Grown-up politics
The Voice referendum a year on
There has been a large amount of comment on the loss of the Voice referendum. I have chosen the reflections of three prominent indigenous Australians, Thomas Mayo, Tom Calma, and Pat Anderson. All three remind us of the decades of work they and others put into building public support for the Voice, including support of politicians in the main parties. They refer to the way this work was undone by a well-organized campaign by a small group of people unbound by any considerations of decency or respect for the truth, determined to use the referendum as a means to discredit the government, regardless of the cost to national cohesion or the effect on First Nations Australians.
A common theme is a resurgence of racism following the referendum’s defeat.
And all three stand out in the way they put their views with politeness, dignity and a spirit of unity and understanding, in contrast to the campaigners who mobilized to undermine their work, and are still gloating about their success in landing a blow on the Albanese government.
Thomas Mayo is interviewed on what's next for reconciliation and justice in Australia. He shows no anger to those who voted “no”: they were misled by a barrage of blatant lies about land grabs and special privileges for Aboriginal Australians. He is dismayed that in our political system “blatant lies can be spread so easily”. His reflections are in his recently-published book Always was, always will be: the campaign for justice and recognition continues. (8 minutes)
Tom Calma appears on the ABC’s 730 Report: One year on from the Voice. “There's been a higher level of racism and racial slurs … it's like as if people think that they've now got a licence to have a go”. He points out, once again, why the Voice had to be embedded in the Constitution. He reminds us that during the campaign Dutton promised to run a referendum on recognition, should the Voice fail. That was a useful tactic in suggesting to half-enthusiastic voters that there was a fall-back, contributing substantially to the “No” vote. Of course we have never heard of the proposition again. (13 minutes)
Pat Anderson is on Radio National Breakfast: One year on from the Voice referendum. Like Calma she sees the defeat as having given people a “mandate to say “no””, not only to the proposals in the Uluru Statement, but more widely to any programs that may advance the interests of indigenous Australians. She is outraged by the hypocrisy of those who justified their “No” campaign on the basis that the Voice would divide Australia, when their campaign used division as its main weapon. Nevertheless she is optimistic. Young people will pick up the movement and take it forward, but it will be a long, slow journey. (16 minutes)
Pat Anderson’s optimism about the way people now young will achieve change is based on more than hope. The ANU’s detailed analyses of the Voice referendum found that “No voters were more likely to be male, older, speaking a language other than English at home, with low levels of education, living outside of capital cities, and living in low-income households”. This is a demographic with a past rather than a future.
A Conversation contribution The Voice defeat set us all back. And since then, our leaders have given up by James Blackwell of ANU considers some of the reasons for the referendum’s failure, focusing on the political dynamics. Dutton and his followers seem to have picked up practices from Donald Trump’s campaigns:
Campaigns like this are something we as a nation haven’t come to terms with. We’ve seen in the United States how effective misinformation can be at confusing people, creating false senses of reality and distorting public perception.
Even if Australians supported the ideas behind the Voice in the abstract, neither they nor the media were prepared for the level of dishonesty and bad dealing from the No campaign. It was never a fair fight.
He calls for much better education about our democratic institutions. Dutton’s “if you don’t know, vote no” campaign would never have gotten off the ground in a well-informed electorate. (Is it just education that’s lacking, or a sense of the obligations of citizenship in a democracy – in this case the obligation to cast an informed vote?. Dutton’s “if you don’t know, vote no” demonstrates why he is unfit for office in a democracy.)
Blackwell joins those who worked on the Voice to note, with disappointment, that the Albanese government seems to have given up, even though there is widespread agreement, even among those who voted “No”, that First Nations people should have a voice in matters that affect them.
Those are the informed views of people who have been involved in the long campaign for the Voice, and of an academic who brings a more detached perspective.
There’s another view, the media view or “narrative”, that portrays the defeat of the referendum as manifestation of a fundamental flaw in the Albanese government, leading to its inevitable demise.
This view is conveyed in the ABC’s Jacob Greber’s article: Failed Voice to Parliament referendum continues to overshadow Anthony Albanese's term one year on. He asserts that “the Voice referendum has come to define and overshadow Albanese's prime ministership more than any other issue” and “it threatens to become the definitive event of his term in the Lodge”.
How did it come to have such importance?
This is an interpretation created by journalists. The simplistic view is of a Shakespearian story about a well-meaning king with a fatal flaw. It has its own confirmation, because it feeds into voters’ perception that the government is crumbling.
That is not to accuse the ABC or Greber of political bias – he’s simply reporting on an interpretation that has been circulating among journalists – the unquestioned conventional political wisdom.[1] It’s about a process that has its own positive feedback mechanism. It starts with a few seeds, and grows until it becomes the dominant narrative in the press gallery echo chamber, drowning out any other interpretations of the referendum’s defeat.
It’s serious, not only because it portrays a decent and honour-bound politician as a fool, but also because it reinforces the idea that in a democracy substantial change is impossible. Greber goes on to write “It further underlines our contemporary political parable that bold and risky change is a fast road to voter rejection”.
