The Voice – if you don’t know, find out
It is now clear that Peter Dutton is determined to see the referendum on the Voice fail. He’s not opposed to bettering the lives of indigenous Australians (he’s not racist), but he wants to see what he regards as an initiative of the Albanese government fail, whatever the cost to Australian society.
He revealed his present tactic in an interview on Friday, where he criticized the government for not providing “details” of how it intends the Voice to operate. It’s the “if you don’t know, vote no” message.
The specific design, informed in part by the referendum outcome, comes later, and all parties, including Dutton and his remaining followers in the Liberal Party, will have their say. If the government were goaded into specifying a detailed design Dutton would be able to raise doubts about every aspect, and would be able to criticize the government for jumping ahead of the process.
Ten questions about the Voice answered
“Will the Voice insert race into the Constitution?”; “How will the Voice make a practical difference?”; “Will the Voice give rise to High Court litigation and clog up parliamentary work?”.
These are three of ten questions answered in a Conversation post by Gabrielle Appleby of the University of New South Wales Law School, Geoffrey Lindell of the University of Adelaide Law School, and Hannah McGlade of Curtin University.
The common theme of the questions is a response to doubt, confusion, lies, misinformation and misrepresentation deliberately promulgated by the “No” campaign.
Tracking support for the Voice
The Guardian has a referendum tracker on the Voice, prepared and maintained by Nick Evershed and Josh Nicholas.
It confirms that national support for a “Yes” vote has been falling, from around 65 percent last August to around 55 percent now, and it so far shows no sign of flattening. The trendline is based on a statistical best fit of results from 9 polling organizations, with adjustment for sample size, and with “don’t knows” allocated in the same proportion of “Yes” and “No”.
Understandably there is a fair degree of variation in pollsters’ results, in part because different pollsters have different ways of framing the questions.
Support for a “Yes” vote is strongest in New South Wales and Victoria, and lower in other states, but in the smaller states the margin of error is high, reflecting smaller sample sizes. In fact there is so little polling in Tasmania that the authors do not even try to estimate support. Because four out of six states must vote “yes” for the referendum to succeed, it would be useful if pollsters put more resources into surveying smaller states. It would also be useful if indigenous Australians were more intensively sampled, to overcome the impression, conveyed by a small handful of indigenous politicians – part of the “Canberra elite” – that indigenous Australians do not want the Voice.
Support or otherwise follows dismally predictable partisan lines.
And by age, while there is strong support (84 percent) among respondents aged 18 to 34, there is low support (40 percent) among respondents aged 55 and older.
For decisions with long-term consequences, such as the Voice, there is a strong case for restricting the franchise to people aged, say, under 65, or weighting people’s vote by their average remaining life expectancy. But such changes may be a trifle controversial. One piece of advice the “Yes” campaigners should take from this data is to focus on traditional media including television and print media, the choice of older Australians.
While this tracking poll is simply about the “yes”-“no” vote, the most recent Essential poll (13 June) has four specific questions on the Voice:
On overall support, it shows that although support is lower than it was last August, it has held steady since March. Support by age, state and voting intention is generally in line with other polls. Women are slightly more in support of the Voice than men.
The “hard no” response is strengthening (now 29 percent), as the “soft no” response falls (now 12 percent).
The main reasons for respondents’ opposition to the Voice are “It will divide Australians” and “It will give Indigenous Australians rights and privileges that other Australians don’t have”. (The “No” campaign’s false representations obviously have traction.)
Only 12 percent of respondents have heard someone read out the Uluru Statement or have read it themselves, and a further 21 percent claim they know what’s in it. Because for such questions people fear their responses may reveal ignorance, these are probably overstatements. On knowledge of the Uluru Statement Labor and Coalition voters have similar responses. Younger people (18 to 34) are more familiar with the Statement than older people. About a third of respondents haven’t heard of it.
For a refresher the Uluru Statement is available as an interactive website. The Referendum Council has a plain vanilla version of the text. The National Museum’s website presents it with its full colour surround and signatures. The text is not legible but it has an onward link to a “classroom resource” where the full context of the Statement is explained in simple, clear language.
Closing the gap
On June 15 the Productivity Commission released a regular update of data on Closing the Gap. Progress revealed in this update, or more correctly the lack of progress, is summarized in a press statement by Malarndirri McCarthy, Assistant Minister for Indigenous Australians.
This update does not cover all dimensions of Closing the Gap, but in three areas, education, employment and imprisonment, it has new data.
Education indicators, from pre-school programs through to university graduation, show improvement for indigenous Australians, but for most indicators the gap is closing far too slowly. Similarly for employment: national indicators show progress but the gap is wide, and in the Northern Territory there has been no improvement in employment for 30 years.
Indicators for imprisonment are discouraging. The gap is enormous: the age-standardized imprisonment rate for non-indigenous Australians is 151 per 100 000 adults, while for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australians it is 2151. There is no sign of this gap closing.
Extraordinarily, opponents of the Voice claim that it would have no effect on practical outcomes – those outcomes revealed in Closing the Gap indicators. But what explains their assuredness? Some opponents of the Voice assert that, in view of the diversity of situations in which indigenous Australians live, the Voice will be too distant from problems on the ground – part of the so-called “Canberra bubble”. But when one examines the disaggregated data provided by the Productivity Commission, it is apparent that the trends in all jurisdictions are similar. These are indeed national problems, requiring a national response, guided with advice from indigenous Australians.
In any event, the Voice is about more than closing the gap. It is about recognition of the prior owners of this land.
How to donate to the “Yes” campaign
You have less than a week to donate to the Yes campaign and claim a tax deduction for 2022-23.
One avenue is yes23.com.au “a campaign led by Australians for Indigenous Constitutional Recognition Ltd”. It lists among its directors Daniel Gilbert, Rachel Perkins, Michael Chaney, Karen Mundine, Noel Pearson and Mark Textor, to select some of the more familiar names.
Click on the red “donate” button.