Miracle now required -- analysis of the Voice campaign

 

MIRACLE NOW REQUIRED

to make necessity of virtue

 

Being abused by NO voters a few days ago, daring to walk through Redfern Station wearing a YES t-shirt, gave me pause to reflect on the nature of the stakes in the present referendum. The vote on October 14 is about many things, but above all it is about righting – or beginning to right – past wrongs, so as to give first Australians more of a say over their own situation and destiny. For non-indigenous Australia it is about beginning to take responsibility for the grief and loss that has been caused by the dispossession of the people who were here before Australia began coming into existence.

 

I have followed the opinion polls closely throughout the campaign and realize that it will now take a miracle to save the Voice from the NO voters. Towards the end of this piece I will speculate as to who they are.

 

 

What has been lost and what can be saved

 

What has been lost of indigenous culture in Australia is an extraordinary loss for humanity, for the world. Along with the loss of biodiversity it is the greatest tragedy of this continent. And it is a loss for which Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples cannot and should not be blamed. This loss of culture and of language – and the accompanying loss of lives, of land, of livelihood, of purpose – is the foundational crime of nation in the case of Australia.

 

What can be saved and what is being saved of indigenous culture and language, is the greatest gift, we as a nation, can give the world and our own future generations. And who is doing that work? Many Australians, but among them, indigenous Australians are naturally to the fore. Naturally, they lead in the preservation and in the development of their culture.

 

These are things a new constitution for Australia needs to recognize. This is the direction in which we must now point our hearts for as long as we wish to call this land ours.

 

This matter of how we come to be here in this place (and by what rights?) has been the key to my thinking about my country of birth ever since it was brought to my attention – that is to say – for most of my life.

 

Who votes how

There is a small and vocal minority who understand more or less what is at stake (as outlined above) but who refuse to believe – to accept – that they live in a stolen country. ‘It’s so long ago, it can’t matter now’, they’ll say, as if there had been enough time to heal all wounds. But at Juukan Gorge and elsewhere we see how the crime goes on. With the statistics on suicide, employment, health, housing, incarceration, we see how the crime goes on. Under the smokescreen of ‘might is right’ or assimilationist inevitable-ism, these people-of-no-colour at all absolve themselves of any responsibility for the current and for the future situation of indigenous people in Australia. For a number of inter-related reasons, to do with where they are and what they have and wish to have and wish to do, this small and vocal minority refuse to accept the reality of indigenous dispossession and disadvantage. Dogs at a bone they have just for themselves, and wishing not to be disturbed, they refuse to accept the reality of their situation because it puts them in the wrong, they feel, and cannot bear to feel that they are in the wrong (however wrong they are). Like Claudius in Shakespeare’s Hamlet they are up against a dilemma as to how they can be pardoned and retain the offence. These are the children of the assimilationist age, who cannot see what the problem was with what we now call the stolen generation. These are the people who believe that assimilation has worked and that there really are no Aboriginal people left, just people pretending to not be white. Except of course, for a few – as I have had it put to me – ‘bush Aboriginals’ – who just want to be left alone with their spears and boomerangs and don’t need any help at all and don’t want any conversation.

 

Why can’t we all just love Anzac Day and January 26^th and salute the Union Jack with a few stars thrown in for local flavour? Why can’t we love everything American, believe in Sky News and sing the tableau of history’s page advancing on every stage from gallant Cook till now? Why can’t we have that kind of progress, the kind we’ve always had in this land? Why do we have to go back to the Stone Age? And what would hope to find there? Look on pretty well any local regional/rural facebook community group through the time of the Voice debate and you will find all of these sentiments (and much meaner, nastier, less knowledgable, less logical ones) expressed.

 

So really everything’s fine and what’s all the fuss about?

 

Let us for a moment put aside the out and proud racists – neo-Nazi types and so forth, a tiny, dangerous, violent minority – the people who believe that indigenous people are naturally bad and doomed and are getting what’s coming to them. As in Europe in the thirties and in many parts of the world right now, it’s the people who won’t stand up to these thugs, the people who are cowed by them, who pose the greatest threat to our democracy and to progress towards reconciliation in this country.

