This month an Indian ride share driver in Queensland is suing police after an officer was caught on body‑worn camera saying, “f*cking Indians, mate, they are a bunch of f*cking perverts”.
In Canberra, Labor has just handed the home affairs minister a new power to stop whole groups of temporary visa holders from ever boarding a flight here, by quietly cancelling their visas in the name of “guardrails” and “integrity”.
And at the end of last year in New South Wales, about 60 neo‑Nazis marched outside state parliament with a banner calling to “Abolish the Jewish lobby” while police effectively signed off on the protest.
Happy Harmony week!
What Harmony Week sits on
If you grew up in Australia, Harmony Day probably lives in your memory as a blur of orange ribbons, “cultural dress” and parents trying to decide what dish best represents the family. The slogan “Everyone belongs” gets printed on posters, bookmarks and school newsletters like a national affirmation. At work, the same language turns up in all‑staff emails and intranet tiles about celebrating diversity.
But March 21 is not just a cute date someone in Canberra plucked out of a hat. Globally, it is the International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, tied to the Sharpeville massacre in 1960, when South African police opened fire on Black protesters, killing dozens and injuring hundreds. The day exists because state violence and racism literally killed people. It was meant as a reminder and a call to action.
From the late 1970s, the UN pushed countries to use that week to confront racism directly, not rebrand it.
Here, the Howard Government chose a different route in 1999. Instead of centring racism as a problem to be named, it repackaged the date as Harmony Day.
Internal research at the time had already concluded that a significant chunk of Australians held very negative views about certain groups, and that any campaign which used the word “racism” too loudly would lose them.
So the language was softened. “Harmony”, “cohesion” and “shared values” took the place of words like “discrimination” and “violence”.
Sociologist Andrew Jakubowicz told New York Times that Australia avoided the word “racism” because the government was scared it would upset people, describing Harmony Day as an attempt to “pretend that there’s nothing to see here” and arguing that it puts pressure on minorities not to “raise a stink” about their own marginalisation.
Scott Morrison then turned the day into an entire Harmony Week in 2019, folding the feel‑good branding even more tightly into official multicultural policy.
That choice did not stay in the past. It still shapes how we talk about race now, and what gets labelled as too negative, too divisive or too much.
Who actually belongs?
On the surface, Harmony Week looks like proof of progress. Australia is supposedly proudly multicultural, almost half the population are first or second‑generation migrants. Classrooms are full of different languages and lunches. But when you look at who holds power, the picture changes.
2025 research shows that more than 90 per cent of ASX300 board members still come from Anglo‑Celtic or European backgrounds. First Nations people are almost entirely absent from those roles. Culturally and racialised marginalised women make up only around five to six per cent of board directors nationally.
Outside the boardroom, the numbers are even harsher. As of June 2025, out of the 46,998 adult prisoners in Australia,17, 432 of them were Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. Victoria’s own cultural review of its corrections system found that First Peoples continue to experience racism and discrimination in custody, affecting their safety, access to health care and chances of rehabilitation. Since the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody handed down its final report in 1991, First Peoples have continued to die in prisons and police custody at unacceptable rates.
For multicultural communities, trust is frayed too. Pasifika and South Sudanese young people in Melbourne have spoken about being targeted by “risk‑based” policing, including being constantly stopped and monitored. Legal centres have warned for years that the lack of free, skilled interpreters for people who don’t speak English as a first language is directly linked to miscarriages of justice. A 2022 national survey by the Australian Human Rights Commission found that 60 per cent of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people had experienced at least one form of racial prejudice in the previous six months, up from 43 per cent in 2018 and 52 per cent in 2020.
In other words, while Harmony Week’s branding leans harder into belonging, reported experiences of racism are on the rise.
What is the point of Harmony Week, really?
There is something genuinely lovely about the small moments that Harmony Week can create. A kid walking into school wearing clothes their grandparents sent from overseas and feeling proud instead of weird. A workplace morning tea where someone’s mum’s dumplings or dad’s jollof become the star of the table. A chance to say, out loud, that this country is not and has never been only one thing. Those moments are real, and they absolutely matter.
But they cannot be the whole story, not when the same country is locking up First Nations people at soaring rates, when culturally and racially marginalised professionals are still shut out of leadership, when people from racialised communities report more racism now than they did a few years ago, when our laws keep entire nationalities out at beck and call.
In 2023, Greens senator Mehreen Faruqi wrote to Multicultural Affairs Minister Andrew Giles calling on the government to revert Harmony Day back to its original name.
“The 21st of March is not celebrated as Harmony Day anywhere except in Australia,” Senator Faruqi said in the letter.
“It represents a superficial, self-congratulatory celebration of diversity which completely ignores the entire point of the International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination — the urgent, pressing need to recognise racism and eliminate it in all its forms.”
Harmony Week was never just a cute calendar event. It was a political decision to reframe a day about racial discrimination into something softer, something comfortable, something you could sell to people who did not want to hear the word “racism” at all. And that is the uncomfortable part: when we prioritise keeping things harmonious, the people who live with racism are the ones expected to swallow their anger, moderate their language, and show up smiling for the diversity photos.
So sure, wear orange. Bring the food. Tell the stories. But if our government keeps passing laws that deepen inequality, if our institutions keep producing racist outcomes while calling them “unintended”, if First Nations communities and people of colour are still paying with their freedom, health and safety, then Harmony Week on its own starts to feel like being asked to decorate a room you’re still not allowed to move around in freely.
The real question, underneath all the posters and platters, is whether this country is willing to be as serious about eliminating racism as it is about celebrating harmony. Until the answer to that feels honest, the week will always carry a gap between what we say we are and the reality people are actually living.
Lead image: Getty
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