A simpler account, without the drama of a Shakespearian tragedy, is that the Albanese government kept to its promise to hold a referendum, and the public rejected it. Albanese and his advisers should have known Dutton was not to be trusted, but they mistakenly believed that the “No” campaign would be based on reasoned argument and evidence.
With the benefit of hindsight one can say that Albanese, having seen how Dutton set out to destroy Malcolm Turnbull, should have been more cautious – perhaps by delaying the referendum. But Albanese had the confirmation of polling showing high community support and encouraging feedback from campaigners. He knew that Coalition governments had been more or less on board. Also he had invested so much personally in the cause. His administrative and policy judgement seems to be well ahead of his political judgement.
If there is a tragedy in this story it’s about the way Dutton and a cabal of political opportunists defeated it. Had Dutton mounted reasoned arguments against the Voice, without using a scare campaign, without relying on people’s ignorance of the Constitution, and without relying on misinformation and disinformation, the referendum may still have been lost. That loss, however, would not have resulted in the bitterness and sense of betrayal felt by indigenous Australians and by all who have worked for recognition and reconciliation, and would not have re-opened slowly healing wounds of a brutal disrespect shown to those who have lived on this land for 60 000 years.
1. Greber’s article is not entirely despondent. He notes the ANU survey suggesting that demographic change will eventually weaken the attitudes that drove the “No” campaign, and he writes “Albanese's prime ministership is far from terminal. Voters are historically inclined to give governments a second term. And he has plenty of achievements to be positive about, including addressing climate change”. ↩
Is Europe in the grip of the far right?
Following electoral successes by far-right parties in the Netherlands, France, Germany and most recently Austria (covered in last week’s roundup), a common interpretation is that Europe is going through a surge of support for the far right, particularly over immigration.
Writing in Social Europe Cas Mudde and Gabriela Greilinger present a more complex picture: Far-Right wins in Austria and Germany: what mainstream parties keep getting wrong.
They suggest that the success of far-right parties is not due to economic stress (which is far worse in Europe than in Australia). Rather it is due to “structural societal changes and mass attitudes and are here to stay”. There have always been xenophobic and nativist sections of Europe’s population: immigration and ethnic diversification have energised these movements.
Not everywhere in Europe has the far-right gained politically, but even in countries where it has gone backward electorally it is still a powerful force. Some of that power is their capacity to make other parties react to their agenda, not by rebutting it, but by partly taking it on board.
They dismiss the idea that centre-right parties can tame parties of the far right by joining them in coalitions. Such arrangements tend to strengthen far-right parties and normalize their policy agenda.
Geraldine Doogue, who has recently been in Italy, presents a different view. She observes that the government of Giogia Meloni is less hard-line in office than people had expected. There had been concern about the Fascist roots of her Partito dei Conservatori e dei Riformisti Europei, and some of the conservative platforms on which he stood for election in 2022.
Geraldine Doogue’s comment is in the context of the ABC’s Global Roaming series, presented jointly with Hamish Macdonald. Last Saturday’s program , The battle for hearts and minds, was about the success of the far right in Europe’s elections. Doogue and Macdonald observe a constellation of forces that have tended to polarize Europe, but they acknowledge that Europe is far from a single political entity, even among its right wing. Giogia Meloni may have softened but Victor Orbán has hardened if anything.
The main part of their session is a discussion with Margaritis Schinas, the European Commission Vice President for Promoting our European Way of Life, appointed by Ursula von der Leyen. (Whom would we pick as a commissioner to promote the Australian way of life?) That appointment evokes echoes of Europe as a source of white, Christian civilization, but Schinas stresses that the values that hold 27 European countries together are liberal – access to education and health care as a right, rights of minorities, the rule of law and the absence of a death penalty.
While there are themes that resonate with Australia, there are many differences. In Europe immigration is about a flow of largely uncontrolled refugees turning up on their borders, and it’s only in the last year or so that Europe has been able to establish a single immigration policy and a well-defined external border. The other difference many Australians overlook, particularly because their business and recreational travel takes them to Europe’s big cities, is the depth of the urban-rural political divide. We have such a divide in Australia, where far-right parties like One Nation and the National Party have been nurtured in our rural regions, but nowhere near to the same extent as in Europe.
It is also worth reflecting on just how we assess Europe’s movement to the far right. Most European countries are multi-party democracies, which means it is rare in parliamentary elections and even in presidential elections for any party to get a majority of votes to claim legitimacy, or enough parliamentary seats to form government. When the European headlines announce that Party X has “won” an election, that simply means that they have won more votes or more seats than any other parties. In Austria that was 29 percent of the vote.
This point is taken up by Maciej Kisilowski, writing in The Strategist: Austria’s far right did not win. He outlines the conventional wisdom:
In Austria, the party with the strongest showing has almost always been offered an opportunity to form the government and hold the federal chancellorship. But the populists are themselves providing reasons to be treated differently. From Poland and the Netherlands to Austria, populists consistently frame elections as a stark choice between an indistinguishable assortment of corrupt mainstream parties and themselves.
That conventional wisdom needs questioning. He explains that there are other options, including coalitions of the centre, and that Austria’s President Van der Bellen is reminding political leaders considering coalitions that 70 percent of electors didn’t vote for the far-right FPÖ.