 

Don’t you love the conversational ambit that begins – ‘I’m not a racist but…’ It is almost always said pre-emptively, defensively, before anyone has made any kind of accusation. This is almost always uttered by people who do not know what racism is. The current debate has brought these words forth from the mouths of many such people. People say ‘I’m not a racist but… ‘ because they wonder if they may be racists. Who wants to be insulted?

 

So who is a racist in the present case? I say you are a racist if you understand the history of this country well enough to know that there have been and are major problems for Aboriginal people in Australia and you choose to blame them rather than looking for the real and obvious historical cause of the problems. If you understand the situation and turn your back on what you know to be true about the long suffering of the first Australians, about who brought it about and who benefited from it and who continues to benefit from it, then I say you are a racist. If you refuse to shake the hand offered you in friendship, just because it is not a white hand, then I say you are a racist.

 

So many people claim to have not enough information, not enough detail about the Voice proposition. The press makes much of this in their effort at ‘balanced reporting’. This morning on ABC radio news the only referendum coverage was a snippet from an APY man who claimed to not know what the Voice was but said he’d vote YES anyway. Why wasn’t he asked if he knew what the Constitution was, where it came from, what it’s purpose is and how it can be changed. Why aren’t all the smug NO voters who say they don’t know being asked a few questions like that? Why is the lazy voter so easily let off the hook in this ‘debate’? You can see how attractive an option not knowing about the situation is.

 

Which brings us to Dutton’s slogan – if you don’t know, vote no.

Prima facie insulting, it’s typically not taken as such by those who have decided to vote no, because what it really means is – if you don’t WANT to know, vote no.

 

That’s a lot of people in a compulsory democracy. A lot of people don’t want to know, and about a lot of things – not just the Voice.

 

So what are the varieties of NO voter in this referendum?

 

There are people who are just so negative, they would vote NO to a proposition like ‘the Earth is probably roundish’ or ‘the sky is sometimes blue.’ The restrictions on life that accompanied the pandemic have swollen the numbers and amplified the voices of this cohort. It is a long time since they’ve have had the opportunity to shout NO to something – to anything – that somebody really believed in and really believed was for the common good. These are the visceral NOs. No is a howl of defiance against every and any kind of governance, against the idea of civil society or social contract. It is the NO of the anti-vaxer, of the ‘sovereign citizen’ (aka ‘citizen of self’). Here is the one word of defiance against anything that could be asked. ‘You want to ask me a question? Well, ‘I say NO’. Nothing can be done with or for these people. With hindsight, we may well ask – ‘What fool government put up their hand for this treatment, just after a pandemic, and knowing how the Republic referendum went down in flames?’

 

There are people who don’t like being lectured or told how to think and who feel that the YES people are lecturing them and/or telling them how to think. That they are, to revive the Hilary Clinton term, being treated as ‘deplorables’. They would love to wear the ‘deplorable’ badge with pride. These are the naughty kids at the back of the class, who are pretty pleased with themselves for thinking the way the teacher doesn’t think, and for disagreeing with the ‘goody-goodies’ up the front. Thy think the anti-vaxers have a point, but mainly just to give the rest of us the shits.

 

There are people who genuinely don’t know, and their not knowing has no overt racist motivation. Mainly these are city dwelling migrants who could not tell you if they have ever met an Aboriginal person. They like their lives and they like Australia – even if they have experienced some racism themselves – and they just don’t know whether any change to the constitution might actually be dangerous. That’s if they know what the constitution is or what role it has in our arrangements.  If the YES campaign could reassure everyone in this category, YES would shoe it in. With more than 50% of the population born overseas of with a parent born overseas, this is a substantial and neglected (and under-represented) chunk of the electorate.

 

There are Dutton’s covert ‘don’t WANT to know’ mob – people who personally see nothing to gain in indigenous recognition and who are happy to feign the required degree of ignorance (or not bothering to find out) in order to get away with ‘not knowing’ enough to vote yes. These are people who have been given permission to vote NO by Dutton’s ilk, as a kind of Sartrean expression of bad faith.  They are the ones who will be most responsible for the defeat of the proposal.

 

Handing out at pre-poll, eye traffic persuades me that there are many people voting NO in this referendum to the imagined accusation – ‘Are you a racist?’ There’s some psychology to unpick there! And a mountain of self-congratulatory bad faith.

