Risk, politics and the dogged task of persuading the public: What does it take to get an Australian referendum over the line in 2023?
Hysteria, polarisation and identity politics have swirled around the referendum debate this year. It has been a disheartening performance to observe, probe and question when the issues of substance at stake are so great.
I cannot imagine how cruel, insulting and racist the discourse must have been at times for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australians and the leaders of this longtime movement spanning generations and many governments.
The consequence is that prominent ‘Yes’ campaigners have been forced to use their 11th-hour messages ahead of Saturday’s referendum to appeal to the public that there is nothing to fear about the proposal.
Senator Pat Dodson, who stepped back from campaigning to receive treatment for cancer these last few months, addressed the National Press Club (NPC) this week to call for an end – finally — to Australia’s policies of “denial and assimilation” that had plagued First Nations people.
The government’s special envoy for reconciliation said it was time to build a new foundation upon which Australia could move forward with hope and trust in one another.
“[We need] some confidence that we’re able to deal with the complex and complicated issues that we know still confront us,” Dodson said.
“The referendum offers us hope, it offers us courage, and it offers us the basis to begin to trust each other so that we can work together in a way that delivers better outcomes for the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples of this country; and in a way that ultimately brings pride to us as an Australian peoples,” he said.
The essence of fellow ‘Yes’ advocate Noel Pearson’s speech some days earlier was dedicated to telling voters that the invitation expressed by the Uluru Statement from the Heart and the referendum question was from a desire for unity and love.
The fact that time, energy and oxygen were needed to contest the idea the Voice proposal was anything other than this (the official ‘No’ camp’s slogans target fears about racism, division, segregation, special rights based on race, and some esoteric concern about legal risk that an overwhelming number of lawyers do not think is justified) is extraordinary.
Many commentators – including constitutional law expert Professor Megan Davis – have blamed the so-called mainstream media for the limp or shallow public discourse. In many ways, this critique is fair. Robust criticism of the lies and spurious claims overwhelmingly flowing from the ‘No’ campaign led by Senator Jacinta Price and Nyunggai Warren Mundine have barely been examined and called out for what they are.
Writing for The Monthly, Davis pointed to the fact that there was barely any headline news – least of all condemnation – for Peter Dutton and David Littleproud’s rejection of the referendum proposal outright without having read any detail.
This contrasted with the pile-on of ‘Yes’ advocate Professor Marcia Langton, who questioned the racist foundations of the ‘No’ campaign messages.
“Nine and News Corp repeatedly asked whether Langton had delivered the nail in the coffin for ‘Yes’,” Davis wrote.
“Langton was derided for questioning racism in this country in a way that no racist is ever scrutinised. As many said in social and political commentary, it’s seen as worse in Australia to point out racism than to be a racist.”
For those who have actually listened, Langton’s searing intellect and capacity to articulate complex truths have offered some of the most potent pearls of wisdom in the referendum discourse.
Langton’s new book ‘First knowledges law: the way of the ancestors’, co-authored with Aaron Corn, is powerful, pragmatic reading for any Australian who wants to learn about Australia’s Indigenous practices such as songlines, architecture, design, land management, botany, astronomy.
Davis went on to critique the media’s propensity to deploy false equivalence and normalise conspiracy theories prosecuted by ‘No’ campaigners ahead of the referendum. She observed the news had become a “passive conduit of misinformation and disinformation” in the weeks leading up to the vote.
“When 20,000 marched the streets of Brisbane, a few sovereignty activists unfurled an Aboriginal flag across Victoria Bridge with ‘Vote No’ emblazoned on it. The flag led the news, not the 20,000 Aussies marching,” Davis said.
“Now… the media are writing pre-referendum obituaries exonerating themselves entirely by asking whether the ‘Yes’ campaign failed because it didn’t have more pithy slogans.”
The Fourth Estate has been so corroded by cheap infotainment bits, a taste for populist distraction and thin attention spans that there are few players remaining who really should be allowed to continue being referred to as the media at all.
Two specific examples of the more ridiculous diatribe being dressed up as referendum debate include:
- An absurd interview between Ali Langton and Ray Martin featuring 17 minutes of the A Current Affair host grilling Martin about the general offence he may have caused by calling ignorant voters ‘dinosaurs’ and ‘dickheads’; and
- Sky News’ Peta Credlin giving Louise Clegg a platform to complain about why she did not feel the legal profession was consulted sufficiently on the proposed wording of the Voice. The show did not disclose that Clegg is the wife of deputy Opposition leader Angus Taylor, and simply referred to her as a barrister. There was no disclaimer Clegg’s views may, in fact, be partisan and not the dispassionate opinion of an informed legal expert. Clegg’s views are not widely shared among the profession.
None of this nonsense has any regard for or respect towards the substantive issues of the referendum question, or the lives, welfare and self-determination of our First Nations people.
These are the real issues you will only hear given proper spotlight by the likes of Langton, whose anthropological assessment is that the arrival of British colonisers to Australia in 1788 saw the first Australians reduced to the most disadvantaged Australians in less than 230 years.
“Our peoples were almost wiped from the face of the earth by a brutal rolling frontier after more than a century of sustained warfare that ended only in the 20th Century, and also by diseases introduced by the British: smallpox, measles, and influenza to name three,” the professor said at her own NPC address last month.
The existential crisis also cut across the need to preserve laws, language and culture, Langton said.
