No is so easy

 

No is so easy

What Opposition to the Voice is doing to Australia

 

Kit Kelen

 

‘No’ is the word with the sharpest edges. Ask a two year old. Most of them know the first word weapon. And the Australian voter has more than a passing familiarity with the expression, if thirty six out of the forty four referenda since Federation are anything to go by.  

 

A convincing no vote in the Voice Referendum will have a number of gloomy consequences for Australia. It will leave the forces for reconciliation desperately dispirited. It will empower and embolden nay-sayers of all stripes, from anti-vaxers to climate change denialists. And it will leave the Prime Minister and federal Labor seriously, if not mortally, wounded. It will, in short, spread feelings of inevitable doom throughout indigenous Australia and among the progressive forces in Australian politics. Months before the poll, these negative consequences are already among us.

 

You might not have noticed that Labor’s honeymoon with the electorate has recently ended. We know it ended because nobody uses the word anymore. And what ended it? The No campaign and the apparent evaporation of the yes vote, as witnessed in all recent polls.

 

Encouraging a no vote is by far the easiest shot Peter Dutton has of mortally wounding an until now very popular Prime Minister. In terms of strategy, this is Tony Abbott in the Age of Trump. The virulent resurgence of post-presidential Trumpism in the US proves the effectiveness, in opposition, of what is essentially an oppositional movement – rabble proud of their ‘anti-woke’ rebel cred, galvanized in permanent celebration of their victimhood and in permanent opposition to perceived powers that be (most notably that well known bogey – ‘the deep state’). 

 

Dutton is the negativity man par excellence, in the avatar of the Queensland cop gone on to greater things. In some ways, Dutton makes Tony Abbott, with his erstwhile religious fervour, seem a dreamy idealist. The ‘lack of detail’ gadfly has been a brilliant tactic for Dutton – red herring (to mix metaphors), but very effective. Dutton is quite sincere in believing he has found an Achilles heel of Labor hubris here. What ‘lack of detail’ boils down to, at this point, is that the PM is not Nostradamus. Albo is experiencing a classic case of damned whatever he says or does. Committing to the Uluru Statement from the Heart in full, as the PM did very publicly on election night, does commit to truth telling and treaty processes, as well as a voice. Much of this may be a long way down the track and involve complex negotiations with many parties. If the government says we know exactly how these treaties will work and we know precisely what will happen with them then they gainsay the will of the people they hoped to empower by instituting a constitutionally enshrined voice. Every time they say, and rightly, that these things can’t be known yet – that they must be negotiated – they start up the ‘where is the detail’ merry-go-round. The key tactical question becomes then what proportion of the electorate can we credit with being able to pay attention long enough to deal sensibly with this contradiction?

 

Dutton, and the no campaigners generally, may have a serviceable and perhaps inexhaustible tactic at their disposal here. Better in a way than any of Tony Abbott’s three word slogans, ‘where’s the detail (?)’ is a kind of magic pudding of negativity. With hindsight, on the national stage of reconciliation, we can see how easy it was for Rudd to make the apology to the stolen generation. He was negating, not only the intransigence of his predecessor on the issue, but the horrors of a long historical wrong that clearly needed righting. Likewise, further back, with Keating’s Redfern Park speech. Brave as it was, it was a kind of ‘no’ declaration – no to the rotten past, no to what we had been. 

 

Now we need a YES. Yes to a better future than we’ll get under the present arrangements if we just carry on pretending it’s all steady at the helm. YES is a lot harder! And while it’s easy to say that Labor needn’t have exposed itself to all of this, one asks what alternative have they really had? The fact is that, through this commitment to Uluru, the Labor government showed that under that submarine loving tow-the-US-line and tow-back-the-boats exterior there actually beats something resembling a heart. And it showed that there’s a conscience that cares about fixing some fundamental things that need fixing about Australia. In Albo’s from time-to-time trembling lip we can see that – unlike his predecessor, he’s not a mechanical toy – that he cares about this stuff – and that this is why he is actually there. Whether this heart on the sleeve is enough to get the job done is another question.

 

I’m not Nostradamus either. Although we won’t know the outcome for some months yet, and regardless of what the polls indicate this week or next, the divisiveness is being felt now, as it was during the marriage equality debate. The ultimate YES vote there cleared a lot of that up and seemed to make worthwhile what felt hard at the time. That was something progressive happening in darkly conservative times. This vote is a very different beast. Though happening in a more socially progressive context, it has much more in common with the 1999 Republic poll. Hindsight shows that the postal plebiscite was a stroke of genius on Turnbull’s part. A novel proposal with a novel mechanism. I think it’s fair to think that a fair proportion of the 20% of the electorate who did not vote in the Marriage Equality plebiscite would have been NO votes were they pressed. Of course, that whole debacle might have been got around had John Howard not gone out of his way to amend the Marriage Act to specifically outlaw same sex marriage in 2004. Still, whatever we think about those events, they did not involve a change in the constitution.