 

There are people – like Dutton, like Price, like Mundine, like Lydia Thorpe, who have very specific political objectives for their opposition. In the case of Price, this is an important step on her journey to the Lodge. A smart, indigenous, treacherous Pauline Hanson. They are the credible catalysts for a NO victory. If they were removed from the picture, YES would certainly win.

 

There are specific vested interests – for instance in pastoral industries and mining (and regardless of what the corporates declare or invest in as a result of their declared ethical positions) who simply believe that a Voice might not be in their long term economic interests. They represent a tiny but influential number of votes. Through early Land Rights movements, Mabo and Wik, and on, they have been a consistent block to indigenous solidarity on a nationwide basis. These are pragmatic ‘divide and conquer’ forces and individuals, accustomed to wielding (and concealing) great power, and power over large parts of Australia.

 

Following Lydia Thorpe, there are the radical NO people, invested in permanent victimhood, out of touch with the possible, and for whom nothing could ever be enough.

 

The logical corollary of the ‘never enough’ people (their mirror cohort) are those to whom they have gifted the rhetorical position: ‘it doesn’t matter what you give them or do for them, it will never be enough’.  Those people are quite numerous and not necessarily out-and-out racists. They’re more like ‘soft racists’, the ones with the ‘I’m not a racist, but … ‘ patter. They are the Hansonite mob or the Clive Palmer mob. They really are a mob (and not in a good way). Five or six percent of the electorate. They wouldn’t by themselves win the vote for NO, but they are a significant cohort on the NO side.

 

And then there are the out-and-out racists – people who identify with fascism and ethnic cleansing as ‘solutions’.

 

And of course there are all sorts of shades and variations and motions among all of these positions.

 

It really is hard to see how a ‘coalition’ like that can lose.

 

Disunity is no disadvantage to them, They don’t particularly need to make sense. The more noise they make, the more insulting and disrespectful they are, the more reasonable decent people come to the position of not wanting to know. People turned off from the whole debate because it is so uncivil are extremely unlikely to vote against the status quo. Things were better before everyone started being so nasty, so why not just forget the whole thing? It’s Trumpism with an Australian flavour. And this is where we are right now.   

 

Walking through Redfern Station, being abused by thugs last week (who had probably come looking for indigenous people to abuse) made me realize how simple and effective their crude strategy (if you can call it that) is – a voter who genuinely doesn’t know is easily converted by this spectacle into a voter who doesn’t want to know. And a voter who doesn’t want to know is going to vote NO. As they say, it’s not rocket science.

 

Then back to ‘bad faith’.

 

To be a committed NO voter on the right (as opposed to the Lidia Thorpe kind) you need to believe things that you know cannot be true, cannot make sense. The central mindfucks are these: 1. I found one Aboriginal person who doesn’t want the Voice, so they don’t all agree so they can’t have one. (This is racist because it is impossible to imagine this being applied to any other ethnic group or category of person in Australia … 80% agreeing is not enough. The key irony here being that the whole idea of a democratically elected Voice would be that, as in parliament, different views would battle it out.) and 2. You can’t have a Voice because you don’t have a Voice. That is to say – there is currently no democratically elected representative indigenous body in Australia that could ask to have a democratically elected representative indigenous body in Australia, so there cannot be a

democratically elected representative indigenous body in Australia. It’s not just ATSIC that met this fate but this circular il/logic is precisely what has consistently kept first Australians from having any national voice from 1967 (and before!) until now. It is why and how the rug has been repeatedly pulled out from under indigenous Australians having their own representative body on the national stage.

 

I suppose the most frustrating thing for the YES side is how much effort – and creative effort and empathy – has gone into trying to establish the proposition that the nation listen to the people disadvantaged in an ongoing way by having been dispossessed by the nation. What could be more unifying for a country than to set that kind of wrong to rights?

 

It is an hilarious but very effective hypocrisy for the NO side – for the makers of division and hate, for the spreaders of ignorant lies, for the people of bad faith – to blame those of good conscience for the division that they themselves have created.  For the putative division created by those with the temerity to suggest that indigenous people in Australia ought to have a voice.  

