The two-minute clip never mentions the Indigenous voice to parliament, but a now-viral Channel Seven news story about cancelled tree planting ceremonies in Western Australia was quickly seized upon last week by the no campaign and far-right opponents of the voice.
The video has now reached more than 1.5m views on Twitter, largely thanks to a significant boost from opponents of the voice, who have attempted to co-opt controversy over the state’s updated planning laws since at least early July.
The segment claimed the tree planting ceremonies were cancelled because of Western Australia’s newly reformed Aboriginal Cultural Heritage Act, which requires landowners to check for the presence of Aboriginal cultural heritage on their land before undertaking major works.
It was promoted last week by a roll call of social media accounts linked to the no camp, including the Instagram, Facebook and TikTok pages of Fair Australia, which is run by the conservative lobby group Advance.
Daniel Angus, a professor of digital communication at Queensland University of Technology, said the no side was deploying classic “malinformation” tactics to sow confusion about the voice. “That’s taking a largely factual account and radically decontextualising it to essentially weaponise it,” he said.
The broader no side’s narrative is that “we don’t know what [the voice is] going to do”, Angus said. “They say many things that are half correct or completely incorrect, but that labours the conversation down in trying to unpick every single thing that they’ve said.”
The RMIT FactLab editor, Esther Chan, said some voice opponents were increasingly using “scare tactics” framed as a warning to concerned voters about how the voice might affect land ownership or divide Australia by race.
In fact, the voice would be an advisory body without legal powers to enforce its recommendations.
The clip was also seized on by far-right accounts on Facebook, Telegram and Twitter, which have been attempting to exploit the voice by linking the referendum to a variety of racist tropes.
Claims that the voice will allow Indigenous Australians to seize land and resources have been shared via Telegram channels with almost 10,000 followers as well as accounts created to share far-right perspectives on the voice, where followers have been encouraged to spread them on more mainstream platforms, including Twitter.
One Telegram post that shared the Channel Seven clip and claimed it was evidence the voice would be an “extortion racket” has been viewed more than 15,000 times.
Chan said FactLab’s research has shown a recurring false narrative that the voice could force land to be redistributed from non-Indigenous Australians to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. Memes spread in certain far-right channels have even linked this idea to apartheid in South Africa and land seizures in Zimbabwe.
Planting ceremony not linked to voice
The Channel Seven story was about planned planting events near Perth’s Canning river that were called off by local landcare groups. The outlet reported that the then head of the local Whadjuk Aboriginal Corporation, David Collard, allegedly told local landcare groups they couldn’t go ahead until a river restoration funding issue was resolved.
In a statement via his lawyer, Collard denied he had made such a demand and said the coverage had been “inflammatory”.
“It is deeply disappointing that the media and prominent politicians have chosen to exploit Mr Collard to advance their arguments and create further division over the broader political issues regarding the new Aboriginal Cultural Heritage Act and referendum on the voice to parliament.”
The chief executive of the South East Regional Centre for Urban Landcare, Amy Krupa, said the planting was postponed due to confusion over a funding question and whether the heritage laws applied.
The day after the story aired, the Whadjuk Aboriginal Corporation said in a statement that the cancellation had nothing to do with the heritage laws, and WA’s minister for Aboriginal affairs, Tony Buti, told Channel Seven as much.
Krupa rejected the attempts to link the tree planting situation with debate over the upcoming referendum.
“The voice campaign should have nothing to do with this,” she said. “It shouldn’t be coming into this at all.
“Now that things have started to be clarified and we know that tree planting can go ahead, we have no concerns.”
WA a key battleground
This is not the first time voice opponents have tried to link genuine confusion about the heritage laws with the referendum.
Official no vote supporters have also used an incomplete quote from the Western Australian premier, Roger Cook, in Facebook ads.
Referendum News, one of Advance’s Facebook pages, has spent up to $1,500, according to Meta’s data, to run an ad targeting audiences in the state that includes Cook’s partial quote that the heritage laws “do the same thing as the voice” while noting that he urged voters not to conflate the issues.
The line comes from an 8 July press conference at which the premier was at pains to distinguish the heritage laws from the voice and suggested those trying to blend the two were attempting to “cool that discussion”.
“Aboriginal cultural heritage laws do the same thing as the Voice, that is they respect, acknowledge and consult. And nothing can be fairer than that,” his complete quote reads.
The Facebook account of the Country Liberal party senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price, who is a prominent advocate for the no campaign and a leader of Fair Australia, also shared an image of Cook with the out-of-context quote. Western Australia is a key battleground for the referendum.
Marcus Stewart, a leading Indigenous voice campaigner, accused the no campaign of race-based “dog whistling”.
“They don’t have to play by the rules,” he said. “The no campaign is desperate because they know the simple ask of the Australian people is for a constitutional enshrined voice that is permanent and independent and simply asks for the parliament to listen.”
Fair Australia declined to comment. Price was approached for comment and did not respond substantively before publication deadline.
