There have been, and will be, plenty of post-mortems on the recent referendum, from people on all sides of the political fence, black and white. A lot of those people will be more qualified than me to comment. This statement from the First Nations leaders behind the 'yes' campaign is a 'must read'. By comparison my thoughts carry little weight, but here goes anyway....
There are lots of nuances to the explanation for the 'no' vote, and I think they all have some truth to them but to my mind, the deeper we dig the more useful our understanding becomes. Here's three of the many ways to look at it.
1. Blame the 'no' campaign
A lot of good judges have suggested it is almost impossible to get a 'yes' vote in a referendum where one of the major political parties opposes it. Given this, the Liberal and National Parties waged a brutal but highly effective campaign. At least the Nationals were up front about their opposition from the start. The Liberals, on the other hand, played a cunning, ruthless game. They led the government along by not committing either way, asking for more detail, listening to briefings, and declared their hand only when the game was well advanced.
The 'no' campaign itself followed a similar script. The strategy was to sow doubt and confusion, via disinformation and misdirection, and then tell a confused public, 'If you don't know, vote no'. Diligent fact checking by various media outlets found that while a few things in the 'yes' campaign materials were incorrect, the 'no' campaign was riddled with falsehoods, even in the official pamphlet sent to Australian households at government expense. But who reads the fact-checks? There are no laws requiring political campaigns to tell the truth, and the 'both sides' practices of the mainstream media simply allowed both sides to have their say and let the lies stand.
It worked, if your aim was to make the Labor government look inept. If you wanted to further the wellbeing of Australia's First Peoples or build greater understanding and respect between black and white, not so much.
2. Blame the 'yes' campaign
Despite the ruthless destructiveness of the 'no' campaign, it is worth also running the rule over the 'yes' campaign in which I played a small part. Despite the warning shot across the bow six years ago the 'yes' campaign had no strategy for combating the flood of misinformation. The campaign was slow to get started, like an elephant trying to run the Melbourne Cup, and by the time it got moving the 'no' campaign had a running start and had flooded the airwaves and social media channels with a dozen different lines of misdirection.
When the 'yes' campaign did get going, the strategy at local level was very focused on door-knocking, believing this was the best way to change people's minds. I'm not sure what this was based on, but assuming it was true you would have needed a far larger army of door-knockers than what we had when you consider that many of the 'yes' supporters (including me) were not really up for that. Meanwhile, a large group of campaign leaders, mostly First Nations people, spoke to the media whenever they had a chance, trying in vain to cut through the barrage of gotcha questions and communicate a positive message.
There was a lot of stuff out there, but it didn't really seem to hit the mark. The sense I had in my interactions was that by the time the 'yes' campaign really got rolling and I was handing out flyers most people had already made up their minds and switched off. The early goodwill, expressed in 60% support for the change in early polls, quickly evaporated. It was clear weeks out that the change would be rejected. The 'yes' campaign strategy, based on sustaining the early momentum and sweeping across the line in a wave of goodwill, proved to be a fantasy.
3. Rejecting or Accepting the Historic Moment
While this talk of tactics is interesting in its own way it is ultimately shallow. It treats politics as a game which you can win if you just play it well enough. But politics is not a game, it is a serious process by which we decide how we are governed. To treat it as a game, as many of its practitioners and much of the media do, is to debase it and sell us all short.
The first thing we need to understand is that assimilation is not dead. It is not even ailing. It is alive and well, and not going away any time soon.
Back in the 1950s Paul Hasluck as Commonwealth Minister for Territories (and hence also for Aboriginal Affairs) championed the shift from what was often called 'amelioration' - the idea that Aboriginal peoples were dying out and we just needed to make them comfortable while they did so - to the policy of assimilation. He was supported in this by all the State and Territory 'Protectors'. It was plain that Aboriginal people were not dying out after all and in fact were increasing in number. What future did they have in British Australia? The answer was that they were to be assimilated - they were to be absorbed into the Anglo-European community in such a way that over time you would no longer be able to tell the difference between black and white. The people would survive, but their culture would wither away in the presence of superior European culture.
