A decision by a Melbourne council to stop holding citizenship ceremonies on Australia Day was suspended hours after it was made on Wednesday, with a Labor councillor moving to rescind the motion.

The Greens-led Merri-bek council, which covers Brunswick, Fawkner and Glenroy in the north, voted on Wednesday night to accept a recommendation from its First Nations Advisory Committee to stop holding citizenship ceremonies on the controversial date.

A decision by Merri-bek council to stop holding citizenship ceremonies on Australia Day was suspended hours after it was made on Wednesday.Credit:Chris Hopkins

With five votes for and five votes against the ban, the newly minted Greens Mayor Angelica Panopoulos gave the deciding vote that saw the motion carried as people in the gallery clapped and cheered.

But during the meeting, Labor councillor Lambros Tapinos lodged a rescind motion to overturn the original motion. The decision to stop holding the ceremonies on January 26 is now suspended and cannot be implemented until the rescission motion is debated and voted on.

In a statement, Panopoulos said an extraordinary meeting of council will occur later this month to again debate the matter of holding citizenship ceremonies on Australia Day.

The 11-person Merri-bek council is made up of four Greens members, one Socialist Alliance member, two Labor members and four independents.

Aboriginal elder Gary Murray, who was part of the council’s First Nations Advisory Committee, said before the vote on Wednesday night that January 26 was a day of mourning and the council needed to be courageous and stop hosting ceremonies on the date.

“We need to move on to a better day, that’s inclusive, that’s multicultural and involves First Nations,” he said.

He wanted to see the citizenship ceremonies become more spectacular and culturally focused – “that hasn’t got the baggage of being tainted by what’s happened in the past”.

It was the council’s second attempt to stop Australia Day citizenship ceremonies after a similar motion was voted down in 2017. The same year, two other inner-north Greens-led councils, Yarra and Darebin, successfully voted to stop holding the ceremonies.

Many of the arguments made by the councillors who voted against stopping the ceremonies centred around the legal ambiguity it would leave the council in.

The Darebin and Yarra councils had their ability to conduct citizenship ceremonies revoked in 2017 by the then-Liberal federal government after they voted to stop holding them on Australia Day.

Then-prime minister Malcolm Turnbull said the councils were “out of step with Australian values” and the purpose of his ban was to “safeguard the integrity of citizenship ceremonies”.

Two years later, in 2019, the Morrison government amended the Citizenship Ceremonies Code to force all councils to conduct citizenship ceremonies on January 26. Darebin and Yarra are still unable to hold citizenship ceremonies for residents, something Merri-bek could also face depending on the response from the new federal Labor government.

A federal government spokeswoman said on Wednesday that there had been no changes so far to the Citizenship Ceremonies Code.

With Caroline Schelle

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