The Morning After
On 14 October 2023 around forty per cent of Australians voted yes to recognising the country’s first peoples, the Aboriginal and Torres Strait descendants of Terra Australis, in the federal Constitution. The land that Australian schoolchildren are told is the world’s largest island and smallest continent, has been continuously occupied by countless generations of first nations peoples over the last sixty-five thousand years. The other sixty per cent voted no, nationally and in each state. The amendment failed.
Colonisation by the British Crown as a prison, followed by an endless stream of free immigrants from Britain, Ireland, Europe, Africa and Asia over the last two hundred and a bit years has resulted in the continuous population decline and marginalisation of the descendants of the original inhabitants, associated with dispossession from their ancestral land. The current cultural and socioeconomic plight of these people has never proceeded without the deliberate policies and neglect of colonial and later national governments and the self-interested and brutal actions of the new chums.
White settler colonisation in the nineteenth century ruthlessly stole the land as the Crown colonies slotted into the British-led global capitalist order. This was a bloody affair. Aboriginal resistance against the official and informal policies of genocide was fierce. There were no treaties and lines drawn as in other colonised places. It was simply a case of smash and grab. The land from which they were evicted was never ceded and this remains so today.
The Australian Constitution that came into force on the first day of the Twentieth century was negotiated by white male politicians born and raised in the preceding century. They accepted and promoted the iniquitous doctrine of terra nullius, a myth propagated by the early British explorers, that asserted that the Great South Land was bereft of inhabitants. Although this was demonstrably untrue, the land-hungry newcomers set out to make it so.
Section 51 (xxvi) empowered the new Commonwealth government to make special laws for people of ‘coloured or inferior races’, excluding ‘the aboriginal race’, whose regulation and control were to be left to the state governments. This section also explicitly prevented Indigenous Australians from being counted in regular population censuses. From the start what has been called ‘the race power’ has placed Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island peoples at a systemic disadvantage to other Australians. Not to be counted amounted to a confirmation of Terra Nullius. In an imported post-enlightenment culture where measurement and quantification equated to ‘scientific knowledge’, this was a crushing blow and justified policies of at once, neglect, control and paternalism. The subsequent atrocities of ‘the stolen generations’, mass incarceration, deaths in custody, confinement, unemployment, homelessness, poverty, health and educational disadvantages, and discrimination have resulted in third world hubs in a first world country. The fact that the Constitution was finally amended in 1967 to remove the race power clause, with more than ninety per cent of Australians voting yes, has not materially ‘closed the gap’. Governments continue to impose policies on Indigenous communities without effectively consulting them in an effective and continuing manner.
In the face of accumulating government failure, Aboriginal activists have been pushing for new and more effective ways of involving Indigenous Australians in the development, implementation of and accountability for policies aimed at improving their lives. Too often even well-meaning actions of state and federal governments have been imposed without the input or knowledge of Aboriginal communities, resulting in perverse outcomes that reinforced prevailing injustices and stereotypes, culminating in 2017, when Indigenous representatives met in central Australia and agreed what came to be called ‘The Uluru Statement from the Heart’.
Basically, this statement proposed three paths forward:
1. Recognition of first nation peoples in the Australian Constitution by way of a permanent ‘voice’ to government.
2. Recognition of joint first nations sovereignty with the Crown.
3. Truth-telling between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians.
The incoming Albanese Labor government promised to accept the offer made by the framers of the Uluru statement, ‘in full’. But the new government chose to start with point one, The Voice, which would provide indigenous communities a permanent mechanism for advice to government on issues affecting them. The key point was permanent. By being enshrined in the Constitution, future governments had to ‘listen’, though not heed, advice from a mechanism that could not be unilaterally removed, other than by another successful Constitutional amendment.
As it turned out, the order of action may have been misplaced. Opposition to the proposed amendment that only picked up point one above quickly mobilised around the other two paths. Conservative politicians and their backers in agribusiness and the natural resources sector tied the voice to an attack on private property, while relying on the widespread ignorance of the history of relations between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians to bolster extraordinary assertions like – ‘they are coming for your land and house’. Decades of ‘the history wars’ had prepared the majority of voters with a distorted and demeaning view of how we have arrived where we are and reinforced a generally ungenerous, for some deeply racist, attitude to first nations people.
But rank racism is not the full story. There was also genuine confusion about why we needed the Voice, a situation readily reinforced by those opposed to the amendment on a rag-tag range of grounds, reflecting particular material and ideological commitments. The centre right and far right political parties quickly planted their flags as being opposed to creating a ‘special status’ for first nations people. The cry went up – ‘it will divide our nation. We are all equal’. The fact that we are not all equal, that we are divided along class, ethnic, gender, ‘race’ and cultural fractures, was quickly buried.
