Anyone paying attention to the latest fever dream of the right’s No campaign would be forgiven for doubting there exist limits to its commitment to mendacity and disinformation. No claim, it would seem, is too large; no lie too brazen or heroic; no words too redolent with fear or division; and no conspiracy too ensconced in the trappings of bad faith to warrant reconsideration, however harmful or unpatriotic.
On the contrary, sustained withdrawals from reality for those on the right are no longer a portent of an unwell mind but conversely a Pavlovian response to the times — an emblem, if you like, of reflexive partisan loyalty and faith. And so it was for little-known Queensland Liberal-National MP Colin Boyce last week, whose daring foray into civic vandalism and delusion produced this mordant rejoinder from Anthony Albanese (before he reduced Boyce’s question to “a conspiracy in search of a theory”):
I do say that, as a new member, [the member for Flynn] should be wary if no-one up the front will ask a question.
What we have here are conspiracy theories colliding with each other. They’re struggling to get their scares straight. I mean, what role did Marcia Langton play in the faking of the moon landing? What was the role of the Uluru Statement from the Heart in that? This is absolutely nonsense.
Boyce’s accusation of “deception” over the Voice, for what it’s worth, turned on Sky News host Peta Credlin’s much-vaunted claim that the 439-word, publicly available Uluru Statement from the Heart does not — at least on her reckoning — fit on one A4 page, but rather extends to some 26 pages.
Like other lies peddled by the No campaign, what’s striking but not unique about this particular claim is its audacity; it’s lazy and intellectually unserious, easily disproved with a simple Google search. The additional 25 pages, released under freedom of information, are nothing more than a collection of documents detailing accounts of the historic regional dialogues that ultimately shaped and gave expression to the Uluru Statement six years ago.
But truth and reality mean little to nothing to the right. If anything, eminently provable facts to the contrary appear to embolden those who proselytise in delusion, as Credlin’s salty reaction to the National Indigenous Australians Agency (NIAA) correction of her Uluru Statement lie shows. Instead of retracting her claim, she doubled-down, suggesting — without evidence — the government had “bullied” the NIAA into submission.
For Credlin’s part, however, this is all par for the course for the No campaign. Since its inception, it’s made no secret of trafficking in sinister assaults on reality, and ones aimed at annihilating the concept of truth itself. Some 50 claims from those loosely associated with the No campaign have been found to be false by the independent AAP FactCheck unit in the past 15 months, with RMIT’s FactLab eclipsing this with even higher figures.
Among the most recent array of false and groundless suspicions are claims the Yes campaign is secretly taxpayer-funded; that the Voice will force landowners to pay 1% of their income in rent to an Indigenous council, convert all private property into native title or otherwise see all land passed into conservatorship; that it offends and runs contrary to racial discrimination laws; and that it will result in a “Black state” being carved out of the Northern Territory.
These are bizarre and outlandish claims, and ones that by rights belong to the preserve of the unhinged. But they also speak blunt and tragic truths about the complete lack of good faith on the part of the right’s No campaign and its will to win at all costs.
Aside from its epistemic nihilism, what unites it is its slippery tendency to dispense with what Harvard academic Nancy Rosenblum calls the burden of explanation, with the entirety of the claim resting on an appeal to fear, hatred of other, and grievances of old. Credlin’s lie over the Uluru Statement is in this respect one of the purest, most inane distillations of this dangerous phenomenon.
By design, the claim is intended to evoke an immutable haze that, despite appearances, things are not really as they seem, though it’s difficult to explain how. As Albanese intuited, to call it a “conspiracy theory” would be to lend it a weight it doesn’t deserve. It’s bare assertion — a “conspiracism”, as Rosenblum says, with no room left for movement from point A to point B, no demand for evidence of a plot, no connecting of the dots, leaving many people to fill the void with a mangled sense of reality.
Here, the implication is the 25 additional pages suggest a radical project of civic deception. One that incidentally comports to former prime minister Tony Abbott’s fears the Voice is a “Trojan horse” destined to give way to a broken, dystopian nation divided by race, where Indigenous peoples regain the “sovereign power over the future of the country” to the detriment of all others.
