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Ehhhh. I'm not sure I would consider the impending failure of the Voice (and you are right, it absolutely is dead in the water) as evidence Australia is turning against wokeness. I think it has a lot more to do with the specific circumstances of how the campaign has played out.
The left in general, and Albanese in particular, took the wrong lesson from the 1999 Republic referendum. They saw people who liked the idea of a Republic but disliked the specific model and voted no. They also (correctly) realised that any specific proposal will inevitably have details that will upset someone. But then they decided (foolishly) that the way to keep everyone on board was to provide no details at all.
This has been a disastrous decision, as it has left the government in the horrible position of trying to convince voters to create a new constitutional body, with absolutely no idea how that new institution will work. We don't know how many people will be appointed to it, who will be appointed, or by what method. We don't know how it will resolve differences of opinion among Aboriginal groups. We don't know what issues it will choose to address, or what sort of proposals it might champion. All we know is it will be almost impossible to get rid of.
They have tried to use this vagueness to convince the radicals that it will lead to transformational change, while at the same time reassuring the normies that it's just a toothless advisory committee and it won't change anything. It hasn't worked. The two groups have gotten the message intended for the other, and both have turned against it.
Which brings me to the other factor that is killing the Voice. It's utterly devastating to the Yes campaign that the two highest profile Aborigines in Parliament, coming from opposite ends of the political spectrum, are both violently opposed to the Voice. There's a lot of people who would quite happily vote to give Aborigines what they want, but it's not so clear that this is actually what they want. ("Yes" supporters love to quote an old poll saying that the Voice has 80% support among Aborigines, but this is an old poll taken back when the voice had widespread support among everyone. It's highly likely it's lost a lot of skin even among Indigenous voters, considering how much support in general has cratered.)
But though people are becoming increasingly sceptical about this specific proposal, there is still widespread support for giving Aboriginals special status and treatment. It wasn't so long ago that Yes had a massive lead - if the Voice were being rejected on principle that would not have been the case.
I'm not pointing entirely to the "this is evidence that we're already coming to our senses" direction. There's also the "getting crushed in a referendum - as is looking likely - builds consensus against the thing being voted on" direction. It gives One Nation more respectability if they're the only party that took a firm "no" and "no" wins, regardless of whether it was "no" winning properly or a "yes" fumble. The Greens can't claim consensus on this any more if they took their "consensus" to an actual vote and it got crushed.
Now, in the USA this wouldn't matter; tribal loyalty overwhelms national loyalty, this'd just be one more reason to despise the outgroup and fight harder. But in Australia we're not that far gone; stare decisis is a thing that still means something here (note for instance the lack of another republic referendum). Ironically, I got this pointed out to me by SJers worried about it.
Yeah, there's some truth to this - we do tend to be willing to say "Ok, we had that debate, one side won, let's move on". I've certainly heard some Yes supporters arguing that Yes needs to win for exactly this reason - there won't be an opportunity to come back and "do it right", people will just say "Nah we settled that. Not doing it".
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