Having spent most of my career trying to understand rural culture, I think it’s fair to say the bush’s image of itself is egalitarian. Rural people say they identify with battlers and underdogs.
That core idea has held steady while other things in the regions have changed. Greater access to fast internet – notwithstanding all frustrations – has created new opportunities and allowed more people to work from home in the bush.
More recently, pandemic lockdowns forced Australians to look to the regions with new eyes. Our city cousins saw a new way of living, more closely connected to nature while not missing out on full strength coffee.
Rural Australia has built the confidence to very publicly welcome people from other places, such as the Ezidi people in Armidale or the Nadesalingam family in Biloela.
It is as if the bush’s idea of itself has expanded.
But all of this happened in a decade when conventional politics was breaking. While regional voters in other places were voting for Brexit and Donald Trump, Australian old-style country conservatives remained more circumspect.
It was not that rural voters weren’t looking to shake things up. Some lost faith or grew apart from their traditional representatives and sought new voices on the right and centre right. Rural third party independents and minor parties have been prepared to challenge the status quo, but not too much.
And when things moved all too fast, voters have shown they were prepared to run back into the arms of their old voting choices. Consider New England going from a teal prototype independent in Tony Windsor to the former Nationals leader Barnaby Joyce.
Some rural communities have also formed new alliances with traditional owners. Support from Indigenous communities is increasingly sought and enlisted when farming land is threatened, even though traditional owners have no ownership, control or (often) access to private land.
Implicit in this request is a recognition of the moral weight held by traditional owners when communities call on governments to change or overturn decisions.
Just last week the Gomeroi people joined farmers in the Sydney CBD protests against plans by Santos to mine coal seam gas on the Liverpool Plains.
Before Santos, the Gomeroi opposed Shenhua’s plans for an open cut coalmine on the Liverpool Plains. The project was eventually defeated and the NSW government paid out the company. The land was sold back to farmers.
At the time, the National Farmers’ Federation president, Fiona Simson, urged her fellow Liverpool Plains farmers to work with the traditional owners to keep access to heritage open, and credited the alliance to the defeat of the Shenhua proposal.
Yet farmers associations and other rural organisations have been mostly either silent or, in the case of the Pastoralists and Graziers Association of Western Australia president, Tony Seabrook, actively negative on the 14 October referendum. It is clearly contentious in the bush.
The egalitarian self image of country people has been weaponised by the no campaign, refashioned to look like Indigenous people will be getting something extra if the country votes yes. This is an old trope, that goes back to Pauline Hanson 1.0, circa 1996.
What Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people will be getting, if the country votes yes, is equal footing. The voice is just recognition of the First Nation peoples’ original place in this land and an avenue to allow them to have a say on how policies that affect them are made. “Nothing about us, without us,” as the refrain goes.
So mild is the proposal, that the government does not even have to take their advice.
And if there is one thing that non-Indigenous people in rural Australian should be able to relate to, it is having to deal with ill-conceived policies made for other people (read: city folk) imposed on places where it is not appropriate.
So what is going on here?
Rural Australia is older and whiter than the rest of Australia, even though regional and rural places have higher proportions of Indigenous people than cities. Our population represents just under 30% of the Australian population, but spread over a much larger area.
Older populations and conservative voters are two of the hallmarks of no voters, after the Coalition chose to actively campaign for a no vote in this referendum.
Our towns attract fewer overseas migrants than our cities. It’s worth noting that migrant populations are more likely to support the voice.
Many still do not know the question, which is simply this:
A Proposed Law: to alter the Constitution to recognise the First Peoples of Australia by establishing an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice. Do you approve this proposed alteration?
We just have to write yes or no.
The result will determine whether we amend the constitution for the creation of an Indigenous advisory body to parliament.
That advisory body will be designed by our own democratic representatives. In rural Australia, those representatives are overwhelmingly from the Liberal and National party rooms.
Most rural people I have talked to over the past six months have been firmly in the no camp. A sizeable portion are uncommitted or uninterested. A smaller group will vote yes, including an energised Together, Yes campaign brought to you by the same people who conceived kitchen table conversations before the wave of teal independents.
At the weekend, a farmer down the road texted me a single line.
“If you don’t know, give them a go. Vote yes.”
My friend reminded me that rural Australians have historically seen themselves as committed to the “fair go”.
However the vote lands, the nature of the debate leading up to the referendum has ensured there will be fraught relations in rural Australia.
It has unleashed some ugly language that feels like a stepping back in time. It feels like a shrinking of sorts, back to a place that we don’t fit any more. I hope we haven’t lost the hard-won outward facing confidence we have gained.
