if it floated a bit like the Queen’s birthday so you always got a long weekend. With a bit of planning, we could ensure that the replacement public holiday also fell in prime beach weather. Referendum on constitutional recognition on 31 January, anyone?