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Notes -
Reposting from the final hours of last week's thread, as requested (and have no fear, it is still 11 PM on the 14th here, so it's still the anniversary!):
Today is the one year anniversary of Australia’s Voice to Parliament referendum. It received a good deal of discussion on the Motte at the time, so I thought it might be worth looking back at what’s happened since then.
As a brief reminder, the referendum was about amending the constitution to require a body called the ‘Voice to Parliament’. The Voice would have been a committee of Aboriginal leaders with the power to advise and make submissions to the elected parliament, but not to do any legislation itself. Despite early signs of support, that support decreased as referendum day approached, and the proposal was soundly defeated, with roughly 60% nationwide voting against it.
On the political side of it: on the federal level, the Labor party seems to have responded to the defeat by determinedly resolving never to speak about it again. The defeat of one of their major election promises reflects badly on them, so it’s understandable that they seem to want to memory-hole it. What’s more, the defeat of the referendum seems to have warned Labor away from either more Aboriginal-related reform, or from any future referenda on other matters. They’ve silently backed away from a commitment to a Makarrata commission, which would have been a government-funded body focused on ‘reconciliation’ and ‘truth-telling’, and they’ve also, in a reshuffle, quietly dropped the post of ‘assistant minister for the republic’, widely seen as a prelude to a referendum on ending the monarchy and becoming a republic. Labor seem to have lost their taste for big symbolic reforms, and are pivoting to the centre.
Meanwhile the Coalition seem to have been happy to accept this – they haven’t continued to make hay over the Voice, even though a failed referendum might seem like a good target to attack Labor on. Possibly they’re just happy to take their win, rather than risk losing sympathy by being perceived as attacking Aboriginal people.
On the state level, the result has been for Aboriginal issues to fade somewhat from prominence, but there has been little pause or interruption to state-level work on those issues. Despite a few voices suggesting that state processes should be ended or altered, notably in South Australia, not much has happened, and processes like Victorian treaty negotiations have moved ahead without much reflection from the Voice result.
To Aboriginal campaigners themselves…
For the last few days, Megan Davis, one of the major voices behind the Voice, has been saying that she considered abandoning the referendum once polls started to turn against it. Charitably, that might be true – you wouldn’t publicly reveal doubts during the campaign itself, after all. Uncharitably, and I think more plausibly, it’s an attempt to pass the buck, and she means to shift blame to politicians, such as prime minister Anthony Albanese, who was indeed extremely deferential to the wishes of Aboriginal leaders during the Voice referendum. It’s hard not to see this as perhaps a little disingenuous (notably in 2017, Liberal prime minister Malcolm Turnbull had knocked back the idea of a Voice referendum on the basis that he didn’t think it would pass, and at the time he was heavily criticised by campaigners; does anyone really think Albanese would have been praised for his leadership if he had said the same thing?), but at any rate, the point is more that it seems like knives are out among Aboriginal leaders for why it failed.
The wider narrative that I’ve seen, particularly among the media, has generally been that the failure was due to misinformation, and due to Peter Dutton and the Coalition opposing the Voice. Some commentators have suggested that it’s just that Australia is irredeemably racist, but that seems like a minority to me. The main, accepted line, it seems to me, is that it failed because the country’s centre-right party opposed it, and because misinformation and lies tainted the process. The result is a doubling-down on the idea of ‘truth-telling’ as a solution, although as noted government specifically does not seem to have much enthusiasm for that right now.
To editorialise a bit, this frustrates me because I think the various port-mortems and reflections have generally failed to reflect upon the actual outcome of the referendum, which is that a significant majority of Australians genuinely don’t want this proposal. ‘Misinformation’ is a handy way of saying ‘the people were wrong without maximally blaming the people, and it feels to me like the solution is to just re-educate the electorate until they vote the correct way in the future. Of course, I wouldn’t expect die-hard Voice campaigners to change their mind on the issue, but practically speaking, the issue isn’t so much that people were misled – it’s that people didn’t like the proposal itself. I confess I also find this particularly frustrating because, it seemed to me, the Yes campaign was just as guilty of misinformation and distortion as the No campaign, and as magic9mushroom documented, many of their claims of ‘misinformation’ were either simply disagreements with statements of opinion, or themselves lies.
