The poor civics literacy that acutely affected the voice referendum is never more on display these days than in the persistent and pernicious narrative of some that the no vote in the 2023 referendum has blanket application across all Indigenous law and policy reform, across the federation, forever more.
I find this revisionism of how voting sentiment works deeply concerning for Australian democracy but especially for First Nations communities. If voting sentiment for one specific proposition has blanket application to all future non-related or tangential things, what’s the point of voting? It makes a mockery of policy development, trivialises professional political parties and their election platforms if a no in 2023 applies to every jurisdiction and every level of government.
A recent example is the suggestion that New South Wales premier Chris Minns’ commitment to a treaty process, with the appointment of three treaty commissioners, undermines the self-determination of the Australian people who voted no at a federal referendum.
The Australian people did not vote no to the appointment of NSW treaty commissioners or to a treaty. This is very clear in the question put to the Australian people at the referendum. The question was:
“A Proposed Law: to alter the Constitution to recognise the First Peoples of Australia by establishing an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice. Do you approve this proposed alteration?”
Minns took treaty as a policy to a state election and won that election. That seems to me a straightforward application of election policy and democratic governance. It is unclear why certain proponents are advocating no progress and positing that decisions to advance Indigenous peoples rights should not be made because the 2023 vote has blanket application regardless of subject matter and nuance.
This raises an important point about the role of misinformation and the integrity of our democracy. It is difficult to find another referendum, or even an ordinary election example, whereby the question put to the Australian people is regarded as a conclusion forever more to any more advancement or discussion on a major public policy area. The republic movement lost at referendum to an even greater degree than the voice but there is no public discourse as to its evisceration from Australian aspirations for future structural change. Indeed no one said to the Australians that voted yes to a republic that they can never aspire to, or talk about, a republic again.
Similarly, the failed four-year-term referendum has not deterred an Anthony Albanese, Peter Dutton unity ticket for increasing the length of time between federal elections. The ink was barely dry on the 2023 ballot before these two politicians were effortlessly espousing sparkling new bipartisanship for more time in office. Where was that cooperative fervour when it came to First Nations futures?
The problem of extending the failed voice constitutional amendment to outlawing acknowledgments of country, welcomes to country, representative bodies or advisory groups, or truth-telling or agreement making is that it’s such an extreme proposition that it’s plain to see it’s disingenuous. It’s more about an assimilation agenda: the erosion of culture, cultural rights and the denial of difference. There is no other explanation because no other political issue is regarded as defunct because a single attempt at reform failed. After all, failure is incontrovertibly a normal part of the political cycle.
Welcome to country and acknowledgments of country are not going away. Those rituals of local respect and engagement that matter in regard to how we live together and coexist can’t be dictated by those who seek to deracinate Aboriginal culture. I have read that some local councils have disavowed reconciliation and Aboriginal flags and welcome to country. I have read and heard media that quarrel with the antecedents of dispossession after the no vote, query native title claims as questionable after no. That’s three decades of parliamentary debate and negotiation, determinations and court litigation and jurisprudence. How is native title suddenly disrupted by no? Such a suggestion displays a complete and utter disregard for the rule of law in Australia, contempt for the parliament and profound ignorance of the common law.
The extension of a referendum question to reject and dismantle all things Indigenous is not poor civics. It is deliberate. We know from post-referendum research that there was so much noise that most Australians still don’t know about the Uluru statement from the heart, they did not know about the deliberative dialogues and did not know the voice came from community, not politicians. The idea of the voice from politicians was one of those pieces of misinformation that allowed the no campaign to manufacture the sentiment that the reform was driven by “elites”, a slippery term that permits actual economic elites to feign alliance with the common folk.
But the reality is it came from our people. We have a long tradition of seeking a voice in Australian democracy. Clare Wright points this out in her latest history of the Yirrkala Bark Petitions, regarded as one of the founding documents of Australian democracy. It called for a voice. This is not new. It is an old and ongoing aspiration. We have struggled for that voice since the colonial period. And that’s not the same as participation in parliament as a politician with a primary allegiance to a party and ideology.
The no vote is contained to that proposal, on that fateful day, one year ago put to the Australian people alive in 2023.
That day does not define Aboriginal policy forever more. I have not been able to read his words until now – the memory of his speech and that time is far too painful – but the prime minister put it best that night, “this moment of disagreement does not define us.” Albanese said he wanted us to be ambitious for our country and to be the very best version of ourselves. And so did the men and women of the Uluru statement from the heart.
In offering that olive branch to all Australians that day on 27 May 2017, they knew that the Uluru statement and the recognition of our rightful place in Australian democracy by the Australian people is an Australia innovation whose time will come.