It is a long time since the word 'assimilation' has been used to describe official policy. People will talk officially about self-determination, about respect for First Nations cultures in a multi-cultural nation, about inclusion, about 'closing the gap'. The referendum was a test of how serious we are about these new ideas. The answer is, not very. Beneath these words lies the ongoing power of the assimilation narrative.
This was expressed during the campaign in various ways - in the concern about 'dividing the nation' as if it had previously been united, in the concern about giving Aboriginal people special rights, in the assertion made by Senator Price that colonisation has been good for Aboriginal people, and the idea repeated by various 'no' campaigners that it is Aboriginal culture that keeps them poor. We even heard it, probably in ignorance, from various 'yes' campaigners for whom the primary point of the Voice was help rectify Aboriginal disadvantage by improving service delivery.
The anthropologist WEH Stanner had this to say back in 1958.
One would wish that the authors of the policy of assimilation had found for it a happier name. The crunch with which the lion begins to assimilate the lamb and what follows are images best dismissed from the mind. Yet the physiological metaphor brings us uncomfortably near the truth. Assimilation means that the Aborigines must lose their identity, cease to be themselves, become as we are. Let us leave aside the question that they may not want to, and the possibility - I myself would put it far higher than a possibility - that very determined forces of opposition will appear. Suppose that they do not know how to cease to be themselves?People who brush such a question aside can know very little about what it is to be an Aboriginal. Not that we have ever been a people remarkable for an intelligent appraisal of other races and cultures.
This is where what has been called the 'progressive no' campaign is worth listening to. What they were saying, in essence, is, 'Why would we want to be incorporated into the white nation's constitution?'. In other words, the process of recognition and the creation of the 'Voice' are merely another form of assimilation. Aboriginal people already have a voice, they don't need anyone's permission to exercise it, the problem is that white people are not listening. Why would they listen any better if it was in the constitution?
As the eventual votes showed, both the 'conservative' and 'progressive' 'no' voters were small minorities in the Aboriginal community, with solid majorities voting 'yes'. However, this doesn't mean the 'progressive no' advocates were wrong. Indeed, we didn't listen. So we march on down the difficult path of treaty and sovereignty, made more difficult now by the fact that the forces on the right feel empowered to withdraw their cooperation from treaty processes and double down (or perhaps chew harder) on their calls for assimilation.
Which brings me to my second point: racism is alive and well, but most of us don't recognise it.
Most of the progressive white people I know, whether supporters of the 'yes' campaign or the 'progressive no', share an understanding that we are prone to racism. None of us like this fact, but we understand that racism is structural, that we are trained to it from childhood and that despite our best intentions it can express itself at the most inopportune moments. We understand, like recovering addicts or repentant Christians, that admitting the problem is the first step, but far from the last, in addressing it.
By contrast, I discovered that 'no' campaigners were remarkably touchy on the subject, with one person even saying to me that being 'accused' of racism had turned them from a supporter to an opponent of the Voice. It is as if having to admit to the existence of racism was too high a price.
Yet this campaign was shot through with racism from beginning to end. Leaving aside the fact that assimilation is in itself a racist idea, there was blatant racism in the suggestions about various hidden agendas behind the seemingly innocuous 'Voice' campaign, in personal attacks on some of the key leaders, in the characterisation of Aboriginal people as parasites, in the fear (which emerges with every advance in Aboriginal rights) that white people will be displaced.
Sad to say, some of the most prominent 'yes' advocates fed this racist narrative by framing the Voice in terms of fixing problems in Aboriginal communities. Of course, it won't do to simply deny the problems exist. Whatever they disagree on, all Aboriginal people would like to have better health, safer communities, better education and job opportunities, adequate housing, fewer of their young people in prison.
