Why same-sex marriage got up but the Voice won’t
Excuses for the referendum’s failure are already piling up. Take them with a grain of salt
I’m writing this a few days before the result will be known, but everyone has already accepted that the Voice referendum is a lost cause. Yes, the polls have often been wrong in recent times. But it’s improbable that there are a substantial number of Australians who are telling pollsters they are voting no, but who will actually vote yes in the privacy of the ballot box.
In the lead-up to the 1999 Republican referendum, engineer turned playwright David Williamson wrote an essay for, from memory, for The Monthly. I’m a bit hazy on the details, but I seem to remember Williamson arguing that most Australians – and especially the less educated and affluent ones – would vote against Australia becoming a republic. Not for any of the reasons being bandied about, but because ordinary people wanted to give elites – who even back in 1999 were far more economically and socially liberal than the man in the street – a good hard kick in the nuts.
I might be retroactively projecting my beliefs into his long-ago published think piece. But I seem to remember Williamson arguing that lots of Australians were uncomfortable about the social and economic changes unleashed by the neoliberal policies introduced by Hawke and Keating and then furthered by Howard. Given they only had the choice between the neoliberal ALP and the even-more-neoliberal Coalition for a decade and a half (at that point – it’s now been four decades since Hawke’s 1983 election victory), non-elite Australians would vote against the Republic, Williamson argued. Not because they had any strong feelings about it one way or the other, but because they wanted those at the top of society to get a rare taste of the bitter disappointment they’d had to endure since a Labor PM – a former president of the ACTU, no less – had heroically “opened up the economy”.
Williamson was proved right. The Republic was supported by almost all media outlets, much of Corporate Australia, and the Great and the Good of the nation more generally. Yet it failed, primarily because it failed to appeal to average Australians.
(The ALP was all in on the Republic, yet many safe ALP seats voted against the Republic. Likewise, plenty of safe Coalition seats voted for the Republic despite many prominent Coalition politicians, including John Howard, being staunch monarchists. I expect the electoral map to play out similarly come Saturday night.)
The same-sex marriage outlier
If the Republic referendum went down, and the Voice referendum is almost certainly going to go down, the obvious question to ask is why the same-sex referendum got up a mere six years ago. Wouldn’t the commoners have wanted to give the out-of-touch, lah-di-dah types a thorough kicking then, too? Or do Australians swing wildly from being progressive to being conservative?
Well, yes and no.
Yes, low-income and even many middle-income Australians probably did want to lash out back in 2017.
But no, they apparently didn’t think preventing gays and lesbians from getting married would somehow inflict harm on distant elites. Or at least they didn’t want to throw their gay and lesbian friends and family members under the bus on the off chance it might somehow teach the top end of town a lesson.
I didn’t follow the debate closely, but it appears the same-sex marriage campaigners – in stark contrast to the Voice campaigners – were careful not to repeat the mistakes of their Republican predecessors.
Who was the face of the Australian same-sex marriage campaign? Magda Szubanski, aka Sharon ‘Shazza’ Strzelecki, the most non-elite Australian imaginable. In reality, Szubanski probably has very little in common with the average Australian (whoever that is). But the average Australian doesn’t feel inferior to, judged by, or lectured at by her. And what kind of miserable prick would want to stop Magda/Sharon tying the knot with the love of her life?
Where it all went wrong for the Voice
The Voice was doomed from the moment Peter Dutton decided to oppose it. History suggests that unless a referendum is wholeheartedly supported by both sides of politics and almost every other significant institution in Australian society, it will go down in a screaming heap.
But those who are already arguing that the Voice campaigners shot themselves in both feet have a point. They weren’t insincere, dishonest or lazy – far from it. But they were blind to how those in less fortunate positions were always likely to perceive the Voice.
The proposal
What do university-educated people do when there is an issue? They form a committee. Ideally, you get the right people on the committee, and they spend a lot of time talking about the problem, then – all going well – they come up with suggestions about how to fix or at least ameliorate the problem. (I don’t watch it, but I gather Utopia has great fun with the ‘let’s form a working group’ obsession of white-collar workers, especially public servants free from the discipline of the market.)
Of course, most Indigenous Australians – indeed, most non-Indigenous Australians – aren’t university-educated professionals. If they have a problem, they either take action to solve it or they don’t. Either way, they rarely assemble an advisory body to brainstorm solutions and devise an action plan. (If a truck driver needs to score amphetamines to get through a demanding week/month/year, I’m told they ring around their drug dealers rather than assembling a steering committee made up of experts in drug law, substance abuse, transportation systems and sleep deprivation to look into the matter across a 12-month timeframe.)
Pro-Voice campaigners were nonplussed by questions about how the Voice would work and what it would achieve, but these were questions non-elite Australians were always – entirely reasonably – going to ask. Incredibly, the Voice campaigners had no particularly reassuring answers.
Here’s a 200-word summary of the entire Voice campaign:
Elite Australians (EA): Indigenous Australians want a Voice and we’re going to give them one!
Non-elite Australians (NEA): Great! How will that make things better?
EA: (triumphantly): The Voice will make representations to the Parliament and the Executive Government on matters relating to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples!
NEA: So, Indigenous Australians will tell governments what they want and then the Government will do it?
EA: Of course not! The Voice will have no power at all. Except to make suggestions. Which the government of the day can choose to ignore.
