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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   28211 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 14, 2024

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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.

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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