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SILENCING THE VOICE  
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Amy Bachrach
September 9, 2024
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_ This January 26 was the first “Australia Day” following
October's defeat of landmark constitutional referendum recognizing
Australia’s first nations people by enshrining in the Constitution
an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice to Parliament _

WugulOra morning ceremony, which includes performances by Aboriginal
and Torres Strait singers and dance troupes, on Australia Day,
sometimes referred to as Invasion Day, in Sydney, 2020. , Photo
credit: Rick Rycroft/AP // Al Jazeera

 

Australia Day 2024 has come and gone. In mainstream Australian
culture, January 26th celebrates the arrival of the ‘First Fleet’
-- of British convicts -- in 1788 when the first Governor of the new
colony of New South Wales claimed the land and declared it _terra
nullius _or empty land -- having no inhabitants.

In fact, there were hundreds of thousands of Aboriginal people here
speaking 260 distinct
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languages and 500 dialects
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They had been on this unceded land for at least 60,000 years and are
the oldest continuous culture on the planet.

Aboriginal Senator Lidia Thorpe wrote in Jacobin
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just a few days before “Australia Day” 2021, that the arrival of
the colonizers and their massacres of indigenous people makes
“Australia Day” a day of mourning for Indigenous people who have
renamed it Invasion Day.

The day echoes a combination of Columbus Day, Independence Day and
Thanksgiving with all its critiques.

Introducing the Voice

This January 26th has been different from previous years: this is the
first “Australia Day” following the crushing defeat in October of
a landmark constitutional referendum to recognize Australia’s first
nations people by enshrining in the Constitution an Aboriginal and
Torres Strait Islander Voice to Parliament. The Voice was to be an
independent advisory body through which indigenous people could
provide non-binding advice to Parliament on legislation and programs
_affecting them_. It would make representations intended to improve
the desperate conditions of indigenous life in Australia that
Parliament would, it was hoped, seriously consider, but which it was
equally free to ignore.

The idea for the Voice was set out in the Uluru Statement from the
Heart [[link removed]]
that proposed the Voice and _Makaratta _-- a process of truth-telling
and agreement-making (treaty). That statement represented a consensus
many years in the making and which stemmed from hundreds of
consultations amongst indigenous people across Australia. The change
needed to be constitutional and not legislative because, although
there had been other representative bodies for the indigenous
community, these were short lived, intermittent and subject to the
whims of the government of the day.

How bad was the damage?

The defeat was cataclysmic. The referendum failed 60% to 40% in the
popular vote, and in all Australian states including those in which
failure was unthinkable. The only jurisdiction in which the referendum
was approved was the Australian Capital Territory -- the seat of
government -- with the most highly educated population in the nation.
What should have been a day of healing turned out to be the day that
Australia turned its back on its first nations, again.

Why did the referendum fail?
The first barrier to success was the fact that a constitutional
referendum requires a “double majority” in order to succeed -- a
majority of Australians nationally (by compulsory vote) and a majority
of voters in four of the six Australian states. It is notable that the
progressive Australian Capital Territory (ACT) and the 30%-indigenous
Northern Territory are “territories” and so did not count as
‘states’ for the latter purpose.

Next, of the 48 proposed national referenda in Australia’s history,
only 8 have succeeded and they all had bi-partisan support. The Voice
referendum was doomed from the outset because shadow Prime Minister
Peter Dutton and the Coalition he led wasted no time in opposing it.
This was widely understood to be a _bad faith _stance, with the
political goal of giving the Labor government a black-eye, rather than
because they disagreed with the proposition on its actual merits.

Contaminating the Ecosystem

An article published in Jacobin three days before the referendum, Zac
Gillies-Palmer [[link removed]]
describes the toxic tone of the No campaign and explains some key
reasons why the referendum was unlikely to succeed. In particular he
noted the No Campaign’s Trump-like strategy of “contaminating the
ecosystem” with the help of media allies and captures the ways in
which the No campaign dog-whistled to racists and refused to distance
itself from neo-Nazis.