 

And of course this strategy is not mere Trumpism. It is directly out of the ‘accusation in the mirror’ playbook, attributed to Goebells and Lenin, among others – that is, accuse the enemy of doing what you are doing or planning to do, before they have time to accuse you. ‘Don’t listen to the Voice of Division’ could be a slogan for the YES side if it were not already taken.

 

The press have a lot to answer for in having promoted so much false equivalence throughout the debate. The best example of this involved Jacinta Price’s claim at the Canberra Press Club that her side were subject to racist attacks just like the other. She got away with this because she put up a smokescreen in the form of a Pythonesque claim that colonization never did anyone any harm. (What did the Romans ever do for us?) That got all the attention, so nobody bothered much about the other issue.

 

People on the YES side have used a ‘wrong side of history’ argument to try to persuade those on the fence. The ‘wrong side of history’ is a specious argument, and a dangerous one. People can be wrong, whole peoples. ‘History’ has taken the world in many wrong directions up until now. Cheery determinism is unlikely to sway anyone not already persuaded. And in any case ‘getting with the strength’ is probably not a helpful idea for the YES side just at the moment.

 

If we are to lose on this proposition, it matters how we lose. I see no dirty tricks on the YES side, I see no racist attacks (though, as mentioned, these have been claimed, for instance by Price and Mundine, as a way of promoting a false equivalence). If anything, the YES campaign has elevated levels of civility in politics. And for the not-so-obvious reason that division, incoherence and unpleasantness are – as with Trumpism – no disadvantage for the NO side. Being turned off from the debate is very rarely going to result in a YES vote.

 

The republic proposal – set up to fail as it was by John Howard – was so comprehensively defeated (carried only in the ACT) that, not only has that proposition languished for a generation, but it has taken until now for any government to be prepared to sponsor a referendum proposal of any kind. If the Voice goes down in like manner, that may – whatever Dutton says – simply be it for referenda in Australia.  Were Dutton, as PM, to insist on the idea, it might well be his Captain’s call death knell, along the lines of Tony Abbott’s knight and dames entertainment.

 

So much for the NO people and the fellow travellers who will carry them over the line.

 

And who are the YES voters?

 

The NOists do a lot of painting into corners and, to be fair, this probably goes, to some extent, both ways. The NOists paradoxically paint YESters as being terminally gloomy about everything Aboriginal (indigenous people have the worst of everything) and at the same time regarding indigenous people as ethereal and saintly spirits who are all-wise and can do no wrong. Of course there are people on the YES side to provide avatars for these imaginings, which are about as silly as imaging that all NO voters are signed up Ku Klux Klanspersons.

 

So who are the YES voters really? Perhaps they are people a little blinded by altruism, a little over-optimistic to think that, after things have been so wrong for first Australians for so long, that one, particular, step on the path to reconciliation and self-determination could set in progress a virtuous cycle of improvement. Maybe YES will by some miracle get up and maybe in ten years’ time we’ll be sad that it hadn’t made the difference for which we had hoped. We’re unlikely to ever know, and certainly, we can never know if we don’t give it a go. Right now it looks like we’ll be pretty sad this coming Saturday night.

 

Likely, the story will be – something in Australia was seriously broke and we – as a nation – chose not to fix it. The international embarrassment of this will never be felt by the vast majority of NO voters, and particularly not by the DON’T WANT TO KNOW voters. Collectively, we will have exercised a deliberate choice not to fix the thing that we could see was broken. I think I’ll just skip the open heart surgery and have the deep fried pizza menu instead.

 

YES voters are people facing up to the truth of invasion and dispossession, people who have decided not to blame the victim. People who can acknowledge that there was an originary crime in the case of Australia that needs to be atoned for, that things need to be made right. YES voters are people who want the process of reconciliation and truth telling and healing to progress.

 

Sadly, for the purposes of the present vote, I do not believe we have enough time to persuade enough of the people who need persuading, that the virtues we assert by hoping for something better, not just for first but, through them, for all Australians are in fact a necessity for us as a nation – in order to prosper, to realize our collective potential, to become the better people we together can be.

 

What a moment for ethics this is in Australia. And we go on from here to the other great moral struggle of our time – saving the world from us – we humans. And saving it for us too!