In Queensland politics, it’s known as auto-babble, a nod to the state’s great word mangler, Joh Bjelke-Petersen. Whether you’re on offence or defence, just throw the whole bowl of word salad across the table and hope you’ll confuse everyone with the volume of verbiage.
Liberal Leader Peter Dutton, who has absorbed and practises the less refined arts of Queensland conservatism, rolled plenty of auto-babble out this week while going on the attack in the debate over a constitutional amendment for an Indigenous Voice to Parliament.
This approach involves non-sequiturs like this, in an interview on ABC’s 7.30: “I want to make sure that those voices who have the ability to make the changes, and the practical outcomes and the improvements for kids and women and families on the ground, that’s the voice that I want to hear.”
Also in the same interview: “I don’t accept this proposition that foreign affairs or defence or education policy or any other policy affects Indigenous Australians more or less than what it does Australians living across the country more generally. The fact is that of course defence policy affects Indigenous Australians in an equal way that it does somebody living in a regional town with them or elsewhere…”
The first example is a case of “Who can argue with that?” The other is more “What the… ?”
The Coalition is clearly running a two-track tactical battle on this proposed referendum question, something first alluded to by Anthony Albanese in his victory speech in May 2022, fleshed out at the Garma Festival in July, and given a renewed push in the last months of the year.
While Dutton and senior frontbench Liberal colleagues argue they only want a successful “Voice” targeted at improving the circumstances of Indigenous families, especially children, there’s non-stop harping about the “detail” or lack thereof.
The Nationals have mostly walked away but the Liberals are the self-professed principled bystanders who have only the best interests of Indigenous Australians in their hearts and minds. The cynical see a plan to force a failure on the first-term Labor government — and not just any failure, but one close to the hearts of the true believers. This could, of course, turn out to be a cunning plan in the Baldrick sense.
However, a few questions on the government side of this should be examined before we look at the wisdom of what Dutton’s up to.
First, there’s the existential question of why this was seen as a priority in this term of Parliament. No one argues it isn’t important business but you can mount a case that it wasn’t top of the list of vote-shifting issues for Australians last May — something confirmed in various academic and party reviews of the result.
Climate, accountability and transparency, women’s issues, a non-threatening plan for the country, and Scott Morrison’s character were on the list of reasons for change. Voting for a Voice was not.
Given the enormity of the crowded policy and political agenda for the Albanese government, any mission to get this referendum across the very difficult series of lines in Australia (majority of votes in a majority of states) would require a tireless campaign and detailed plan to make it work.
The Coalition’s criticism about a lack of detail is, for most voters, fertile ground for failure. There have been comparisons to previous ballots on constitutional change: the successful 1967 vote to change the constitution in relation to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, and the unsuccessful 1999 referendum for a republic.
But the important reference should be the failed rights and freedoms referendums vote held by Bob Hawke’s Labor government in September 1988. This sought to enshrine various rights regarding the compulsory acquisition of property, fair trials and freedom of religion. There were also votes on four-year terms, fair elections and the recognition of local government.
After the votes were counted, the “rights and freedoms” vote made its way into the record books as the “worst-performing” referendum, with just 31% of voters backing the questions and not one state giving the thumbs up to any option. Extending parliamentary terms and recognising local government attracted just 33% of votes cast, while the idea of fair elections was more popular (37%) but still didn’t succeed.
To contrast this poor outcome, the 1967 referendum (where just over 90% of voters said yes) remains the most successful.
The 1988 votes started out as very popular, attracting support from between two-thirds and three-quarters of voters. This support held reasonably well from May when the questions were first promulgated until August when the Liberal Party’s No campaign (led by Victorian hard man Peter Reith) kicked in. The low point of Reith’s hardball campaign was when he claimed voting for freedom of religion would lead to Easter being cancelled.
The Labor government fought hard but couldn’t match the fake news and misinformation. As Geoff Walsh, the campaign strategist steering the referendums to the electoral grave, remarked to this columnist at the time: “How do you sell a series of propositions which, boiled down, rest on nothing changing if you vote Yes?”
It feels like 1988 all over again with the current referendum, especially with a government Yes campaign that feels afraid of itself, has no narrative with which people can identify and which mostly leaves the field clear for Dutton and his band of doubters.
Of course, failure might not be the win the opposition has in its mind, which is why its plan might be more Baldrick and less genius. Any loss will be painted by Labor as the Coalition using negativity and untruths to deny Indigenous Australians something supported by a strong majority. This could feed an image of Dutton and the LNP as backward-looking, not focused on the future and essentially pessimistic, not optimistic.
A smarter opposition might pick this issue as the one on which to unite with the government, give the ALP its win, use it as a way to modernise its own image, and have a handy “we can be bipartisan” card up its sleeve. That would be a reverse Baldrick with pike.
As it stands, it could win the battle of the referendum but lose the war of the next election.
