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The last time a No campaign told us “if you don’t know, vote no”, it didn’t work. It was a key slogan of the effort to kill the same-sex marriage plebiscite in 2017. And it failed because we did know.
Specifically, we knew gay people. Just about everyone was related to, neighbour to, or friend of a gay person.
We did indeed. Credit: Alex Ellinghausen
So the scare tactics fell flat. Few believed Liberal senator Bronwyn Bishop’s provocation that if we legalised gay marriage, “why not polygamy?” Or Liberal senator Cory Bernardi claiming that the “next step” could be legalised bestiality. Or the posters warning that gay marriage would lead to more child abuse.
Australians knew gay people and they weren’t afraid. We voted in favour of legal same-sex marriage by an emphatic 61.6 per cent to 38.4.
But, this time, the scare tactics are working. Some of it is sheer nonsense. Like the claim that an Indigenous Voice would force everyone to pay the local Aboriginal tribe to visit the beach.
The source? Pauline Hanson. Claiming she’s uncovered the secret agenda, she produced an 11-point agenda for the Voice. Hanson told the Senate that point six required “all beaches and national parks to be the property of the relevant tribe” and “non-First Nations people to be charged” to visit.
Illustration: Jim Pavlidis. Credit:
And the provenance of this letter? Supposedly, it had been left behind in a cafe, and sent to her by persons unknown, according to Hanson. Sounds authoritative, right? Yet this has fuelled a baseless whispering campaign on so-called social media.
Other scare tactics are based in reality. Perhaps the most effective has been the “pay the rent” line spoken by leading Voice campaigner Thomas Mayo, a member of the Albanese government’s Referendum Working Group and a signatory to the Uluru Statement from the Heart. Mayo really did say in a 2020 speech: “‘Pay the Rent’ for example, how do we do that in a way that is transparent and that actually sees reparations and compensation to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people?”
Anthony Albanese has always rejected any notion of reparations of any kind. Did Mayo slip up and reveal a hidden agenda? The No campaign has circulated his words far and wide to fuel fear.
“Those comments were taken from well before there were negotiations on the wording” of the proposed constitutional amendment, Mayo tells me. “There’s been a lot of politics and a lot of work since. It’s important to underline that the Voice would be an advisory committee – any decisions still have to be decisions of the parliament and the government and it’s not up to Indigenous people to decide.”
Voice campaigner Thomas Mayo has become a lightning rod for the No campaign.Credit: Peter Rae
I asked him: Does he want reparations paid? “No I don’t,” replied the Maritime Union of Australia official. “I will concentrate on health, education, employment, on clean water, on infrastructure so you can get the kids to school without busting a tyre every three months. That’s my vision.”
And the No campaign’s use of his 2020 remarks? “I think most Australians can see it’s just a scare campaign.” Yet he knows its effectiveness from first-hand experience. He was at some markets in the Hunter Valley recently and overheard a man quoting his “pay the rent” line.
“I introduced myself and we ended up having quite a good yarn, actually.” Mayo thinks he might have converted the man into a Yes voter. “I’m not that sort of big scary black man that people make me out to be. I pointed out the actual words [proposed in the referendum] and that it’d just be an advisory body.”
Australia’s Indigenous population is about 3 per cent of the total. You might think 3 per cent and an advisory committee is a pretty flimsy basis for a secret black takeover of Australia’s beaches and backyards. But it’s proved to be enough to fuel a powerful scare campaign.
A leader of the Yes campaign says that “fear is absolutely underpinning” the success of the No movement. Another Yes strategist, asked for evidence that voters have been frightened into No, said: “It’s written all over the opinion polls, mate.”
Every published poll is flagging failure for the Voice. And the specific evidence of fear-based voting has turned up in the campaign focus groups. The Yes strategist says that this is not chiefly a racist reflex: “There are a lot of people who don’t know enough about the referendum, they don’t know enough about the constitution, they don’t believe there is Aboriginal disadvantage and they hear something about the Voice and they just go, ‘Nah’. It’s not racism, it’s indifference.”
