It’s one year since the failed referendum to enshrine a First Nations Voice to Parliament in the Australian Constitution.
The vote represents a moment of deep sadness and frustration for many First Nations people for the lost opportunity to move towards meaningful change in our lives, communities and for our futures. Many elders and old people will likely not live to see change.
I was one of the many people in the Uluru Dialogue at UNSW who worked last year across the country educating on and advocating for the constitutional change. I spoke to communities across New South Wales, Victoria and the ACT, from Boorowa to Melbourne.
I not only saw the campaign first-hand, I also have read every think piece imaginable in the 12 months since about why the referendum failed.
A ceaseless blame game
From the expected pieces blaming the usual suspects (Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, Opposition Leader Peter Dutton, Indigenous peoples, the Yes campaign, the No campaign and the media), there were also some weirder supposed culprits.
Some blamed “wokeness”, Donald Trump and dark money, secret elites, identity politics, and all manner of culture war issues.
To my mind, no single thing doomed the Voice. It was a mix of a lot of the above.
Albanese treating the referendum like an election campaign but without the usual level of resourcing and advocacy. The Coalition’s outright opposition to the idea (despite previous indications of support). The media’s failure to grapple with Indigenous issues and dogmatic insistence on giving prominence to “both sides” of the debate.
The YES23 organisation was also disorganised from the start. Yes campaigners were forced onto the back foot daily by relentless misinformation, seemingly deliberate, from the No campaign.
This built on a distinct lack of civic education among most Australians.
It was further amplified by the No campaign’s very successful “If you don’t know, vote no” slogan – the idea being that their untruths warranted little scrutiny.
That’s on top of a large undercurrent of racism that was never properly called out, and which has never been properly addressed.
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.
No, no, and no again
The Voice to Parliament represented a consensus plea from Indigenous communities for systemic reform. The idea was that the structure of the Australian political system was, either by design or outcome, causing many of the social and economic issues that we face, and therefore a structural solution was needed.
The No campaign claimed after the referendum that the result was a rejection of this idea of a Voice to Parliament as a solution to issues in Indigenous communities or among Indigenous peoples more generally, “because it wasn’t going to fix the things that needed to be fixed”.
Prominent No campaigner Warren Mundine even called the referendum the “most divisive, most racially charged attack on Australia I’ve ever seen”.
“Australia has voted no to the Voice of division”, was the common refrain from people like Pauline Hanson and other No campaigners. Australians “wanted practical solutions” to Indigenous issues, not a body without any detail that wouldn’t hear “real communities”.
I am not bringing up these issues again to relitigate the issues of the referendum. Instead, I want to ask a very important question: the Voice to Parliament was designed to address our systemic disadvantage, so what solutions to these serious structural issues have any of the No campaigners offered in the past 12 months?
We have seen some policies from the Coalition. Plans to reduce “fly in, fly out” workers in remote communities. Reforming land rights and native title. A royal commission into child sexual abuse in Indigenous communities. Less need for programs with “a specific Indigenous focus” in urban areas, where most First Nations people live.
Some of these are just a rehash of failed Coalition policies of the past, as many others have mentioned. Some appear to have come personally from Senator Jacinta Price and are seemingly not backed by experts (or many people in Indigenous communities). Others appear to be tied directly into conservative political talking points, rather than really addressing Indigenous need.
The Coalition also abandoned its plan for an alternative second referendum almost immediately after the failed vote.
The Coalition and other leading No campaigners clearly have no plans to address the structural issues facing our peoples. They’re only offering more of the regular policy tinkering and seesawing we have seen far too often before.
Abandoning the cause
The same is true of the government. I have already written for this masthead about the government’s abject failures at implementing the Closing the Gap targets and its lack of meaningful consultation.
The government’s current attempts at Indigenous policy remain exercises in seeking consent over genuine consultation. Its proposed “economic empowerment” agenda for First Nations peoples is a perfect example.
Aside from the lack of codesign and meaningful engagement, such policies have been bandied about for the better part of two decades and still have not substantively moved the dial.
The pursuit of market-based wealth for some privileged few First Nations peoples and communities, under the guise of closing the gap, as well as focusing on the overexaggerated benefits of renewable energy as a driver of Indigenous economic power, is not “economic development” for all mobs.
The policy focus was also announced as Albanese abandoned his commitment to a Makaratta Commission – the Treaty and Truth components that were meant to follow the Voice to Parliament.
These ideas fall into the same tired policy stereotypes of throwing money at some of the usual organisations and peoples who have long benefited, and claiming this solves the systemic problems we face. The problem isn’t money, it’s the very rules of the game.
Charting a way forward
Research following the referendum shows that 87% of Australians think First Nations peoples should be able to decide for ourselves about our way of life. Moreover, 64% think the disadvantages faced by our communities warrant extra government attention, and 68% believe this disadvantage comes from “past race-based policies”.
Only 35% believe Indigenous peoples are now treated equally to other Australians, and only 37% believe injustices faced by our community are “all in the past”.
This clearly shows a level of recognition by the Australian people that something needs to be done about Indigenous policy and the structural issues in this country.
According to the same data, 87% of Australians agree it is “important for First Nations peoples to have a voice/say in matters that affect them”. This jumps to 98.5% among Yes voters, but also is true of 76% of No voters.
This suggests that Australian people see the problem and can identify the structural issues.
The real work, then, is on civics education, getting people to understand that the structural issues they can see need structural change; but also making them more aware of the effects of misinformation. It’s not right that proposals that should get the support of the Australian people can be derailed the way this was.
But what also isn’t right is the current abdication of Indigenous policy by both major parties and their abandonment of any attempt to remedy structural issues. Following the referendum, the major parties have given up.
To paraphrase myself from February’s Closing the Gap announcement: the next time you run into an MP, ask them what their plan for Indigenous people is. Ask them not just about closing the gap, but to fix the structural issues that so clearly disadvantage our people.
That’s the question no one wants to answer, but it’s what we need to do if we are to move on from the 2023 referendum in a positive direction.
