This summer’s media stumbles over the Voice have revealed something its supporters have long feared: the major threat to its success is traditional media. Not through open hostility (outside the op-ed pages of The Australian, anyway) but because cowed journalists have taught themselves to squeeze any story into an all-conflict-all-the-time, Canberra-centred framing.
It would have been a summer of media slapstick if the subject wasn’t so serious: a skid on the banana skin of “details” thrown out by Opposition Leader Peter Dutton, a face-planting pratfall tripped up by “sovereignty” all accompanied with a Chicken Little “The sky is falling!” shrieking from the commentariat (including *cough* some here at Crikey).
Thankfully, Australia Day brought a pause and an opportunity for a reset.
Early last week, Patricia Karvelas hosted Noel Pearson on RN Breakfast to eviscerate the bad-faith “details” demand, dragging the credibility of opposition spokesman for Indigenous matters Julian Leeser, once professedly pro-Voice, on the way through.
At the weekend, Guardian Australia editor Lenore Taylor cautioned: “The media has a particular responsibility to help readers understand the facts and the historical, political and legal context, to call out falsehoods and to avoid fuelling an ideological outrage cycle.” Her piece came paired with an explanation of the links (or lack thereof) between the Voice and sovereignty.
The Nine mastheads have nailed the reset best, with reporting led by The Age’s Indigenous affairs journalist Birpai man Jack Latimore and Caitlin Fitzsimmons that centred diverse First Nations voices. Latimore also brought some nuance to the connections between the Voice and Alice Springs’ crime wave.
Other reporters broke open the referendum’s worst-kept secret: much as the gallery may wish it otherwise, the Voice campaign is not going to be fought in Canberra. It’s being played out community by community, door by door. The teal independents are grasping at the opportunity. So, too, is Labor (like Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s local council the Labor-controlled Inner West Council in Sydney).
However, undercutting the media’s attempts at bothsidesism was the release of a poll showing 80% of Indigenous peoples support the referendum question. The Sun-Herald and The Age started a flurry with their overegging of a poll showing a minor slip in support for the Voice, but the mastheads’ op-ed columnists have pushed back against the panic narrative.
“Dutton isn’t looking for details, he’s looking for a fight,” wrote Sean Kelly.
On Saturday Peter Hartcher brought the panic and the campaigns together: “The last referendum [on the republic] was held in 1999. Before the proliferation of the smartphone. The big parties were the dominant communication sources last century, but campaign communications are radically different today.”
It’s Heraclitus’ insight brought to modern politics: you don’t get to step into the same river twice. The Voice referendum is not the republic redux. It’s a different history — more community-initiated than driven by elite politicians. The campaigners have been entrenching support across communities and institutions since 2017. Straight up Yes-No polling has always been significantly stronger than it was for a republic. Albanese has resisted the temptation to make it all about himself, knowing it would deliver the party-political divide that helped doom the 1999 vote.
We’re a different electorate today too — about half of those eligible to vote this year were not eligible, or even alive, in 1999. That half is the post-Mabo generation, deeply influenced by 30 years of change on how we (should) respect First Nations peoples; they’re significantly better educated and substantially more culturally diverse.
Of course, none of these differences guarantees a Yes majority. But they suggest that Voice campaigners — and their politician supporters — are entitled to a more sophisticated take than lazy 25-year-old pattern recognition.
Over at News Corp, meanwhile, the company’s right-wing commentariat — even those with a strong history of support for Indigenous recognition — read the summer as an opportunity to throw a few punches at the Labor government. Its tactics? Keep hammering at the confusion over detail, elevate hostile voices, muddy the clarity of the debate with whataboutery (this week: what about Alice Springs?) and deny First Nations peoples’ agency by making it Albanese’s Voice.
The question is: will the reset endure? Or will News Corp’s continued power of agenda-setting retrigger the traditional media’s knee-jerk reach for the politics of conflict?
