In our book Taking Control, the editors of The Northern Star argue that the Remainer response to Brexit exposed the liberal British elite’s fear and loathing of the masses of working people. Here Craig Smith explains how Australia has just experienced its own version of Britain’s Brexit moment, as citizens reject a proposed ‘indigenous Voice’ to parliament.
On 14 October, Australian citizens rejected by a wide margin – 60 percent to 40 percent – the proposal to institutionalise an ‘indigenous voice’ to their federal parliament. During the bitter campaign, Yes campaigners had warned – and they now declare – that this was Australia’s ‘Brexit moment’. It is – just not in the way that they think.
The referendum was announced in March by a tearful Labor Prime Minister Tony Albanese, as a means of restitution for Australia’s Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, and as part of a wider pledge to implement the Uluru Statement from the Heart. Albanese’s proposal was as vague as the Uluru Statement, which merely called for ‘the establishment of a First Nations Voice enshrined in the constitution’ that would ‘empower our people’, plus a ‘Makaratta Commission to supervise a process of agreement-making between governments and [the] First Nations and truth-telling about our history’.
Exactly what this meant was not spelled out in meaningful detail. The government said that the Voice would ‘give independent advice to the Parliament and Government’. It would not be an executive body with any decision-making authority, and it would not wield veto power. Beyond that, and broad design principles based on standard equality, diversity and inclusion thinking, no detail was provided – it would be left to parliament to determine. It was not even clear that this required a constitutional amendment; arguably, ordinary legislation would have sufficed. But Albanese chose to call a referendum to signal public recognition of indigenous people and lock-in changes that future governments would be unable to reverse. Yet this led to months of campaigning wherein the Yes campaign turned a political issue into a moral question.
Here is where the parallels with Brexit emerge. During the EU referendum, Remain campaigners were unable to make a positive case for European Union membership, and so instead campaigned using fear and moralism. Leaving the EU, they said, would entail economic, social and political disaster, and only morons and racists could possibly support it. After the vote, they denounced Leave voters as dupes of disinformation, or as racists. The Yes campaign differed in that it was arguing for change, not the status quo, and so offered a more hopeful narrative, of an Australia capable of coming to terms with its colonial, racist past and finally making amends. Nonetheless, when confronted with counter-arguments, they swiftly duplicated the Remainers’ moralistic approach.
A fundamental contradiction of the Yes campaign was that they downplayed the political significance of creating a Voice – it was only about institutionalising a space for indigenous people to express their views to parliament, nothing more – whilst simultaneously claiming that this meagre institutional change would somehow radically transform the socio-economic plight of Aboriginal communities. While radical supporters of the Voice claimed it was merely a first step to a treaty between the ‘First Nations’ and the Australian state, which would entail further-reaching changes, Albanese and his allies resolutely denied this. As writers for The Guardian insisted in a broadside against ‘misinformation’: ‘The voice cannot force a treaty as it has no power over parliament’ (emphasis added). Similar confusion abounded over the question of veto power: Albanese insisted the Voice would have no such ability, yet also insisted that it would take a ‘very brave’ government to reject its ‘advice’.
This never made sense to many Aussies, and it contributed to a divide among indigenous citizens themselves, with those on the left denouncing the proposals as inadequate and those on the right, as unnecessary. This was particularly awkward for Yes campaigners, who effectively just told those indigenous voices to shut up, while the No campaign was swiftly characterised as relying on ‘base racism’ or ‘sheer stupidity’.
In fact, while a minority of voters probably were motivated by racism, or believed No campaign scaremongering, or were simply indifferent, there were also several good reasons to vote No. The government undoubtedly treated citizens with contempt by failing to clarify what the Voice would actually mean in practice – by, for example, drafting legislation in advance. At a time when trust in politicians is at record lows, it was naïve to believe that Australians would vote simply to write them a blank cheque. At the very least, it gave opponents space to make all kinds of claims about what the Voice would mean, swiftly eroding a substantial majority of in-principle public support, according to initial polls. Equally, many voters objected to institutionalising racial difference in the constitution, a position that is perfectly compatible with deep concern for the plight of indigenous peoples. Undoubtedly Australia is racially divided, but how would constitutionalising this division lead to ‘unity’ as, Yes campaigners alleged?
The Yes campaign really had no answer to any of these objections and so, much like Remainers, they quickly transformed a political debate into a litmus test of morality: are you a virtuous, progressive, upstanding individual (in which case vote Yes), or a racist ‘dinosaur or a dickhead who can’t be bothered reading’ – as one celebrity put it (the only possible explanation for voting No)? Would Australians be revealed as ‘measured, generous people’ or ‘a frightened, resentful people’ governed by a ‘deep well of racism’? Yes campaigners warned that if No triumphed, this would be ‘Australia’s Brexit moment’ – the country would be revealed as a racist backwater, becoming an international laughing stock, just like Brexit Britain.
With No’s victory, Australia is indeed having its Brexit moment: just like Remainer elites, Yes campaigners are suffering a collective nervous breakdown, denouncing their compatriots as prejudiced knuckle-draggers. Much as Laurie Penny diagnosed the defeat as a triumph of Britons’ racist ‘lizard brain’, Australian professor Thomas Klikauer denounces the ‘stupidity, indifference, and ignorance [which] allowed many Australians to release their monster that has been slumbering deep in the soul of non-Indigenous Australians for over 200 years: racism.’ It was ‘risky to put faith in the Australian people’, an Australian Guardian editor agreed, since their voting was ‘vitriolic, mean-spirited, full of misinformation, driven by racism, petty grievances and conspiracy theories based on fear and ignorance’. Whatever reasons No voters gave to explain their decision were dismissed as a smokescreen for ‘racial prejudice’.
