Anthony Albanese used his powerful Garma speech to build momentum behind his “simple and clear” proposition to change the constitution to enshrine an Indigenous voice.
“I believe the tide is running our way, I believe the momentum is with us, as never before,” he said, framing the referendum as a basic question of decency and respect.
But he knows the challenge will be to maintain that momentum through the political debate to come.
Some of the arguments against the case for change are easy to counter. The claim that a voice to parliament is mere symbolism, for example, as if symbols haven’t been powerfully motivating throughout history. Or the idea that the government should instead concentrate on practical policies, as if it can’t do both, and as if a representative voice would not also be a practical means to drive change.
Others will be much harder to navigate.
The prime minister is proposing three fairly simple constitutional changes, one of them stating that the parliament will legislate the detail of the voice. While he’ll legislate to set up the simple proposition for the referendum, all the details of the voice will be contained in subsequent laws thrashed out by the parliament, which by definition can’t be passed until after the referendum decides whether or not the voice is going to happen at all.
For now he doesn’t want to go any further than that – deflecting demands for any more detail on whether a voice will be elected or how it will be representative.
Labor knows it will have to answer some of these questions eventually. Yes, they have been addressed by the co-design process set up when the Coalition was in government, and in innumerable other committee investigations and reports in the years of debate since the Uluru Statement from the Heart. But now the electorate really needs to understand the answers.
Labor also knows the greatest threat to maintaining momentum lies in getting bogged down in arguments over the detail with those whose aim is to sink the plan – effectively repeating the mistakes that enabled John Howard to defeat the republic referendum in 1998. “There may well be misinformation and fear campaigns to counter,” Albanese said, in what is almost certainly an understatement.
The opposition spokesman, Julian Leeser, who attended Garma with the prime minister and his ministers in the “spirit of bipartisanship” and who worked with Senator Patrick Dodson on the constitutional recognition select committee, immediately hedged his bets, welcoming the statement and demanding the detail at the same time.
And then there’s the question of amending the legislation setting up the “machinery” of conducting referenda, to align it with modern voting expectations and perhaps to modernise the somewhat outdated provision that politicians supporting the “yes” and “no” case write an essay which is mailed to all voters.
It seems unlikely the government will suspend the provisions of the act to allow public funding of a “yes” and “no” case, leaving it up to each side to raise funds, but that process will almost certainly bring more controversy and debate.
The momentum for the prime minister’s “unifying Australian moment” that will rise “above politics” felt powerful against the red earth of Garma, delivered to an audience some of whom had waited lifetimes to hear a prime minister say those words. Maintaining it through an ill-tempered political discourse with little capacity for nuance or attention to detail will be the prime minister’s great challenge.
