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The last time a No campaign told us \u201cif you don\u2019t know, vote no\u201d, it didn\u2019t work. It was a key slogan of the effort to kill the same-sex marriage plebiscite in 2017. And it failed because we did know.<\/p>\n
Specifically, we knew gay people. Just about everyone was related to, neighbour to, or friend of a gay person.<\/p>\n
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We did indeed. <\/span>Credit: <\/span>Alex Ellinghausen<\/cite><\/p>\n So the scare tactics fell flat. Few believed Liberal senator Bronwyn Bishop\u2019s provocation that if we legalised gay marriage, \u201cwhy not polygamy?\u201d Or Liberal senator Cory Bernardi claiming that the \u201cnext step\u201d could be legalised bestiality. Or the posters warning that gay marriage would lead to more child abuse.<\/p>\n Australians knew gay people and they weren\u2019t afraid. We voted in favour of legal same-sex marriage by an emphatic 61.6 per cent to 38.4.<\/p>\n But, this time, the scare tactics are working. Some of it is sheer nonsense. Like the claim that an Indigenous Voice would force everyone to pay the local Aboriginal tribe to visit the beach.<\/p>\n The source? Pauline Hanson. Claiming she\u2019s uncovered the secret agenda, she produced an 11-point agenda for the Voice. Hanson told the Senate that point six required \u201call beaches and national parks to be the property of the relevant tribe\u201d and \u201cnon-First Nations people to be charged\u201d to visit.<\/p>\n Illustration: Jim Pavlidis. <\/span>Credit: <\/span> <\/cite><\/p>\n And the provenance of this letter? Supposedly, it had been left behind in a cafe, and sent to her by persons unknown, according to Hanson. Sounds authoritative, right? Yet this has fuelled a baseless whispering campaign on so-called social media.<\/p>\n Other scare tactics are based in reality. Perhaps the most effective has been the \u201cpay the rent\u201d line spoken by leading Voice campaigner Thomas Mayo, a member of the Albanese government\u2019s Referendum Working Group and a signatory to the Uluru Statement from the Heart. Mayo really did say in a 2020 speech: \u201c\u2018Pay the Rent\u2019 for example, how do we do that in a way that is transparent and that actually sees reparations and compensation to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people?\u201d<\/p>\n Anthony Albanese has always rejected any notion of reparations of any kind. Did Mayo slip up and reveal a hidden agenda? The No campaign has circulated his words far and wide to fuel fear.<\/p>\n \u201cThose comments were taken from well before there were negotiations on the wording\u201d of the proposed constitutional amendment, Mayo tells me. \u201cThere\u2019s been a lot of politics and a lot of work since. It\u2019s important to underline that the Voice would be an advisory committee \u2013 any decisions still have to be decisions of the parliament and the government and it\u2019s not up to Indigenous people to decide.\u201d<\/p>\n Voice campaigner Thomas Mayo has become a lightning rod for the No campaign.<\/span>Credit: <\/span>Peter Rae<\/cite><\/p>\n I asked him: Does he want reparations paid? \u201cNo I don\u2019t,\u201d replied the Maritime Union of Australia official. \u201cI will concentrate on health, education, employment, on clean water, on infrastructure so you can get the kids to school without busting a tyre every three months. That\u2019s my vision.\u201d<\/p>\n And the No campaign\u2019s use of his 2020 remarks? \u201cI think most Australians can see it\u2019s just a scare campaign.\u201d Yet he knows its effectiveness from first-hand experience. He was at some markets in the Hunter Valley recently and overheard a man quoting his \u201cpay the rent\u201d line.<\/p>\n \u201cI introduced myself and we ended up having quite a good yarn, actually.\u201d Mayo thinks he might have converted the man into a Yes voter. \u201cI\u2019m not that sort of big scary black man that people make me out to be. I pointed out the actual words [proposed in the referendum] and that it\u2019d just be an advisory body.\u201d<\/p>\n Australia\u2019s Indigenous population is about 3 per cent of the total. You might think 3 per cent and an advisory committee is a pretty flimsy basis for a secret black takeover of Australia\u2019s beaches and backyards. But it\u2019s proved to be enough to fuel a powerful scare campaign.<\/p>\n A leader of the Yes campaign says that \u201cfear is absolutely underpinning\u201d the success of the No movement. Another Yes strategist, asked for evidence that voters have been frightened into No, said: \u201cIt\u2019s written all over the opinion polls, mate.\u201d<\/p>\n Every published poll is flagging failure for the Voice. And the specific evidence of fear-based voting has turned up in the campaign focus groups. The Yes strategist says that this is not chiefly a racist reflex: \u201cThere are a lot of people who don\u2019t know enough about the referendum, they don\u2019t know enough about the constitution, they don\u2019t believe there is Aboriginal disadvantage and they hear something about the Voice and they just go, \u2018Nah\u2019. It\u2019s not racism, it\u2019s indifference.