And the “something” leading to “Nah” is quite likely a scare tactic or simply Peter Dutton’s slogan appeal to voter hesitation and suspicion: “If you don’t know, vote no.” Because most of us don’t know Indigenous Australians.
Which was exactly anticipated by Voice architect Noel Pearson last year: “We are a much unloved people,” he said in his Boyer lectures. “We are perhaps the ethnic group Australians feel least connected to. We are not popular and we are not personally known to many Australians. Few have met us and a small minority count us as friends.
“Unlike same-sex marriage there is not the requisite empathy of love to break through the prejudice, contempt and, yes, violence of the past. Australians simply do not have Aboriginal people within their circles of family and friendship with whom they can share fellow feeling.”
According to Pearson, “Australians hold and express strong views about us, the great proportion of which is negative and unfriendly. It has ever been thus, worse in the past but still true today.”
Is it still true? Pretty much, it seems. Three-quarters of Australians carry an “implicit bias” against Indigenous Australians, according to ANU research from 2020 based on a 10-year sampling of 11,000 people.
The study, claiming to be the first of its kind, “presents stark evidence of the solid invisible barrier that Indigenous people face in society”, said its author, Siddharth Shirodkar. “But the data is actually not about Indigenous Australians, it’s about the rest of us.” It says that we’re largely unconscious of our own “implicit” bias.
So if Pearson is right, we don’t know Indigenous Australians, and we don’t much like them. How can this be? It only makes sense if we’re simply living with echoes of long-ago attitudes, fears and prejudices undisturbed by actual acquaintance with our First Peoples. This would help explain the appeal of “don’t know, vote no” in the Voice campaign.
The comparison with the same-sex marriage vote only goes so far. That was merely a survey, not a referendum. And the legalisation of gay marriage required only an act of parliament, not an amendment to the Constitution. So inserting the Voice into the Constitution always was going to be more difficult.
Yet, knowing all this, Pearson, probably the most influential of the Voice activists, persuaded Albanese to launch the high-wire act which is now falling to earth. If the polls are accurate forecasters and the Voice does indeed fail, there will be plenty of remorse and recrimination to go around.
A one-time secretary of Australia’s Department of Foreign Affairs, Alan Renouf, wrote a 1979 book titled The Frightened Country. He spoke of an “unreasoning fearfulness” in the national consciousness, an anxiety about Australia’s existence to the south of Asia, far from its colonial moorings.
Do we suffer a corresponding anxiety in our unreconciled relationship with Australia’s First Peoples? Might this help explain how the prospect of 3 per cent of the population, armed with nothing more than an advisory body, could manage to stir fears of an Indigenous land grab?
In a late effort to soothe fear, a former chief justice of the High Court took to the National Press Club podium on Friday. Robert French repeated his opinion of months ago that the Voice proposal is constitutionally sound and legally safe. That all of its activities and advice would be subject to parliamentary supremacy. In short, that it’s nothing to fear.
French contrasted the boldness of Australia’s constitutional founders with the small-mindedness of today’s fearmongers. He quoted one of the founders, Samuel Griffith, the Queensland Premier at the time, at the drafting of the constitution in 1891: “There will be timid men who are afraid of launching into something new – but whenever was a great thing achieved without risking something?”
French observed: “Compare the words of those indomitable spirits who drafted a durable national Constitution to the battle cry, ‘If you don’t know, vote No’ – a slogan offered as an answer to a straightforward, although profoundly important, proposal. The Australian spirit evoked by the ‘don’t know’ slogan is a poor shadow of the spirit which drew up our Constitution. It invites us to a resentful, uninquiring passivity. Australians – whether they vote Yes or No – are better than that.”
But are we? Or are we merely a frightened country, uneasy about our legitimacy, unreconciled to our First Peoples, frightened of the future? The moment of truth is almost upon us.
Peter Hartcher is political editor.
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