In choosing to campaign against the Indigenous voice, opposition leader Peter Dutton has not only done existential damage to the party he purports to lead, he has likely given the yes case its best chance of success.
Over recent months the momentum for constitutional change has stalled, the strong and instinctive public goodwill dissipated by internal negotiations in pursuit of a bipartisanship that is beyond the current federal Coalition.
The messaging around the yes vote has softened from a hard “voice” to a greater emphasis on “constitutional recognition”, a position previously rejected by First Nations leaders concerned that symbolism isn’t enough to address the consequences of their historical injustice.
In this period of conspicuous moderation, support among Liberal voters had marginally increased, but the younger progressive vote had started to slide in echoes of the 1999 republic debacle where milquetoast reform was rejected not for its ambition but for its lack thereof.
Dutton’s rejection of bipartisanship liberates the yes campaign from this tepid incrementalism, allowing the campaign to reconnect with the roadmap originally laid out in the Uluru statement from the heart.
This week’s Guardian Essential report shows that in the week since Dutton rejected this generous invitation to walk forward, this slide in support has been arrested and progressive support is again rising.
Now Dutton provides the campaign with a ready-made villain: not simply the charmless champion for an unacceptable status quo, but the entitled white guy who wants to control every detail of a process designed for and by people with less power and privilege than him.
As the putative leader of the no campaign, Dutton becomes an apologist for every libertarian lapdog and racist fringe dweller who will be drawn to the no banner, rightly required to answer for every one of their rhetorical excesses.
Dutton will continue to campaign on the tyranny of detail, a wilfully deceptive misrepresentation of the question on the referendum ballot, trying to spread both fear and panic around the status quo while pretending that nothing really needs to change.
He will attempt to wish away the inherent contradictions in his position while spreading disdain for the very idea of nationhood, with his derisive and disingenuous “Canberra Voice” straw man.
But he will do so with established credentials of a bad faith actor who walked out of the apology to the stolen generations and was part of a government that cut half a billion dollars from health and education programs in remote communities while sending in the Australian federal police to “intervene” in them. Less Canberra Voice, more Canberra Vice.
Dutton has never been popular, but this decision forces him into a premature showdown with a first-term leader who will garner a vocal constituency across business and civil society. The raw figures show the extent of this mismatch.
That Dutton lacks the smarts to see the opportunity to work side by side with a popular prime minister, rising above politics, as Albanese did when the pandemic first hit, probably renders him ineligible for higher office at the get-go.
What does the Liberal party do with these numbers? It would be easy to say that the hardheads should step in and see the folly of this strategy.
The problem for the Liberals is that the hardheads are no longer running the party. Indeed, the hardheads like “turn back the boats” and Brexit mastermind Mark Textor and Howard-era campaign director Tony Nutt are actually on the yes campaign oversight board.
The tragedy for anyone who likes the idea of a two-party democratic system is that the softheads now in charge are the group fixated on playing to their base rather than building genuine, er, coalitions.
As for the yes campaign, the opportunity now is to reinvigorate the journey to the voice by looking outwards rather than accommodating inwards, and reassuring the majority of soft voters whose primary concern is that a yes vote will not lead to meaningful change.
This reassurance starts with the voice’s remarkable source document. No Australian who spends the time to read or listen to the Uluru statement from the heart could tolerate anything but a successful yes vote.
Like all good manifestos, it persuasively and poetically answers the cynical and pernickety questions of detail while explaining how the status quo is no longer tenable.
It elegantly lays out the problem from the specific: “We are the most incarcerated people on the planet. But we are not an innately criminal people”, to the systemic: “The torment of our powerlessness.”
But it also demands more than a narrow yes vote with a bare majority of states. The invitation is to start a journey that deploys a First Nations voice, not just to make better decisions now but to guide us towards treaty in order to confront the terrible, unspoken truths that lie at the heart of our nation’s soul.
At just over 400 words it is a bit too long for a meme, but it is hardly War and Peace. Each Australian who takes the four minutes’ time to read it will find themselves not just informed about the “detail” but inspired to join their brothers and sisters as they “leave base camp”.
I’m proud to be working with the campaign and will, over the coming months, be rolling out a series of Town Hall meetings across the nation that will give every Australian the chance to listen to this eloquent and generous invitation.
There is also a program of kitchen table conversations, inspired by the “voices of” community independent movement, that will be convening from May under the banner Together Yes.
There will be space in the room for anyone who wants to ask questions and be reassured that this is a meaningful step forward that will make a difference.
Sadly, there will no longer be a place for the opposition leader, although the voices of those including Bridget Archer, Julian Lesser, Ken Wyatt and Tasmanian premier Jeremy Rockliff will only serve to highlight a liberalism he has deliberately purged from his party.
They realise what Dutton is wilfully blind to: that this is much more than a contest of legal models, it is an opportunity to create the consensus to finally build a nation on solid foundations.
Peter Lewis is an executive director of Essential, a progressive strategic communications and research company. Essential is a Yes23 campaign partner