The No campaign spread fear and lies that preyed upon ignorance, fear,
apathy, racism and self-centeredness of the electorate.

Some voters I encountered complained that the government was already
throwing plenty of public funds “at the Aboriginals” and that it
wasn’t making a difference. In fact, the precise reason the Voice
was proposed was to ensure that Aboriginal people could have input
into how those funds could be directed more effectively to solve the
problems indigenous people face.

Although the Prime Minister has tried to deny that racism played a
part in the referendum’s defeat, I myself encountered voters making
explicitly racist comments lamenting Australia having “given them
the vote;” and using the “n” word.

One voter I met while door-knocking drove the problem home. He told me
sadly and earnestly that he really wished he cared about the
referendum and learning more about it but he didn’t. He and his
mates had discussed the issue and decided how they were going to vote;
he was sticking with that decision. Although he didn’t tell me what
that decision was, it was abundantly clear. “I don’t see how it
affects me,” he said. In the words
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of Guardian journalist Katherine Murphy, by voting down the Voice
referendum Australians had “failed the empathy test.”

The Aboriginal No Vote

The campaign was also confusing for voters because two prominent
Aboriginal players were placed centre stage in the “No” campaign.
Jacinta Nampijinpa Price is the conservative Shadow

Minister for Aboriginal Affairs. She is from the Northern Territory,
but had not been part of the Uluru Dialog. Nyunggai Warren Mundine was
once chair of the Labor party, but more recently has had multiple
failures as an electoral-candidate for the conservatives. They both
echoed the proposition that the Voice was racist and divisive, and
Price even asserted
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that colonization had not only not damaged but had actually benefited
the indigenous community.

A few voters I spoke with asked me why some Aboriginal people opposed
the Voice. I asked one man of Indian descent if all Indians agreed on
issues. “Not even my family,” he answered, laughing. He voted yes.
So did the vast majority of Aboriginal people
[[link removed]].

Dutton convinced Australians that the referendum was divisive and
racialized Australia. In fact, what racialized Australia was 200 years
of colonization, of colonizers deeming this land to be _terra nullius
_then massacring the indigenous people and introducing smallpox and
alcohol.

What racialized Australia was the practice, that ended only in the
1970s, of taking Aboriginal
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children away
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from their parents, their communities and their traditional country.

Fake fears

The No campaign weaponized fear. It surfaced rumors that the Voice
would lead to the ability of Aboriginal people to take possession of
your garden and bring about quotas and higher taxes whereas only
Parliament could do any of these things. Voters were led to fear that
the representations by the Voice would clog up the court system
despite the fact that constitutional lawyers who were deeply involved
in the process of developing the referendum said authoritatively that
it wouldn’t.

“If You Don’t Know, Vote No”

The No campaign convinced voters that there was insufficient
information about the referendum made available by the Yes campaign
and delivered in a variety of ways.

For people concerned about how the Voice would function, there was
detailed documentation from the Uluru dialog about the limited powers
of the entity, how it would be structured and other answers to
legitimate questions. The Opposition claimed that it didn’t exist
and relied on the apathy of the electorate not to investigate further.

But my experience campaigning revealed that voters didn’t even know
what the referendum said. Rapper Briggs produced an ironic video
[[link removed]] of a conversation in a
pub in which he shows two young women how easy it was to Google the
wording of the referendum: "A Proposed Law: to alter the Constitution
to recognize the First Peoples of Australia by establishing an
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice. Do you approve this
proposed alteration?"

The appeal to apathy was cynical but effective and Australians by and
large put the whole issue into what is referred to as the “too-hard
basket.” The No campaign’s slogan during the last weeks of the
campaign was “If you don’t know, vote no.”

The Yes Campaign’s False Assumptions
But the Labor government and campaign architects made some fatal
errors.

