Neville McCloy writes: I can see the headlines in the international media if the Voice to Parliament fails: “Australia rejects reconciliation with its Indigenous people” (“There’s nothing surprising about the No campaign’s success”). What a racist lot we would look like if that were to prevail, nothing more than a little wealthy white country getting rich off the one thing we do — mining.
The latent uncovering of the real Australia as a racist mob, exploited by John Howard and continued shamelessly by Peter Dutton, confines all of us to being utterly tarred with the brush of hateful ordinariness and brutish white entitlement that apartheid South Africa would have been proud of.
Steve Brennan writes: The referendum’s outcome will depend on Anthony Albanese waking up from his complacency (and hubris) and deciding to fight, as he did after the disastrous start to his election campaign. Dutton is a thoroughly toxic, unprincipled creature, we know this. But in this fight, he is a formidable opponent as he’s tapping the politics of populism like John Howard masterfully demonstrated. White supremacy is alive and well here in Australia and has deep support from the mining sector. The miners always win and are deeply worried that they will somehow lose the right to dig up any part of this country they want to.
There is big money, powerful right-wing media and very clever communications strategists standing behind the No campaign. This has been a huge miscalculation on the part of Albanese. The Voice referendum is pretty much his baby and if it fails, it’s going to have deep repercussions for him. If I was a betting man, I’d put money on a No win. Naturally Dutton will delude himself this is a win for his credibility as leadership material. Laughable, of course, because that man will never, ever win an election.
I also must add the reality of a No win is the effect this will have on the fabric of the nation. It will be a dark cloud that will hang over us for a very long time and will mean the end of Indigenous reconciliation. There will be much more division in society and many more Indigenous people will suffer and die. Will Dutton reflect on this as the chief protagonist? Absolutely not. But it will come back to visit him.
Tor Hundloe writes: I am not surprised that Labor voters are drifting to the No side. In my in-depth focus group work commencing earlier in the year when the Voice was not as prominent, I was surprised to find there were Labor voters — at that stage a minority — who took the traditional socialist position that society should not be divided on racial grounds, while being very supportive of the marginalised Indigenous peoples. As time has passed the Labor cohort’s No vote has grown.
These voters were all for assisting the poor and disadvantaged in remote communities, with better-directed policy — and a Voice. But they viewed the Indigenous spokespeople as a very well-paid, self-serving elite (e.g. Stan Grant and the various professors) with nothing in common with the outback poor Indigenous folk.
As I have continued with my focus group work, the impression I get, particularly from the Labor voters, is that they do not want to be associated with Dutton. He is disliked. Some will say they have no choice if they stick to their No vote. Those more engaged point to Warren Mundine (a former president of the Labor Party) and Indigenous peoples they associate with the grassroots. Senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price is much admired; Senator Lidia Thorpe is anything but.
However, there is one group of Labor or Green supporters where Yes voters are in the majority: the young.
Jan Jeltes writes: It’s either “you’re with the Voice, or you’re categorised as a right-wing opportunist and a racist by the solemn intelligentsia”. Well, I am not a right-wing opportunist, nor a divisive individual. Nor am I a racist. My view is simply that this is an inappropriate measure that does not correspond to the intent of a true democracy and which will aid and abet the practice of partisan wedge politics rather than decision-making for the common good. Please note the term “common good”. Assuming, indeed, that it is acceptable to hold an opinion of your own that is totally disconnected from any ideology.
It is entirely possible that I am wrong, and that it is no such thing, and that my concerns are unfounded in truth and in fact, but the job to convince me otherwise falls to those who seek to change our constitution and method of government. Calling me a racist, a person who divides society for ideological reasons and a mindless right-wing hate-monger shows me what this campaign sets out to achieve, and is essentially a strongly reinforcing stamp of approval on the views I hold.
Christopher Kyriacou writes: It was interesting that Dutton announced his opposition to the Voice days after his humiliating loss in the Aston byelection. He clearly wished to avoid the loss being used as any indication of support for the Voice, and true to form opened the gates of hell on Indigenous peoples with his feigned quest for the details (that were all around him) and to rally the decimated Liberal base.
Dutton’s claims that a Yes referendum result won’t make any difference in closing the gap only illustrate his malevolence and hypocrisy. This is because we all need to remember he was a senior member of a government that had 10 years to close the gap and failed miserably. How can he reconcile the fact it was the LNP government that advanced the process resulting in the Uluru Statement, yet almost immediately binned the invitation made by the most consultative process ever undertaken by Indigenous peoples?
The only conclusion any reasonable person can arrive at this point of the referendum process is that Dutton will do anything to return his party to government. He is prepared to strip Indigenous peoples of hope just as brutally as they were stripped of their lives, culture and lands over the past 250 years. He knows the failures of his own government in closing the gap and the recognition of Indigenous peoples in the constitution was to commence a long overdue change to address the fact all previous efforts had failed and to right a wrong created in 1901.
Dutton may succeed with his relentless No campaign based on misinformation, stoking paranoia and racism, but it reveals he is clearly prepared to destroy any prospect of reconciliation with Indigenous peoples for decades. Any political euphoria of a successful No campaign will quickly give way to a deep malaise and realisation that we again failed our Indigenous brothers and sisters.