The claims are slippery and disorienting precisely because they so cleverly eschew the need for any loose sense of explanation or evidence — they set fire to our shared modes of understanding the world, making it impossible for Yes campaigners to answer them on common ground. Innuendo supersedes fact, common sense recedes and epistemic fog invades. “It is like Whac-A-Mole,” said Uluru Dialogue co-chair Professor Megan Davis last week. “Nobody is fact-checking; it’s astonishing.”
What’s particularly galling about this mindless pablum, though, is not so much that it exists, but the extent to which the opposition has validated it by using the machinery of government to weaponise it. Joining Boyce’s attack on the Voice in Parliament last week were senators Jacinta Nampijinpa Price and Michaelia Cash and, in the lower house, Deputy Liberal Leader Sussan Ley, the latter of whom attempted to have the 26 FOI-ed pages on the Uluru Statement tabled before manufacturing a scare campaign over the Makarrata commission.
It’s one thing for a politician to pursue partisan advantage; it’s quite another to knowingly engage in civic arson to that end by spreading conspiracies that undermine faith in democratic institutions.
The deep irony of the current moment, though, is that it increasingly appears it is the No campaign, not the Yes campaign, that is harbouring a dark agenda, one focused not only on undermining the referendum, but on destroying recognition of Indigenous disadvantage.
The sketches of so much find reflection in argument the Voice will fundamentally divide Australians by affording Indigenous Australians special rights. Putting aside the fact the Voice creates no such rights, it’s telling the No campaign refuses to accept that the extent of Indigenous disadvantage is such that two classes of citizen already exist. On every metric of lived experience — health, education, life opportunity, incarceration rates — ours is a nation already divided by race.
But with powerful elements of the No campaign cynically insisting otherwise, a central fault line over the reality of racial inequity looms. Such a possibility is fomented by Abbott’s rhetoric over what he called the dangers of “entrenching victimhood in our constitution forever”, his claim that “this generation of Indigenous peoples are not victims” and that there’s nothing “fundamentally wrong with this great country”.
Taken to their logical endpoints, views like these cast doubt on the utility and fairness of investment in Indigenous communities, and by extension hang a question mark over the reality of Indigenous identity. This much is apparent in prominent No campaigner Gary Johns’ claim that First Nations peoples ought to submit to blood tests for “all benefits and jobs”, and Abbott’s casual lie that the NIAA already receives “something like $30 billion a year” for Indigenous programs to no avail, when the true figure was $4.5 billion.
Unreality and populist discontent, in other words, have become the crucible in which a new counterinsurgency against Indigenous peoples is being forged before our eyes.
The concern, former Liberal opposition leader John Hewson pointed out on Saturday, is that these lies are taking root. It’s true most of the people who discern force in these arguments won’t have started out as racists, and nor would they see themselves as racist. But once they’ve convinced themselves that an invisible (Black) hand is manipulating the country, the reality is they’re a few Sky News headlines away from being swept up in a torrent of racial resentment.
The dangers of the No campaign’s gambit, from this vantage point, aren’t confined to the prospect of the referendum’s defeat, but extend to the very real prospect the nation might be carried backwards on Indigenous reconciliation. You need only look at the right’s carry-on in the past week over the “divisive” Welcome to Country, with some suggesting it should be reversed.
These people aren’t true conservatives; they’re reactionaries bent on returning the country to a faded world with a modern twist, being the delegitimisation of basic democratic norms. After all, the No campaign is inviting the country to thoroughly mistrust government and expert guidance on the Voice. The logical upshot such a lack of faith in basic institutions is liable to occasion is a country with the hallmarks of democracy but an absence of the conditions required to properly sustain it.
All of which supposes one certainty in this uncertain world: the referendum’s defeat will not only herald the death of reconciliation. It will resurrect in its wake a museum of racial resentments, a perpetual prison of inequality for Indigenous peoples, and a damaged civic space marked by disrespect and vanishing norms. The dangers couldn’t be clearer.
Should Labor get down and dirty in fighting back against the lies from the No campaign? Let us know by writing to letters@crikey.com.au. Please include your full name to be considered for publication. We reserve the right to edit for length and clarity.