The campaign assumed that there would be widespread desire for change
rooted in the understanding of historic and current wrongs that the
Voice would help to make right. But Australians are generally ignorant
of the violent colonial history, the generation of Aboriginal
children, now grown, stolen from their parents and communities and a
plethora of other forms of historic discrimination.

The campaign assumed that Australians would know the facts about what
is commonly referred to as “the gap” in overall wellbeing and life
conditions between indigenous and non-indigenous Australians but which
is really a gaping hole in life expectancy, educational outcomes,
health, employment and an epidemic of incarceration and deaths in
custody -- blights that Americans would be familiar with.

The campaign assumed that it was enough to call out the No
campaign’s misinformation and disinformation. As Megan Davis
[[link removed]],
esteemed member of the Referendum Council, points out, that was
meaningless without any strategy to combat it. According to Davis, 9
out of 10 Australians now support the campaign for truth in political
advertising. It’s a shame the government didn’t see about that
first.

The campaign assumed that many Australians would take time out of
their work, parenting, hobbies and budgeting to attend lengthy
meetings called Kitchen Table Conversations -- two 1.5 hour sessions
in homes and cafes for education about indigenous history -- and more
generally to educate themselves about the Voice proposal and why they
should care about it. Voters did not have the bandwidth for this issue
with their minds distracted by keeping up with the skyrocketing cost
of living.

But one of the most fundamentally mistaken assumptions of the Yes
campaign was that they could win by running an enthusiastic and
highly-skilled grassroots campaign. It couldn’t have been more
wrong.

Not that there was a dearth of grassroots activism. No fewer than
80,000 volunteers went boots-and-all into the campaign. In an American
size population, that would be a million activists.

Two months before polling day, historian Grace Brooks
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argued in the Jacobin that the Labor government assumed the Yes
campaign could win by mobilizing the scarce Labor Party base and union
membership. In fact, tying the issue closely to the new Labor Party
government provided the excuse for the opposition to treat the whole
thing as a party-political game.

But while volunteers were out there making logical arguments
one-on-one about why voters should support this simple and moderate
proposal, Dutton and the rest of the No campaign were out there doing
push-ups spreading fear and lies through the biased media about
fictitious

detrimental effects of the Voice. Grassroots campaigns had been
pivotal in the 2022 campaigns of community Independents but were no
match for the onslaught of highly funded social media.

Truth-telling First

The experience of the campaign showed that Australians do not know
about the history of colonization and genocide, intergenerational
trauma or the currently degraded life circumstances of Aboriginal
people. There has been a “compassion bypass” in play.

Some “progressive no” advocates, led by Senator Thorpe
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argued that the Voice proposal was so weak as to be meaningless and
detracted from efforts toward treaty. But “No” by any other name
is still “No.”

The results of the referendum actually exposed chasms in Australian
society and revealed the necessity of truth-telling
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-- broad and deep education about Australia’s First Nations -- their
ancient culture, the history of violence, the dire “gap” in
wellbeing and the long history of collective efforts toward
reconciliation and sovereignty.

There was an indigenous week of silence following the referendum’s
defeat and no consensus about next steps has emerged since then.

Whatever strategy does evolve, neither the Voice nor treaty nor any
other attempt at reconciliation will succeed without truth-telling.

_[AMY BACHRACH has lived in Australia for 25 years. She has worked in
the Australian union movement and social change organisations, for a
federal Labor senator and has recently been active volunteering for a
progressive Independent MP. She is a former Chair of the NYC Local of
DSA,, Chair of the DSA Youth Section and has participated widely in US
progressive politics._

_I acknowledge that I write and live on the land of the Boon Wurrung
people of the Kulin nation. I pay tribute to their elders, past,
present and emerging, and to all First Nations people who have never
ceded the land we call Australia.]_

* Australia
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* Aboriginal peoples
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* Aboriginal rights
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* Indigenous peoples
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* First Nations
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* Torres Strait Islander
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* colonialism
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* Racism
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* British colonialism
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* National Aboriginal and Islander Day Observance Committee
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