The whole referendum and its aftermath have been much like the earlier marriage plebiscite in 2017 in that they’ve really decreased my faith in the possibility of public conversation or deliberation – what ideally should be a good-faith debate over a political proposal usually comes down to just duelling propaganda, false narratives and misleading facts shouted over each other, again and again. The experience of the Voice referendum has definitely hardened my sense of opposition to any kind of formal ‘truth-telling’ process – my feelings on that might roughly be summarised as, “You didn’t tell the truth before, so why would I trust you to start now?”, albeit taking ‘tell the truth’ here as shorthand for a broad set of good epistemic and democratic practices, not merely avoiding technical falsehoods.
It was doomed from the start. The "No" ads practically wrote themselves. The Yes campaign had no path to victory. In the Republic referendum, the No campaign argued technicalities "Even if you like the idea of a republic, this specific proposal is bad" - and that would have worked here too. So they gave almost no details and tried to coast through on vibes, then rightly got criticised for asking the public to sign a blank cheque.
As someone who cares about indigenous rights, I was angry at Albanese for introducing the legislation and it all played out pretty much as I anticipated. I did vote yes for idiosyncratic "don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good" reasons. The whole debacle set back indigenous relations at least a decade I reckon. Anecdotally, I've seen a marked decrease in "acknowledgement of country" lip service before events/meetings etc in the last year. And now everyone turns a blind eye to the goon squad that rounds up blackfellas in the CBD and dumps them in a park somewhere.
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While the "misinformation" angle was garbage (I appreciate being cited), I think Dutton and the Liberals were actually pretty important in the No result; the polls show a substantial signal when the booklets went out, Labour wanted to scrap them (and allow the government to run other pro-Yes material, WorkChoices-ads-style), and they'd probably have accomplished that if the Liberals hadn't called them out on it. His JAQ was also IMO pretty effective. On this point my only real disagreement with the people mad at Dutton is "I think the No result was good, actually"; it's possible we'd still have gotten a No, but it would at least have been much closer in the counterfactual.
I suppose I'd distinguish two scenarios there. The first is one where Dutton supports the Voice, but the rest of the party does not necessarily. In this case, much like same-sex marriage, the Voice becomes an effective wedge against the Coalition, splitting the Liberals from the Nationals, and potentially getting Dutton, who became opposition leader on a strong, right-wing image into trouble with his most dedicated supporters. The second is one where we presume that the entire Coalition, or at least the entire elected/institutional Coalition, goes all in to support the Voice.
In the second scenario, the Voice likely succeeds, I think. In the first, though... I don't know. The first is more plausible, but the fragmenting Coalition, while worse off overall, might not provide the push to get the Voice over the line. There is an issue that, no matter how much institutional support the Voice had, and it was indeed drowning in it, it runs counter to the moral instincts of a great many Australians. I tend to agree with Jim Reed - Australians will vote to treat everybody the same, but not to treat everybody differently. The Yes case's biggest hurdle was that it was unavoidably a proposition to enshrine permanent privileges for one group of people on the basis of their ancestry, and even if both major parties had endorsed it, I think there would have been some resistance. It's not inconceivable that Australians vote to structurally favour certain people on the basis of ancestry (the White Australia Policy was genuinely popular in its day), but the more multicultural Australia gets, the less that will seem viable, I hope.
Or, well, it's either "treat everybody the same and ignore race" as the most viable truce, or a competition between every ethnic group imaginable to secure legal privileges for itself, and the latter would be disastrous, and I hope most Australians can see that.
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