Polls showing a decline in support for an Indigenous voice to parliament have prompted a lot of public soul searching this week among observers. There have variously been calls for the vote to be postponed, for the question to be amended, for the yes campaign to step it up.
Amazing what anxiety a handful of numbers can invoke.
The yes campaigners appear to be holding their nerve, though they have been out and about this week reassuring supporters the vote is on track for success.
The Yes23 campaign director, Dean Parkin, said they anticipated the “numbers were going to tighten over time” because the voice has been so far “stuck in the Canberra bubble, with politicians and lawyers having their say”.
The past few months have been taken up with establishing the rules for the vote. The government had to modernise the machinery bill. That triggered debate about whether it should reinstate the official pamphlet (it did), and establish and fund official yes and no campaign bodies (it didn’t). Then came the referendum bill itself, which precipitated months of bruising public argument about whether the addition of the phrase “executive government” would lead to endless high court challenges (it won’t), give First Nations veto power (again, nope) and “racialise the constitution” (wrong) by conferring special rights on First Nations people (it won’t).
As an extended opportunity to sow doubt, confusion and misinformation, this period has been the no campaign’s best chance of doing damage to the public perception of the voice, and if the polls are to be believed they have certainly made the most of it.
“Now, thankfully, that process is almost due to end,” Parkin told Sky News on Tuesday.
The referendum bill is expected to pass the Senate by the middle of next week, at which point yes campaigners say they are looking forward to moving the conversation out of Canberra and “into the community where it belongs”. They say they are buoyed by the groundswell of support coming from thousands of people they meet and talk to across the country. Which brings us back to the polls and the matter of how supportive the Australian people are turning out to be.
Some recent polling shows support for the voice is slipping. But as my colleagues Nick Evershed and Josh Nicholas have shown, the polls can’t tell us everything about the national mood.
Their analysis shows support has declined, but it’s impossible to tell by exactly how much because of the differences in how surveys are carried out. Polling companies ask different questions, allow different types of responses, and show low polling numbers in some states. They found a recent Newspoll survey changed the wording of the question and the choices that respondents were offered – which coincided with an increase in the number of people responding “don’t know” and a drop in the percentage of people intending to vote yes.
“We don’t get too caught up on analysing individual polls,” Parkin said. “There will be plenty of them between now and the referendum. They’ll say different things. Our job is very much on making sure that Australians are involved in this conversation and taking it to the community.”
The ugly debate in Canberra this week has reinforced precisely why the Uluru statement from the heart is addressed to the Australian people, not politicians.
There’s been bitter claims about who misled parliament about what and when, triggering further distress among sexual assault survivors and renewed respect for the bravery of women who have spoken out, among them the fearless independent senator and strong DjabWurrung Gunnai Gunditjmara woman Lidia Thorpe, underscoring what a toxic place Parliament House can be, and undermining the Albanese government’s early hopes for a more respectful parliament.
In that chaos, the latest Closing the Gap statistics showing that Indigenous adult imprisonment rates and the number of Indigenous children in out-of-home care are both significantly worse, passed almost without notice.
“We put our faith in the people of Australia,” Parkin said. “What we’ve seen over the last couple of weeks has proven that to be the correct strategy and that’s why we are looking forward to this next period once the conversation leaves parliament and gets out into the communities. It’s a different conversation and that’s one that we’re very keen to really ramp up.”
Those worried about flagging support say this phase can’t come soon enough. The yes war chest is large, including $1m from the Pratt Family Foundation and $5m from the Ramsay Foundation. Last week, mining giant Rio Tinto, in another act of post-Juukan Gorge atonement, donated $2m. More than 500 organisations now back yes, including charities, local councils, faith and multicultural groups, land councils, medical bodies, businesses, universities, sports clubs and unions.
Meanwhile, the no campaign has yet to apply for deductible gift recipient (DGR) status, to allow it to receive tax-deductible donations. Conservative commentators have said the fear of being seen as racist by supporting the no campaign has scared away donors who are worried about the social backlash after disclosure. While some or none of that may be true, it’s possible the no campaign has reached a turning point of its own.
So where does this leave us? In the roughly four months until the vote – which the prime minister has already ruled out postponing – the yes campaign will have to work hard on all fronts in the hope that a clear message, an appeal to the heart and the weight of their spending will be enough to get it over the line.