Inevitably, claims that voters were, if not racist, so stupid that they were duped by the No campaign and media ‘disinformation’ – undoubtedly a factor, but by no means able to explain 60 percent opposition – shade into conspiratorial attempts to blame outside forces. ‘Lies fuel racism’ was one BBC headline. ABC journalist Linton Besser, claiming that Brexit was produced by ‘a sludge of disinformation’ and ‘Russian deception campaigns’, argued (without irony) that ‘white Australia’ had also been misled by ‘peddlers of conspiracy and mistruths’. Russia, inevitably, was blamed, with a ‘Pro-Putin conspiracy theorist’ leading No rallies and a former Twitter executive – backed by academics – claiming Elon Musk’s takeover had left the Voice referendum a ‘prime target’. Others blamed ‘Neo-Nazis, white supremacists and anti-Semitic trolls’ plus, inevitably, ‘sponsored disinformation from China’.
Absent is any serious reflection on why the Yes campaign failed to carry the public with them, outside of the elite enclaves of Canberra and inner-city Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane – the only electoral districts to return positive majorities. Just as with Brexit, Yes supporters are pointing to evidence that people with university degrees voted Yes, while less-educated people voted No, to ‘prove’ their point that ‘stupidity’ is to blame. Or to evidence that Sky TV viewers tended to vote No, ‘proving’ that ‘stupid’ voters were duped by Murdoch empire disinformation. As with Brexit, there is no wish to examine why the vote was so starkly class-correlated – surely relevant amid a brutal cost of living crisis, which a large majority feels should be the government’s real priority – nor what this reveals about the disconnection between working-class citizens and their supposed political representatives.
There are limits to the Brexit analogy, the principal one being that, while the EU referendum mobilised an unprecedented number of voters into a highly contested electoral event, partly because it was called in response to mass discontent from below, most Aussies really couldn’t care less about the Voice. When polled last month, just 15 percent agreed with Albanese that it should be the federal government’s top priority. This means that, unlike the cold civil war that erupted over Brexit, the issue is unlikely to grip the body politic for very long. Without Australia’s authoritarian compulsory voting rules, turnout would have been tiny, perhaps 20 to 30 percent. Yes would probably have won under these circumstances, given the fervour of its activism – though presumably committed No campaigners would also have fought harder. But it is telling that Yes could probably only have triumphed under conditions of mass political disengagement.
Australia is rightly said to be immune from many of the dynamics accompanying the ‘end of the end of history’ in other Western countries. Nonetheless, the Voice referendum illustrates that it shares with them a core political condition: a yawning political void between rulers and ruled, and the limits and decay of the political nation. A deracinated liberal elite called the referendum. Despite claiming to represent the Australian people, they could not persuade citizens to follow them on political grounds, resorting almost immediately to moralistic appeals and condemnations. Shocked and appalled by the revolt of the people, the rulers now revolt against them, vowing to implement the Uluru Statement anyway while academics dismiss voters as inadequates who had ‘failed the test’.
At heart, the Voice fiasco reflects the failure to build a true Australian nation. Successive Australian governments have fundamentally failed to integrate indigenous peoples into the nation, and today’s rulers still lack any real idea of how to do so. They have never done anything adequate to address the legacies of violent colonisation and subjugation, which have left Aboriginal communities bereft and marginalised, often living in third-world conditions in a first-world state. Successive governments of both main parties have oscillated between, on the one hand, continuously missed targets on ‘closing the gap’ in outcomes between indigenous and non-indigenous groups, coupled with virtue-signalling acknowledgements of traditional land-holders and so on, and, on the other, incredibly coercive policies ranging from the child-snatching of the ‘stolen generation’ (affecting some 10 to 33 percent of Aboriginal children) to emergency rule in the Northern Territories, resulting in forcible sequestration of land and welfare payments and blanket bans on alcohol and pornography.
Still, today, over half of indigenous Australians remain out of work, versus less than a quarter for non-indigenous people. Nearly half of indigenous people are in the most disadvantaged fifth of the population. Their share of the prison population has doubled since 1991 to 28 percent – when indigenous people comprise just 3.4 percent of the population, that’s an incarceration rate 12 times higher than for non-indigenous people, or 22 times for youth. The life expectancy gap is over 8 years, and has not narrowed since 2006. Physical health gaps remain wide, and mental health gaps are increasing. The idea that the proposed indigenous Voice would have fundamentally changed any of this strains credulity. The Yes campaign’s retort – ‘if not this, then what?’ – only betrayed their lack of substantive proposals to transform indigenous lives.
Just as problematic is many Australians’ collective shrug of indifference to the Voice. This attitude was perhaps especially acute among more recent generations of immigrants, who are even more remote from the evils of colonialism and fail to see why indigenous people deserve what they see as ‘special treatment’. Contrast this to 1967, when the Australian government persuaded 91 percent of voters to amend the constitution to empower the federal government to start legislating to benefit indigenous citizens. That outcome owed much to sustained indigenous activism, but it also reflected a more cohesive nation: one willing to take greater responsibility for its ills, and where citizens felt sufficiently represented by their elected leaders that they were willing to follow their direction – as with Britain’s European Economic Community referendum in 1973.
So yes, Australia is having its Brexit moment – just not in the way that Yes campaigners think. At the heart of both the EU and the Voice referendum outcomes was the decay of the nation and of political representation. If Australian liberals do nothing but recoil from their fellow citizens, they can only hope to rule over a widening void.
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