Terence Mills writes: Perhaps if Dutton were to say he would resign as leader of the opposition if his No campaign on the Voice fails, it may just get the Yes campaign across the line.
Jeffrey Byrne writes: Crikey’s articles on the Voice are one-sided in favour of the Yes vote. Why don’t you provide some balance? It’s not “Peter Dutton’s negativity” that will carry the No vote. It’s the people of Australia who are wise to refuse to allow racial discrimination to be written in the constitution.
Geoff Thompson writes: The federal opposition’s targeted questioning of Linda Burney in question time two weeks ago continued its attempts to generate confusion about Voice. The pile-on of potentially problematic scenarios was simple fear-mongering and demonstrated what Bernard Keane described as “the effort to find [in the Voice] some sort of damage to non-Indigenous Australians” (“White resentment, zero-sum games and the populist politics of Voice opponents“).
It also displays a lack of confidence in Parliament — and future parliaments — to learn how to fine-tune the Voice. As Thomas Mayo and Kerry O’Brien point out in their book The Voice to Parliament Handbook: “As a permanent institution, [the Voice] would be guaranteed to mature and evolve, just like the Parliament itself.”
None of our great national institutions began as risk-free enterprises. As a nation, we have had the maturity and capacity to navigate the risks and develop effective institutions. By multiplying and magnifying the risks, the opposition implies that we lack such maturity.
As a non-Indigenous Australian I have nothing to lose from the Voice but most Indigenous peoples believe they (and the whole nation) have much to gain. That possibility — so graciously offered in the Uluru Statement — outweighs the risks, especially those concocted by the opposition.
Haydn Radford writes: To say I am disillusioned after reading Maeve McGregor’s article (which is a concise and disturbing exposé of how impotent the Yes campaign’s approach to date has been) is understating my disgust with our conservative politicians and those who support them. Will we ever reflect honestly about our role in Indigenous disadvantage and how white privilege has so poisoned our collective psyche?
Regardless of blame, I cannot see how the referendum failing would be a win for the No campaign, which has provided no real alternative pathway. One outcome of a No vote win should be a focus on establishing a treaty, and this should be arbitrated internationally at The Hague. This at least would result in some international pressure on Australia over what we are doing about reconciliation with First Nations peoples and a move to real power over their present and future.
When the international community starts to publicly examine past and present treatment of First Nations peoples, there will be nowhere to hide from our collective shame.
Ray Armstrong writes: The same scare campaign the Coalition used to infer that Mabo would take all your land, a leg of lamb would be $100, Whyalla would close down, the carbon tax would destroy our economy, refugees will arrive on our beaches in their thousands if Labor was elected, same-sex marriage laws if passed would turn the country into Sodom and Gomorrah, is being used in the Coalition’s No campaign.
Fear, scaremongering, dogwhistling and three-word slogans are tools that have served the Coalition well over the years in winning elections, but the people have woken up. None of the aforementioned occurred. The hysteria and blatant misinformation being whipped up by those in opposition are dividing our nation like never before.
John Peel writes: Hearing intelligent friends beginning to trot out some of the No campaign’s sillier furphies — they’ll change Australia Day, they’ll clog up the courts, they’ll have a veto over everything — is a sure sign the referendum is doomed. Where this nonsense originates is irrelevant. What counts is that it has now become socially acceptable, regardless of political leanings, to be on the same side as Dutton and Howard, not to mention the inevitable crowd of racists and bigots.
Against that, my usual, rather timid response that people who have been here 60,000 years longer than we have might indeed deserve special treatment simply falls on deaf ears.
Bill Gye writes: For the past several years I have been a member of the Close the Gap steering committee as a person with community mental health expertise. If the Voice referendum fails, the details of why it failed will be lost to the public eye, both in Australia and worldwide. It will be the symbolism and shock headline messages from the global media coverage (mass and social media) that will burn bright for a long time.
Whether we think it fair or not, we will be seen as the nation that refused to recognise its Indigenous peoples. Messages such as that the white Australia policy lives on or “terra nullius preserved” will be prolific and viral. It will be seen that in Australia the human rights of our most disadvantaged are trounced and we may well be typecast as one of the most racist countries on the planet.
So we need to face the fact that there will be at least three very negative consequences if the Voice referendum fails:
- The mental ill-health, suicide and crime rate of many Indigenous peoples across the country will increase significantly and extensively. I have no doubt the gap will widen;
- Australians and Australian politicians will not be able to criticise human rights abuses in other countries without being justly accused of hypocrisy;
- Australians travelling overseas will be seen by many coming from one of the most racist countries on the planet.
People may think this unfair, but these will be the consequences of the attention-grabbing global headlines (“Australia rejects reconciliation”) and the permanent reputation damage following the referendum’s failure — which I dread.
Grant Wood writes: So to vote No means you are a right-wing racist? As McGregor writes, Labor is maintaining a narrow path between the Voice having no effect yet being meaningful. The question asks for three things: recognition in the constitution; a Voice to federal Parliament; a voice to the federal executive.
Why not ask the three questions and give us the opportunity to vote on each? Not doing so makes it so easy for the No vote to attack on two fronts. Throw in that it seems the Yes case is largely being pushed by eastern state academics and NT Indigenous Elders to date, you can bet your bottom dollar the No campaign will start banging the Western Australia versus the east drum.