Yet to limit the discussion to these issues is to risk trapping Aboriginal people in a deficit narrative and feeding the perception that there is something inherently wrong with them. Warren Mundine's response has resonance here - by enshrining the Voice in the constitution, are we saying that these problems will never be solved?
Both 'yes' and 'no' campaigns seemed to have had only a hazy grip on what was in play here. The core question is not, 'can we find a way to fix the problems in Aboriginal communities?', but 'can we find a way for the two cultures to live side by side as equals?'. The key problem being solved here is not poverty and poor health - these are the symptoms - it is the ongoing disrespect and marginalisation of First Nations cultures and peoples within post-colonial Australia. The Uluru Statement taken in full (not merely the Voice in isolation) attempts to rectify this - give First Nations people a permanent say in the governance of the nation, negotiate a treaty or treaties to address the unfinished business of peacemaking after the war of invasion, and tell the truth about how this took place.
The referendum result shows that this process will not be easy or quick. Stanner was prescient, on this as on so many things - the 'forces of opposition' have indeed revealed themselves. This should not come as a surprise, it has happened many times before and will happen again. The referendum is a setback but it is also a starting point. We have about 40% of our populace willing to listen and move forward. That is something, but not yet enough. The work continues.
The referendum campaign is just the latest indication that the forces we normally think of as the 'right' are far more adept at navigating this landscape than those on the left or even in the centre. It is easy to flood the environment with misinformation because there is no penalty for lying. With a fractured landscape and low levels of trust in institutions, it is hard to establish an objective criterion for truth.
There are, of course, limits to what this strategy can achieve. It is a poor strategy to achieve positive change, because that requires you to make your case and convince enough people that the change is a good idea. But it works if you want to resist the change, because you can spread lies, confusion and fear about the change and this can be enough to sink it. This is what we have seen in the referendum, and what we have seen for many years over action on climate change. It doesn't mean you do nothing, it means you keep doing what you are doing now. If this isn't working so be it, perhaps that is the whole point.
This kind of strategy is also very effective for the politics of grievance. The story of an innocent person victimised by powerful forces, or a despised minority unjustly taking what is rightfully ours, is an easy sell in this environment because it preys on fears we already have and on our sense of vulnerability in the face of our decaying institutions. This was also used effectively in the referendum campaign with the implication that First People were somehow being offered something denied to the rest of us and were intent on stealing our hard-earned cash. The facts about where that cash actually came from in the first place are too long to fit in a tweet.
We have seen the same in Australia for many years over refugees, with the current controversy focused on people in indefinite detention. We are seeing it here in Queensland over the 'youth crime epidemic' where the not-so-hidden subtext is that the youth committing the crimes are Aboriginal. It is so easy to persuade substantial parts of the populace that the only reasonable answer is to lock people up. The alternatives are much harder to explain, look much more uncertain, and require a leap of empathy for people who are 'not like us'. Hence even supposedly 'progressive' or 'centre-left' governments show little resistance to the adoption of 'law and order' policies.
This same process led in the UK to the success of Brexit as a way of keeping 'outsiders' out and retaining British resources for British people - all this despite the fact that it is objectively making people poorer. In the US it has allowed Donald Trump to remain within touching distance of a second presidential term despite (or perhaps even because of) his attempts at election subversion and the multiple criminal and civil charges he is currently facing. His formidable publicity machine convinces his followers that every revelation of his criminality is a partisan attack from his (their) enemies.
It is not yet clear how this substitution of partisanship for objectivity can be reversed.
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In a sense, none of this is new. As the Prophet Bruce says,
Nothing worth having comes without some kind of fightIf you want to save the planet, bring justice to oppressed peoples or even just make a safe place for kids to ride their bikes to school you will have to fight every step of the way. We thought for a moment we might be at the point where we had worked hard enough, and convinced enough people, that we would be able to take the next step forward on this one. It turns out we were wrong. Now we know. Time to keep on walking.
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