\u201d<\/p>\n And the \u201csomething\u201d leading to \u201cNah\u201d is quite likely a scare tactic or simply Peter Dutton\u2019s slogan appeal to voter hesitation and suspicion: \u201cIf you don\u2019t know, vote no.\u201d Because most of us don\u2019t know Indigenous Australians.<\/p>\n Which was exactly anticipated by Voice architect Noel Pearson last year: \u201cWe are a much unloved people,\u201d he said in his Boyer lectures. \u201cWe are perhaps the ethnic group Australians feel least connected to. We are not popular and we are not personally known to many Australians. Few have met us and a small minority count us as friends.<\/p>\n \u201cUnlike same-sex marriage there is not the requisite empathy of love to break through the prejudice, contempt and, yes, violence of the past. Australians simply do not have Aboriginal people within their circles of family and friendship with whom they can share fellow feeling.\u201d<\/p>\n According to Pearson, \u201cAustralians hold and express strong views about us, the great proportion of which is negative and unfriendly. It has ever been thus, worse in the past but still true today.\u201d<\/p>\n Is it still true? Pretty much, it seems. Three-quarters of Australians carry an \u201cimplicit bias\u201d against Indigenous Australians, according to ANU research from 2020 based on a 10-year sampling of 11,000 people.<\/p>\n The study, claiming to be the first of its kind, \u201cpresents stark evidence of the solid invisible barrier that Indigenous people face in society\u201d, said its author, Siddharth Shirodkar. \u201cBut the data is actually not about Indigenous Australians, it\u2019s about the rest of us.\u201d It says that we\u2019re largely unconscious of our own \u201cimplicit\u201d bias.<\/p>\n So if Pearson is right, we don\u2019t know Indigenous Australians, and we don\u2019t much like them. How can this be? It only makes sense if we\u2019re simply living with echoes of long-ago attitudes, fears and prejudices undisturbed by actual acquaintance with our First Peoples. This would help explain the appeal of \u201cdon\u2019t know, vote no\u201d in the Voice campaign.<\/p>\n The comparison with the same-sex marriage vote only goes so far. That was merely a survey, not a referendum. And the legalisation of gay marriage required only an act of parliament, not an amendment to the Constitution. So inserting the Voice into the Constitution always was going to be more difficult.<\/p>\n Yet, knowing all this, Pearson, probably the most influential of the Voice activists, persuaded Albanese to launch the high-wire act which is now falling to earth. If the polls are accurate forecasters and the Voice does indeed fail, there will be plenty of remorse and recrimination to go around.<\/p>\n A one-time secretary of Australia\u2019s Department of Foreign Affairs, Alan Renouf, wrote a 1979 book titled The Frightened Country<\/em>. He spoke of an \u201cunreasoning fearfulness\u201d in the national consciousness, an anxiety about Australia\u2019s existence to the south of Asia, far from its colonial moorings.<\/p>\n Do we suffer a corresponding anxiety in our unreconciled relationship with Australia\u2019s First Peoples? Might this help explain how the prospect of 3 per cent of the population, armed with nothing more than an advisory body, could manage to stir fears of an Indigenous land grab?<\/p>\n In a late effort to soothe fear, a former chief justice of the High Court took to the National Press Club podium on Friday. Robert French repeated his opinion of months ago that the Voice proposal is constitutionally sound and legally safe. That all of its activities and advice would be subject to parliamentary supremacy. In short, that it\u2019s nothing to fear.<\/p>\n French contrasted the boldness of Australia\u2019s constitutional founders with the small-mindedness of today\u2019s fearmongers. He quoted one of the founders, Samuel Griffith, the Queensland Premier at the time, at the drafting of the constitution in 1891: \u201cThere will be timid men who are afraid of launching into something new \u2013 but whenever was a great thing achieved without risking something?\u201d<\/p>\n French observed: \u201cCompare the words of those indomitable spirits who drafted a durable national Constitution to the battle cry, \u2018If you don\u2019t know, vote No\u2019 \u2013 a slogan offered as an answer to a straightforward, although profoundly important, proposal. The Australian spirit evoked by the \u2018don\u2019t know\u2019 slogan is a poor shadow of the spirit which drew up our Constitution. It invites us to a resentful, uninquiring passivity. Australians \u2013 whether they vote Yes or No \u2013 are better than that.\u201d<\/p>\n But are we? Or are we merely a frightened country, uneasy about our legitimacy, unreconciled to our First Peoples, frightened of the future? The moment of truth is almost upon us.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
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