Why the ‘No’ to the Voice campaign is gaining traction
Supporters of the Voice to parliament plan want it out of the Canberra’s hot-house partisan environment and into the hands of voters.
Tom McIlroy Political correspondent 16 June 2023 Australian Financial Review
After they helped write the Australian Constitution at the end of the 19th century, Sir John Quick and Sir Robert Garran sought to make sure future generations understood the powerful in-built safeguards that would allow the document to be changed only in the most precise set of circumstances.
Referendums, which would require a difficult double majority of both states and voters, were envisaged in order “to prevent change being made in haste or by stealth”.
The fathers of Federation wanted national popular votes “to encourage public discussion and to delay change until there is strong evidence that it is desirable, irresistible and inevitable”.
Such is the historic hurdle facing Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and other supporters of the Indigenous Voice to parliament – a proposal which, some five months out from judgment day, appears to be struggling to gain traction with the public.
A new round of public opinion polls this week showed support for the creation of the Indigenous advisory body to the federal government and parliament is now below 50 per cent.
The Resolve Strategic poll on Tuesday showed support for the Voice dropping from 53 to 49 per cent, and with the Yes vote below 50 per cent in Queensland, Western Australia and South Australia.
With the bill expected to become law within days, a step that will send voters to the polls sometime around mid-October, there’s growing urgency to get to the bottom of the issues surrounding the Voice.
The Yes campaigners say there’s a standout challenge in the months ahead. Asking Australians to consider a change to complex policymaking processes in government departments in Canberra at the same time as they are struggling to pay rising electricity bills or put food on the table is a tough ask, Yes supporters told AFR Weekend.
The Reserve Bank of Australia raised interest rates again this month and The Australian Financial Review revealed this week that electricity tariff increases of up to 51 per cent are set to hit some households this winter.
Yes campaigners also assert that they are being undermined by viral emails warning undecided voters that a Voice to parliament would turbocharge land rights disputes and even result in suburban homeowners being evicted from their property.
Added to that, posts claiming responsibility for rates of welfare payment would be handed to Indigenous activists have surfaced on social media, they say.
Known as “dark” campaigning, the tactics are causing concern about the extent of mis- and disinformation in the Voice campaign. Some of the leading No campaigners include main Voice opposition group Recognise a Better Way and conservative political groups such as Advance. That group –Advance – did not respond to requests for an interview.
Indigenous Australians Minister Linda Burney has likened some of the “No” campaigning to tactics used by former US president Donald Trump and his supporters.
“At its heart is a post-truth approach to politics,” she told a Committee for Economic Development of Australia event in Canberra. “Its aim is to polarise people. And its weapon of choice is misinformation.”
Burney – who remains optimistic that the Voice will succeed – hit out at Fair Australia, part of the No campaign, for regular social media posts that she said were clearly false or taken out of context.
“The No campaign uses an image and a quote of Bob Hawke on social media, as if to suggest that the former PM didn’t support recognition of Indigenous Australians,” she said. “We know that Bob Hawke strongly supported recognition.”
Pressure on the Yes campaign has been building since January, when opinion polls started to shift about the same time that Opposition Leader Peter Dutton started raising doubts about the Voice model and demanding “details” from Labor on a yet-to-be-finalised plan for better consultation.
This week, the Opposition hardened its stance, calling on the government to drop the Voice and instead seek support only for symbolic recognition of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders in the Constitution.
And the Yes campaign suffered a significant blow this week when Indigenous leader Noel Pearson said that the Yes case is flagging and needs a rethink.
Pearson told The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age that the Yes campaign should shift its attention to explaining the need to recognise Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders in the Constitution, and was being “snookered” by arguments from conservative critics of the plan.
The Yes campaign is now preparing to ramp up its advertising and public events from early next month, once the debate is completed in parliament and the Prime Minister has named a date for the referendum.
Buoyed by an Essential poll putting national support for the Voice at 60 per cent this week, they will focus on states including South Australia and Western Australia, trying to bring them back into the Yes column. While NSW, Victoria and Tasmania show positive support, four of the six states need to vote Yes. Labor figures say privately Queensland will vote No.
Campaign director for Yes23 Dean Parkin says that thousands of people had already signed up for a series of community events planned for July 2, which will include concerts, stalls, information sessions, picnics and speeches to support the Voice.
“The events are called Come Together for Yes because that is exactly what this referendum is about,” he says. “This is a unifying moment for Australia to connect with 65,000 years of Indigenous culture and deliver constitutional recognition that is well overdue.”
Once this process gets away from Canberra, then I think it’s game on. I think Australians will buy into empowering First Nations people.
— Roy Ah-see, Uluru Dialogue leader
For its part, Recognise A Better Way has lost no time alerting its members to the state of the polls, pointing out that when they launched, support was as high as 65 per cent in some polls. The group is fundraising and will hold a seminar in Melbourne on June 27, at a secret location being revealed only to supporters.
The Prime Minister told ABC radio on Thursday he was confident Australians would support the Voice, rejecting claims it would hand an unfair advantage to Indigenous people.
“This is the most disadvantaged group in our community and the idea that they have special privileges when you are more likely, as a young Indigenous person, to go to jail than to go to university, I think says it all.
“What Indigenous people are asking for is simply for people to walk together in a more united way to reconcile ourselves with the fullness and richness of our history. If we do that, we will all be better off.”
Original article here