“We were totally excluded from the constitution that came into effect in 1901, with specific clauses that case our diverse people as a race.
“With more than 200 languages — more often described as 600 language varieties — our own laws, traditions, customs; we are peoples, not a race,” she said.
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Ultimately, the close watchers of this referendum – journalists like me who listen carefully, ask questions of the brains and personalities driving the case for either side – occupy a very different space to the everyday Australian showing up to the voting booths this weekend.
Millions of people – 2,212,581 voters according to the Australian Electoral Commission – had already cast their vote a week prior to the referendum day.
It is quite possible that the nuance and noise of the referendum debate have barely rated on many people’s radars.
If so, and if the sentiments of the movement to railroad the constitutional amendment resonate in the hearts and minds of soft ‘No’ voters or those who have not really thought about what is at stake, including the hypocrisy of a neutral ‘No’, we are all worse off for it.
Laziness and apathy do nothing for democracy, the empowerment of the Australian citizenry, or the agency of individuals participating in our society. These qualities also do nothing for the new era of governing with rights, quality, inclusion and personhood at the forefront we so desperately need.
Professor Gerry Stoker, a politics and governance expert from the University of Southampton, recently visited Australia to share his take on trust in government trends with some academic circles in Canberra.
While the latest cohesion index tracking by the Scanlon Foundation Research Institute shows Australians’ trust in governments declined from 2021, Stoker observed this trend was not necessarily unique to the country or bad for democracy. However, political leaders must own their role in building trustworthy institutions and giving the concept of trustworthy government more credibility. This mattered especially in public debates such as referenda, he said.
“The reality is [governments] need to bring people and citizens along with them, and one of the most obvious ways of doing that is developing a slightly stronger bond of trust between them and yourself,” the Saving Democracy author told The Mandarin.
“I think the main attraction for political elites should be the way it expands the range, variety and effectiveness of the things that they can do – [strengthening trust] is going to be very important for addressing a lot of the issues that Australia or many other developed countries face, whether that be climate change, or developing effective policies, social care,” he said.
How the sentiment of low government trust in Australia may inform voting in this referendum is yet to be seen, and will no doubt feature in the wash of public reflections on the other side of October 14.
According to former chief justice of the High Court of Australia and UWA Chancellor Robert French, what it says about modern Australian democracy and public discourse should prompt pause for thought.
Giving an impassioned speech in support of the ‘Yes’ case for First Nations constitutional recognition and a Voice to parliament, French expressed feelings of consternation about the ‘No’ battle cry, “If you don’t know, vote ‘No’”.
“The Australian spirit evoked by the ‘Don’t know, vote ‘No’’ slogan is a poor shadow of the spirit which drew up our constitution. It invites us to a resentful, uniquiring passivity. Australians, whether they vote ‘Yes’ or ‘No’ are better than that,” he said.
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French noted that “socialising” the idea of the referendum more may have helped corral a stronger sense of support for the proposed amendment to the constitution across wider Australian society. But a lot of the concerns that have been publicly aired ahead of the referendum also shared resonance with the same worries at the time Australia federated and the constitution was developed more than 100 years ago.
“An old echo of present times can be found in the content of some of the opposition to the creation of the Commonwealth constitution,” the former chief justice said.
“In an article [published in the radical Victorian journal Tocsin, on the 24th of February 1898], a contributor observed: 1) The people aren’t ready to federate, 2) They don’t know what it means, 3) Their newspapers or leaders are not honest or brainy enough to try to teach them what it means.
“Another resonance with the present was a degree of uncertainty about the future of the [federation] project. At a celebratory dinner at the outset of the drafting process in 1891, Sir Henry Parkes said to cheers and cries of hear, hear’: ‘I do not dive into the future – the conditions of which no men can tell – but suffice it that the work that has begun this day be of sterling merit, and such that Australia will always have cause to remember it with just feelings of pride. There may be difficulties but no great object has been obtained without difficulties’.“
French said the national constitution was a set of rules governing a country, and Australia’s was the work of delegates from each of the Australian colonies back in the 1890s, reflecting the societies of which they were a part and the world views of that historical time.
“They were writing a constitution for a future, which might be beyond their imagining, and they provided for its amendment by a people’s vote,” French said.
“We are a people who, for all our inevitable human shortcomings, have established and maintained a durable representative democracy for over 120 years.
“We have proven ourselves capable of accommodating our evolution into a vibrant, multicultural society. And we look forward,” he said.
For all the slagging about the power of either campaign to genuinely engage voters on the substance of their issues, you have to wonder how much of that cynical talking down of the Voice referendum is just a self-defeating merry-go-round for Canberra’s dinner party tables.
The truth is, we need leaders who show an appetite for progress that reflects the changing attitudes of the country. This change has been a long time coming – a journey of at least eight processes, 11 reports, an expert panel, a joint select parliamentary committee, an Act of Recognition Review, the Referendum Council and more – forged over 12 years.
Many other attempts for First Nations empowerment have come before it and never quite cut through.
Voice proponents have asked and engaged politicians, First Nations people, constitutional lawyers and ordinary people what form of Indigenous recognition is wanted and will work.
The political courage to take the next step – be it to call a referendum, set new policies, make strategic investments, or introduce legislation – is worth admiring.
This country has evolved, whether the naysayers like it or not, and Australia and its First Nations people need more of it.
