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Notes -
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.
I’m glad it failed if for no reason that if it had succeeded, doubtless movements would have started for similar measures in my own country and other Anglophone former colonial states in the west. Its already bad enough here with the constant genuflecting and land acknowledgments
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This has become the default explanation for governments whenever an electorate supplies a vote they don't like. The Irish government did exactly the same thing when a proposed referendum was rejected in a landslide earlier this year, claiming that voters were "confused" about what the referendum really entailed.
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This is an interesting post that should be dropped on Monday. (Real Monday. That's Monday EST. Not fake Australian Monday's.)
Blast, Australia-Monday has led me astray again!
I can repost it tomorrow! Perhaps I should have just waited, but the one year anniversary was too good to miss.
You can just repost it in a few hours and it will still be the 1 year anniversary in Australia right?
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Yes, 'truth-telling' is even worse than 'we need to have a conversation about _____' IMO, it doesn't even pretend to be a democratic or two-way exchange.
I've heard people argue that referendums don't pass in Australia without bipartisan support. It requires a majority of voters and a majority of states and voting is compulsory, so there's a certain level of innate conservatism as people who don't really care vote for the status quo.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1937_Australian_referendum_(Aviation)
This referendum was just about giving the commonwealth the power to regulate aviation, since it's obviously a federal matter, planes routinely flying inter-state. It failed!
That's not to say I think the Voice referendum was reasonable or desirable. What's the point of a constitutionally enshrined body to advise Parliament if it's non-binding? Formally non-binding is one thing, what would be the de facto outcome? It would be a powerful political tool towards a treaty (the ultimate goal of the 'sovereignty never ceded' aboriginal historical falsification movement) and yet more sabotage of national industries. We already have huge mining projects continually being blocked by lawfare and dodgy-sounding ancestral lands claims. We already have a huge national DEI push, better to keep it out of the functioning of the legislature.
Yes, a referendum has never passed without bipartisan support. In a sense it's correct that Dutton and the Coalition going against the Voice was what doomed it. I'm not sure if the Voice would have succeeded if it had been bipartisan, and if Dutton had supported it he would likely have faced revolt from his own supporters (the Nationals had already opposed it, for a start), not to mention the grassroots, but it would definitely have helped.
So I suppose you can say it was their fault, but of course, their argument would be that they were correct to oppose it, because the Liberal Party has particular values and principles, those values are, well, liberal, and thus opposed to privileging any group or demographic on the basis of race or heritage. If your proposal is contrary to the explicitly-stated values of one of the largest and most long-running political traditions in Australia, you probably shouldn't be surprised when the representatives of that tradition oppose it. You might make a more limited criticism of the Coalition for playing dirty politics (Dutton's obviously-insincere, swiftly-retracted, promise of a second referendum on constitutional recognition stands out as especially two-faced), but I really don't think Labor or the Yes campaign have a leg to stand on in that regard.
'Truth-telling' is a problematic phrase, all the more so, I think, because it rarely comes with clarification of exactly which truths need to be told. Reconciliation Australia describes it as "a range of activities that engage with a fuller account of Australia’s history and its ongoing impact on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples", which is roughly the same as the UNSW definition here. Here's a story from Deakin that says that 'truth-telling' involves discussion of colonial history, indigenous culture both pre- and post-colonisation, indigenous contributions to Australia as a whole, and a range of activities including festivals, memorials, public art, repatriation of ancestors, return of land, and renaming of locations. This is all starting to sound quite vague.
If the request is for more education and public knowledge about colonisation, well, that seems to be going quite well - I did some of the frontier wars in school in the 90s and early 00s, after all, and radio, TV, popular media, etc., are full of Aboriginal perspectives. There are already several nation-wide celebrations as well, which is relevant if 'truth-telling' includes acknowledgement of positive contributions as well. There's already NAIDOC Week, Reconciliation Week, National Sorry Day, Harmony Day, Australia Day (or Invasion Day or Survival Day if you prefer) is often used to discuss colonial history, and more. So it seems like 'truth-telling' in that general sense is already happening. What specifically is being proposed in addition?
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