Ignorance sank Australia’s Indigenous Voice referendum

Over the weekend, Australia voted in a referendum that had the opportunity to impact its history positively, but the country made a spectacular mess of it.

The referendum was held to decide whether the government should establish a Voice to Parliament, essentially a federal advisory body composed of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people who would represent the views of Indigenous communities.

The suggestion was to amend Australia's Constitution to say that the Voice "may make representations" to Parliament and government "on matters relating to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples." Parliament would "have power to make laws with respect to (the Voice’s) composition, functions, powers and procedures."

I’m a 32-year-old white woman from an Australian country town called Wangaratta, in Victoria State. The town's name is derived from the Indigenous language: “wonga” means the resting place of the long-neck wonga, a type of cormorant, and “ratta” is the meeting place of the river.

As an Australian writer who has lived abroad for almost a decade (in Japan and now also in the U.S.), I'm somewhat external to the normalization of racist tones, misinformation and disinformation that shrouded the referendum campaign, but still deeply tapped into what is going on in my home country.

I'm aware of my privilege in having broken free from Australia's not insignificant geographical isolation, which creates the condition for some Australians to be unable to look beyond their narrow interests. I see firsthand how dialogues around history, race and identity play out on a global stage.

"Australia now occupies a unique position globally," Crikey's political editor Bernard Keane writes. "It is the only colonial settler society in the world that not only does not recognise in any way those dispossessed by colonialism, but whose citizens have actively rejected any such recognition."

The Voice was never envisioned as having legislative power and Parliament could accept or reject its decisions. It was a chance for people to advise lawmakers on policies that affect their lives. That's it. Yet this change was overwhelmingly rejected.

For most Australians, the stakes of adding some sentences to the Constitution were low, but for indigenous Australians, the stakes were incredibly high. The whole campaign felt momentous.

The Voice to Parliament was initially proposed in the Uluru Statement from the Heart, a 2017 petition written by Indigenous leaders outlining a roadmap for reconciliation with the nation.

First Nations Australians make up a little shy of 4% of the population. That number would be higher were it not for institutionalized campaigns such as the forced removal of Aboriginal children from their families from the mid-1800s to the 1970s, which led to the so-called Stolen Generations — a policy described as genocidal by many, including the Australian Human Rights Commission.

Aboriginal Australians are one of the oldest known civilizations on Earth, with ancestry stretching back 75,000 years. Australia should be uplifting, celebrating and learning from their rich culture. They have inhabited the land called Australia for 60,000 years, while white people have existed there for 0.39% of that time — 235 years.

Since Europeans first set foot on this land, First Nations peoples have suffered violent assimilation, inherited trauma, disenfranchisement, police brutality, unjust incarceration and higher rates of suicide, problems that persist today. And by rejecting the Voice to Parliament, Australians have refused to embrace a framework to begin to change this course.

Supporters of the "yes" vote, myself included, saw this as an opportunity to work with First Nations peoples to solve problems caused by our history, policies and social structures.

The referendum was a chance the Australian majority to right some wrongs, or at least show the traditional owners of the land that they too deserve a voice in how the country operates. However, overwhelmingly, division prevailed over reconciliation.

The outcome over the weekend was dramatic; all of the country’s six states and one of its two territories voted “no,” with the Australian Capital Territory being the exception. At the time of writing, with votes still being counted, the outcome of the referendum was 39.3% in favor and 60.7% against. Of note is that a majority of communities with a high proportion of Indigenous citizens voted “yes.”

At best, this result showcases Australia's ignorance; at worst, it is racist.

Political commentators have discussed the "yes" campaign's inability to sway on-the-fence voters, but I don’t see this outcome as a failure of their work. It is a failure of the population to have enough empathy to try and understand what the referendum was about.

That is one of the key takeaways: There was a barrage of analysis on how the issue was campaigned, but a dearth of information on what the referendum actually meant and how it would (or largely wouldn't) impact the majority of (non-Indigenous) Australians. The "no" campaign saw this gap and ran with it.

Led by the opposition Liberal Party of Australia, it climbed to victory on the back of arguments such as that creating an Indigenous Voice to Parliament would divide the nation, lead to legal challenges and dysfunctional government, be a bureaucratic and financial burden, and that the proposal wasn’t detailed enough.

It also argued that more bureaucracy is not the right way to advance the interests of First Nations Australians.

The campaign was fueled by conspiracy theories, disinformation and misinformation spread online as well as in traditional media, such as Murdoch-owned outlets.

“Sky News is regularly promoting anti-voice misinformation that is demonstrably false,” Malcolm Turnbull, former Australian Prime Minister and Liberal Party head, and Sharan Burrow, general secretary of the International Trade Union Confederation, wrote in The Guardian in July. A claim backed by academics pointing to the falsehood of assertions such as that by Sky News commentator Cory Bernardi that the Voice would lead to “an apartheid-type state.”

As a journalist and communications professional attuned to reading communication tactics, I see these arguments and maneuvers as amounting to fearmongering, efforts to confuse people and racism veiled as concerns for national unity.

But arguably, the campaign's winning move was its ability to capitalize on people’s ignorance. We have seen it time and time again: when there is ignorance, fear wins.

"If you don't know, vote no" was the tagline that probably got the “no” vote over the line. It is clever in its underhandedness and showcases the campaign's understanding of the electorate’s apathy.

Get people scared with misinformation, threaten that Australians will lose ownership of homes (a false claim made by many “no” supporters), confuse with legal hypotheticals and jargon, then tell people that it is OK if they don't get it — just vote "no," and everything will stay the same.

Add a couple of indigenous campaigners and you have got an easy way out for people who don’t want to engage with the issue; who don’t want to think about their privilege or acknowledge how they have benefitted from the systematic oppression of people dispossessed of their land, and more.

The referendum’s outcome is a showcase of Australia’s willingness to let apathy prevail and racism win, a display of ignorance as to the history of the nation and a playbook example of dirty politics.

We got played by a campaign filled with hate, but indigenous Australians, the original owners of the land, now have to pay the price. For that, from the bottom of my heart, I'm sorry. Australian historian Barbara Miller famously titled her book "White Australia Has a Black History." And, it seems, it will continue to do so.