The timing of the referendum magnified the impact of this claim. In an era of high interest rates, declining living standards for the majority of Australians and increasing economic insecurity, working class voters and downwardly mobile middle class voters looked to their own. For those Australians finding it difficult to meet rising housing, health and utility bills, the plight of others less fortunate than themselves receded in significance. The question why should we vote yes morphed into why should ‘they’ get something (anything) when we get nothing? Perceptions of inequality, as the sociologist W.G. Runciman once said, is all about relative deprivation.
This helps us understand the seemingly counter-intuitive result that the strongest no votes were concentrated in low socioeconomic areas, while yes triumphed in the areas housing the most affluent voters. Cities like Sydney and Melbourne displayed a stark divide. The inner city, Eastern and beachside suburbs were strongly in favour but almost all suburbs west of the that went against.
I live and voted on the Mornington Peninsula, about an hour’s drive south of Melbourne’s CBD. Overall, the no vote there was 58 per cent, slightly below the national average. But the yes vote increased as you move down the peninsula on the Port Phillip Bay side past Dromana and Rosebud to Sorrento, and past Hastings, all the way to Balnarring, Somers, Shoreham and Flinders. Towards the end of the peninsula yes figures as a substantial majority outcome.
Some will point to the positive correlation between educational attainment and the likelihood of supporting the amendment. Possibly. But more to the point, people who live in well-heeled areas have the everyday luxury to express empathy for others. They are not scrambling to keep a roof over their heads and food on the table. This, I believe, is the key political lesson of the outcome, one that should have been well embedded on the progressive side of politics after the global rise of authoritarian populist forces here, there and everywhere. Trump, Brexit, Orban, Duda and the whole grisly lot should have armed us against the volley of misinformation, disinformation and vitriol that poisoned the campaign from the beginning.
The no campaign was well orchestrated. The leaders of the conservative federal coalition, Peter Dutton and David Littleproud were able to (literally at photo ops) stand behind their Aboriginal shadow Indigenous Affairs spokesperson, Senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price who argued that Aboriginal Australians were better off because of British colonisation. The symbolism of her strong challenge to the yes campaign’s focus on Indigenous deprivation provided cover for many Australians unaware of the realities to vote no, not because they lacked empathy and generosity but because they didn’t know.
All this is familiar stuff, right out of the Tory handbook. What is baffling to me at least was the role of what was called ‘the progressive no’ campaign spearheaded by another Aboriginal Senator, Lidia Thorpe. The ‘Blak Sovereignty’ movement opposed the voice because they didn’t wish to be included in the Constitution. Their overriding aim is to achieve a treaty or treaties with the Crown over sovereignty, though it’s not clear whether they mean absolute or joint ownership of the land. This meant that the government and yes campaign were faced with two articulate, young Aboriginal women arguing against the amendment for radically different reasons but both claiming that most Indigenous Australians opposed the voice. That this was false was borne out by the fact that the yes vote prevailed in most remote Aboriginal communities, up to 80 per cent in places like Leonora in Western Australia, Hope Vale in Far north Queensland and in south-west of the Northern. Territory. Sixty per cent support figured in Fitzroy Crossing (WA), Jabiru (NT) and Lockhart River (QLD.).
Senator Price believes it ain’t broke. Senator Thorpe thinks it’s broke and beyond fixing. The latter seems to believe that the no result is a victory and will hasten attention being focused on the issue of Indigenous sovereignty. This seems to me to be sheer fantasy, a level of political naivety almost beyond comprehension. If the majority of the three percent Indigenous minority cannot convince the other ninety seven percent to enshrine a voice, are the majority ever likely to accept Aboriginal sovereignty? Complacency also marred the yes campaign. The early polls showed strong majority support for the amendment. The government was also fooled by drawing on the earlier overwhelmingly positive outcome of the same sex marriage plebiscite. Whereas many (most) voters knew someone – family member, friend, friend of a friend – in the LGBQI+ world, many (most) did not directly connect with Indigenous Australians, in part because of their limited numbers but mostly because of their geographical and socioeconomic marginalisation.
There have been many causes advanced to explain the result, which I won’t rehash here. I don’t presume to understand the full significance of the outcome for Indigenous Australians. My empathy won’t change anything. But on a personal note. Deirdre and I stood outside our local electoral booth handing out flyers and trying to engage voters. The vibe was different to other elections we had fronted. There was a palpable sense of anger. People seemed angry that they had to vote and especially that they had to vote on an issue mainly affecting Aboriginal people. One morning I was talking to a very nice and reasonable middle-aged woman who was on the no side. She was a local small farmer on the Peninsula. I overheard her telling another no prompter that she never got involved in politics but this time she just had to – for her grandkids. It really is all about the land!
The result was shocking but not a surprise.