NEA: So how will that improve the life opportunities of Indigenous Australians? Haven’t both Labor and Coalition governments thrown a shit-tonne of money at “closing the gap” for 50 years now, with tragically little positive impact? Haven’t they already spent decades listening to supposedly representative bodies like ATSIC? [ATSIC was the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island Commission, shut down in 2005 because both sides of politics concluded it hadn’t achieved its objectives.]
EA: Listen up, you moronic, reactionary dickhead! The Voice is completely different. Look, how about this: if you just vote correctly, fewer of your precious taxpayer dollars will be wasted on ill-fated schemes to reduce Indigenous disadvantage!
EA/NEA: *Mutual incomprehension and awkward silence*
The figureheads
Let me pose the following question (and guess your class background based on your answer): who would you rather have a beer/glass of Penfolds Grange with?
If you’re an elite Australian, it’s undoubtedly Noel Pearson. After all, he’s been a political power player from a young age, is possibly the only person in the country to have been friendly with both Paul Keating and John Howard, is a powerful orator, and has a “good degree” (law) from a sandstone university (Sydney).
If you’re a non-elite Australian, it’s Senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price. Most unusually for a politician, she doesn’t hail from the Professional-Managerial Class (PMC) and comes across as an unpretentious, amiable, ”everyday Aussie”. It’s a little premature to start talking about her as a future PM, but she has unquestionably been the breakout star of the Voice referendum. I’d be surprised if more than one in a hundred Australians had even heard of her a few months ago. Now she’s one of the highest-profile politicians in the country.
I’ve just checked Price’s Wikipedia page. As I shouldn’t have been surprised to learn, it turns out that Price does have a PMCish background. Her mother was a community leader and former minister in a (Country Liberal Party) Northern Territory Government. But it seems Price didn’t go to university but did spend some time trying to make it the worlds of music and television before starting to follow in her mother’s footsteps in her mid-thirties. After being elected to the Alice Springs Council in 2015, Price is, a mere eight years later, being touted as a future leader of the nation.
(As an aside, here’s a traumatic question for those on the Left to start pondering: How will you react if Price eventually becomes Australia’s first Indigenous PM – the Antipodean equivalent of Barack Obama – partly as a result of her spearheading the ‘No’ campaign?)
Far too late, the ‘Yes’ side became aware that the ‘No’ side was having spectacular success caricaturing the Voice as an incomprehensible frolic of Indigenous elites and their white-guilt-ridden, ivory tower enablers. Sensibly, Alan Joyce’s support for the Voice was belatedly de-emphasised, with Voice campaigners switching to highlighting support for the Voice from high-profile Australians with humble backgrounds (sporting stars, radio personalities etc).
But it was all too late.
The battle is lost but the war was long ago won
In the coming days, well-educated and often well-heeled Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians will unleash a tsunami of articles arguing that 60-70 per cent of the population voting ‘No’ is irrefutable evidence that “Australians are racists”.
Maybe.
But maybe not.
Let me end with an encouraging anecdote about generational change for those who are already profoundly despondent about the referendum, or who soon will be.
When I was growing up – a while ago, but not that long ago – there were two groups it was acceptable to treat as inferior. At my school – and it was by no means a rough school – not only the students but even some of the (Labor-voting, union member) teachers regularly made “Abo” and “poofter” jokes. Maybe I was residing in some incredibly intolerant hellhole, but I suspect that’s how it was throughout most of Australia up until not so long ago.
But lots of things have changed over the last four decades. In the space of a generation or two, we’ve gone from Indigenous and homosexual Australians being treated as something close to subhuman, to recognising them as three-dimensional human beings worthy of respect and empathy.
Growing up, I had little interaction with Indigenous Australians and only the most superficial understanding of Indigenous culture. Now I think about it, I’ve had surprisingly little interaction with Indigenous Australians – who comprise nearly four per cent of the population – throughout my adult life. I’ve sat through countless Acknowledgement of Country ceremonies (often wondering if Indigenous Australians are much benefitted by those on a work Zoom call taking the time to acknowledge the unceded Indigenous ownership of cyberspace), but still know next to nothing about Indigenous culture. Who knows what the future holds, but I will likely die having lived all my life in Australia while having had little interaction with the country’s original inhabitants. I suspect that’s the case with many Australians my age and older.
In contrast, my children were taught about Indigenous culture from the day they started kindergarten. My daughter’s best friend at the first primary school she attended was Indigenous and it was simply no big deal. Presumably, my daughter and her friend knew they looked different and came from different backgrounds, but it was a complete non-issue. At one point, my daughter’s friend told her friend group about her totemic animal. They all started insisting that they, too, had totemic animals (the family dog, a goose, a cow etc).
The woke scolds would no doubt argue my daughter should be cancelled for cultural appropriation, but I found something touching about her and her friends’ unselfconscious eagerness to connect with their Indigenous mate.
I don’t want to get all Dream on white boy/Dream on black girl utopian here. It would be extremely off-brand, for one thing. But those who’ve spent many decades being ‘winter soldiers’ and campaigning for the rights of Indigenous Australians long ago won the war, even if they have lost the current battle. The Voice will fail, but I believe most Australians, especially younger Australians, will remain committed to closing the gap. And I’m confident that, all too slowly, the gap will continue to close after Saturday.