"A Proposed Law: to alter the Constitution to recognise the First Peoples of Australia by establishing an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice.Do you approve this proposed alteration?"
Referendum question and constitutional amendment.
To pass, a referendum needs to receive majority support both nationally and in at least four of Australia’s six states.
The campaign effectively began on 28th December 2022, when the Prime Minister, Anthony Albanese ('Albo') committed to holding a referendum. Here is a time-line of the events since then.
How the Voice to Parliament failed so spectacularly
What these raw figures do not show is the overwhelming support for the Voice by opinion leaders, together with the initial advantage held by the YES camp.
The Voice was supported by the Government, the ABC, and a huge range of corporations and celebrities.
Qantas painted some of its planes with Yes23 slogans.
Yes campaign groups spent more than twice as much as No campaign groups during the referendum, according to new figures from the Australian Electoral Commission.
In addition to the weight of influential voices supporting the Voice, the proposal started the race with a substantial advantage.
Here are some of my thoughts.
1) It is one of the most spectacular failures of a political process that I have ever seen. It has split the country, and the defeated Yes voters are now dealing with shock and grief. As to be expected, that includes denial and casting around for scapegoats to blame.
2) The proposal to change the Constitution, which would effectively be irreversible, without explaining in detail about how it would work, was a major risk, which clearly did not pay off. The Government essentially said 'Vote for this, and we will work out the details later'. Naturally, people wondered whether there might be a hidden agenda, and where a Yes vote might ultimately lead. Whereas the 'Uluru Statement from the Heart' was a single page long, a Freedom of Information claim elicited a much longer version, which included discussions that had preceded the one page version.
When Albo was asked if he had read the 26 page version, or the longer one, he said 'Why would I?' This was unimpressive to many people.
3) The Yes campaign tried to paint No voters as being right-wing racists, and the Yes proposal as being strongly supported by indigenous people. This picture was undermined by some articulate indigenous spokespeople who put the case for No. In particular Jacinta Nampijinpa Price, a senator from the Northern Territory who is Shadow Minister for Indigenous Australians (ie part of the conservative coalition). The other leader was Warren Mundine, who was at one time the President of the Labor Party.
Senator Jacinta Price addresses National Press Club
The Great Voice Debate: Senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price (start at 7:20)
If you don't have time to watch the videos about Jacinta Price, read this short essay of hers: Telling The Truth.
4) Much was made about how indigenous people supported the Voice. An online poll in January 2023 suggested that 80% would vote Yes. (The validity of this was disputed by indigenous senator Lidia Thorpe, who said that the voters polled were not asked if they were indigenous).
The actual results showed much less.
But for a measure that purported to help indigenous people, the salient question is 'Why didn't it enjoy 100% support from indigenous people?'
5) I got the impression that Yes supporters despised No supporters and didn't listen to their arguments. Objections to the Voice were ascribed to misinformation, scare tactics, racism and ignorance. None of those attitudes were effective in changing Noes to Yesses.
6) While early No campaign slogans included 'If you don't know, vote No!', later in the campaign the main slogan was 'No to the Voice of Division'.
The first slogan was attacked by Yes supporters as being a position only taken by ignorant people.
Ray Martin doubles down on his comment about 'Dinosaurs and Dick-heads'.
The Yes campaign failed to counter the argument about the Voice being divisive.
7) There is a long history of people from the progressive side of politics being opposed to Racial Discrimination. Much support for 'No' came from people who perceived the Voice as being racially discriminatory. Australia is one of the most racially tolerant countries in the world, according to the World Values Survey, analysed by the Washington Post. The survey asked respondents in more than 80 different countries to identify kinds of people they would not want as neighbours. Some respondents, picking from a list, chose "people of a different race." Less than 5% of Australians did.
8) A country of migrants is particularly sensitive to challenges to the principle of equality of citizenship, as alluded to by a previous prime minister, Bob Hawke. The slogan 'All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others' would be treated with suspicion in Australia. (Animal Farm, by George Orwell).
Bob Hawke speaking at the Sydney Opera House at the Australia Day Bicentenary, 26th January 1988.
'In Australia, there is no hierarchy of descent. There must be no privilege of origin.'
9) The ostensible premise behind the Voice proposal was that there were inadequate channels of communication between marginalised indigenous people and the Government. Many people doubted this premise, expressed by this letter to the editor of The Economist.
This letter refers to indigenous representatives in Parliament being roughly proportionate to their ratio in the general population. The current figures are:
Estimates of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australians. 3.8% of the total Australian population.
List of Indigenous Australian politicians. As of 2023, Indigenous Australians make up 10.5% of the Senate and 1.9% of the House of Representatives. The total representation is at 4.8%, which is above their representation in the total population (3.8%).
The Coalition of Peaks is discussed in this article in the Conversation by Michelle Gratton.
View from The Hill: There is a way forward to tackle Indigenous disadvantage after referendum defeat
Also by Michelle Gratton. Grattan on Friday: Anthony Albanese had good motives but his referendum has done much harm.
10) A good rule for life (especially for politicians) is that it is better to under-promise and over-deliver, than to over-promise and under-deliver. On this occasion, the Labor Government and it's Yes supporters raised huge expectations which they failed to deliver. As Michelle Gratton said: it did much harm.
11) The Prime Minister repeatedly reminded us that it is very hard to pass a referendum in Australia. Since federation in 1901, 45 nationwide referenda have been held, only eight of which have been carried, with all those being carried having bipartisan support from Australia's major political parties before the referendum. It would have been a good idea to negotiate a consensus with the opposition before announcing this referendum. But Albo pushed ahead, and when the opposition subsequently declined to agree, there was no bipartisanship, and the referendum was duly rejected.
Why did the Government behave like that? They must have known that the referendum would almost certainly fail if they didn't negotiate an agreement first.
12) At this point in history, the major fault-line in ideology internationally is not so much the old left-right division that has dominated discourse for much of the last two centuries, but rather it is the conflict between Enlightenment universalism and identity politics, these days often described pejoratively as 'woke'.
People often vote against what they dislike as much as they vote for what they do like. There were many people who disliked what they perceived as woke identity politics, and they made up a significant slice of No voters in the Voice referendum.
