The King’s Birthday: a public holiday in search of a purpose

Posted on 03 Jun 2026

By Denis Moriarty, founder and group managing director, Our Community

Shutterstock king cupcakes — Hip Hip Non-Hooray! It’s our distant king’s faux birthday! Pic: Shutterstock

Why exactly are we still getting a day off to celebrate a day that is not the actual birthday of some British guy in a crown, asks Our Community’s founder and leader, Denis Moriarty.

The King’s Birthday public holiday arrives each year with all the usual Australian traditions: a sleep-in, retail sales, sport on television, and a vague awareness that somewhere in Britain there is a man in a crown whom we are apparently supposed to celebrate. For many Australians, particularly younger generations, and plenty of older lefties like me, the whole thing feels increasingly bizarre.

Australia in 2026 is a confident, multicultural, independent nation, no matter what One Nation tries to tell us. We trade overwhelmingly with Asia, we live in the Indo-Pacific, and we proudly tell the world our identity is uniquely Australian. Yet every June, most states still pause to honour a hereditary monarch living 17,000 kilometres away: a man who has never faced an election, who has never lived here permanently, and whose role in our daily lives is largely symbolic. The obvious question is: why?

A public holiday that costs the nation over $4 billion exists largely because of inertia. The holiday survives because it always has. I could at least vaguely understand the sentimentality around Queen Elizabeth. But Charles and his sneaky consort? Jesus wept.

At some point, modern Australia has to decide whether we are a genuinely mature nation or simply a former colony clinging to inherited rituals because changing them feels uncomfortable.

At my company, Our Community, we have already made one symbolic decision. Staff no longer receive a public holiday for Australia Day. Instead, we recognise Sorry Day. We made that choice because celebrating the dispossession and invasion experienced by First Nations people did not feel consistent with the values we claim to hold.

Maybe we now need to have the same conversation about the King’s Birthday.

And maybe other workplaces should too.

“Imagine replacing the King’s Birthday with a national day celebrating and commemorating Indigenous resilience, truth-telling and achievement.”

Denis Moriarty

Because the reality is this: we are living on borrowed land and borrowed time. Australia’s wealth, institutions and prosperity were built on land taken from people who had cared for it continuously for more than 60,000 years. If modern organisations genuinely believe in reconciliation, truth-telling and inclusion, eventually that has to move beyond Reconciliation Week (27 May to 3 June), morning teas, and acknowledgements before meetings.

Public holidays are statements about what a society values. ANZAC Day honours sacrifice. Labour Day honours workers. Sorry Day recognises truth and survival. But the King’s Birthday? Increasingly it honours little more than historical habit and a lingering colonial hangover.

What makes the holiday especially tone-deaf is that Australia has far more meaningful stories to elevate. Indigenous Australians maintained culture, language and connection to Country for tens of thousands of years, one of humanity’s oldest continuing civilisations. Yet we still devote a national holiday to a monarch whose actual birthday is not even in June.

Imagine replacing the King’s Birthday with a national day celebrating and commemorating Indigenous resilience, truth-telling and achievement. Schools, communities and media could focus on Indigenous languages, science, art, land management and history. Australians might actually learn something meaningful about the country they live in.

Of course, critics would instantly call such changes “divisive” or “political.” But public holidays are already political. They always have been. They reflect what nations choose to honour.

The monarchy debate also exposes a deeper Australian insecurity. We sometimes seem frightened to define ourselves independently, as though symbolic separation from Britain would erase history or tradition. But mature countries evolve. Canada debates these questions. New Zealand debates them. Australia eventually must too.

A republic would not mean rejecting British heritage or pretending history never happened. It would simply mean recognising that Australia’s future identity should come from the people who live here, not from inherited institutions overseas.

For now, though, most Australians will simply enjoy the long weekend without thinking too hard about why it exists. Perhaps that indifference says everything. A national holiday supposedly honouring the monarch now functions mostly as a day off and a sale at Harvey Norman.

Surely Australia and our communities can aspire to something more meaningful than that. 

Denis Moriarty is group managing director of OurCommunity.com.au, a social enterprise that helps the country's 600,000 not-for-profits.