Portside

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 languages and 500 dialects. 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 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 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 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 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 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.

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 children away 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 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, 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 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