 

When I started writing this article, in late July, it seemed, in light of the available polls, that the most likely outcome was that the YES case would gain a majority of votes nationally, but not a majority of states. Outright defeat now seems more likely, but if loss of the referendum were to occur despite a majority of votes in favour then this outcome would throw a spotlight on the constitution more generally. In particular it would draw attention to the clearly undemocratic nature of the Federation, as perhaps best expressed in the case of Keating’s ‘unrepresentative swill’, i.e. the Senate, where a Tasmanian’s vote is worth ten times the value of my vote in NSW. The constitution may, like ANZAC Day, be holy writ for Peter Dutton (and many on both sides of the aisle in parliament), but it is a deeply flawed nineteenth century artefact, demonstrating much forward thinking for its time, but in urgent need of replacement, after a century and a quarter. It’s not just the issue of the undemocratic nature of the Senate and the way indigenous people have been treated. The whole conception of Australia as Dominion in the Empire, was of a white man’s country, with messy compromises needing to be made to placate feuding colonies. Australian post-colonial nationhood was by no means a project completed, but rather one begun, in 1901. We should remember that the coffins from the Great War came back draped with Union Jacks. We should remember that there was no Australian passport until 1949.

 

We saw the persistence of some of the anachronism our constitution represents, with the failure of national leadership during the most intense pre-vaccine COVID periods. We need a constitution and a parliamentary system – we need a style of democracy – suited to the people we’ve become. That is – a document establishing system reflecting our diversity as a nation, and the moral (reconciliation, the housing crisis) and existential (climate change) crises we now face. Australia needs less layers of government: specifically, it needs two rather than three layers. The country needs national and regional government. It doesn’t need states at all. And it doesn’t need citizens to be more or less equal on the basis of where they live in relation to nineteenth century colonial borders. Making this change doesn’t having to mean abolish anyone’s precious state of origin, just as ridding ourselves of the monarchy needn’t mean rooting out every last vestige of associated tradition.  

 

To get the necessary changes in train, Australian governments are going to need to be a lot bolder, and much better focussed on the big picture. And Australian voters are going need to get used to saying YES a lot more often, YES to the right ideas of course. Big changes are needed in this country, and they need to happen soon.  

 

Let’s be optimistic for a moment and imagine that this campaign can be turned around now and that the ultimate underdogs of Australian political history – the indigenous people of Australia – will, as a result, finally be listened to, not in a haphazard, but in a systematic way. Let’s imagine this won’t be just another rug to be pulled out from under them when the conservatives return to power.

 

If there’s someone whispering in your ear the simple message ‘just say no’, well, one can say no to that too!

 

‘No’ is the frequent first resort weapon of those who see themselves as not being offered a choice, those (ironically) who see themselves as not having a say. After all ‘no means no’. There are good reasons this sometime needs asserting.

 

Demographically, the likely NO voters in this poll will be older, less educated and non-indigenous. Polls show Indigenous support remains solid around the 80% mark. While there is strong support for the NO vote among coalition voters, it’s fair to say that there is a hard Hansonite core to this constituency. The frequent reason intending NO voters give is that they don’t want Aboriginal Australians being entitled to benefits not available to them. But anyone who was awake for the last two hundred and fifty years should have some idea of the ‘special treatment’ benefits the original possessors of this land have generally received. Trumpism has made the Hansonite kind of thinking more plausible, and more respectable, all over the world.

 

I often wondered, during the marriage equality debate, why it was heterosexual people were being offered a vote on something that really did not concern them. And here we are again, with the hegemonic powers deciding what the minority can or can’t have. Wouldn’t it be more sensible to allow indigenous Australians to decide for themselves whether or not they wished to have a voice?

 

Putting Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander self-determination to the sword through a NO vote will not merely be dispiriting. The blow to confidence will surely lead to worse outcomes in terms of health, education, incarceration and so on. I would argue though that the blow to the national psyche will be more significant. A NO vote will represent definitive rejection of the extraordinary generosity of indigenous Australians who have come together, and through long and careful deliberation, issued the invitation to walk together. A NO vote sends us back to the white sliced Howard era sneer, his ‘black armband’ distaste for the truth of how we got to be where we are. It’s now beginning to sink in for government ranks that a decisive NO vote will be worse than if there had been no referendum. As we saw with the way the Republic NO vote set back the cause of ridding ourselves of a foreign monarchy, so every well-meaning attempt in the reconciliation space post NO this time will for years be dogged by ‘but the Australian people voted against this.’ And to pull the plug on the referendum now would be worse than losing. It would amount to saying that the Australian people couldn’t be trusted with their own destiny. The Coalition would harp on this theme indefinitely. The great irony being that it is quite true that on the issue of reconciliation with the people Australia dispossessed – and when it comes to telling the truth about this – the Australian people have indeed, up to this point, been untrustworthy. This referendum is, in its way, an audacious gamble with the proposition that the electorate might be trusted with the nation’s destiny. If the current polls are to be given any credence, the Australian voter is about to make an error of greater-than-Brexit proportions. An error fuelled by a closely related, Murdoch fuelled, negativity.

 

NO is, among other things, the fastest known path from question to tantrum. It is the first discovered power of the ignorant. When it falls into the wrong hands, when it comes out of the wrong mouth, that’s when history is undone. NO then becomes a way to not listen, a way to block one’s ears. NO says ‘I don’t want to know’, ‘nothing can convince me’.  Of course it won’t always work. There may be going to bed with no supper. But when a ballot box is involved and it’s the Australian voter we’re asking! Well…

 

It is hard to imagine another referendum on the Australian constitution in the coming decades, should this one fail. The prospect of another republic referendum would be very dim indeed.

 

Saying YES this time can be an important first step on the way to many improvements for Australia, and especially for indigenous Australians. Sadly, it seems now this is unlikely to be the result.

 

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Voters should take comfort from the fact that, over the decades, the author has been wrong about the outcome of many Australian elections. There is still hope.