Opposition Leader Peter Dutton and Prime Minister Anthony Albanese (Image: AAP/Lukas Coch)
Opposition Leader Peter Dutton and Prime Minister Anthony Albanese (Image: AAP/Lukas Coch)

Courtesy of century-old laws about the way referendums should be conducted, taxpayers will fund the distribution to every household of an offensive lie from No campaigners to the tune of $10 million.

The No campaign pamphlet published this morning by the Australian Electoral Commission — prepared by No campaigners, not the AEC — is a poorly cobbled-together set of vague warnings that something bad might happen as a result of the Voice. They just can’t really tell you what.

That’s understandable; no specific harm can be linked to giving First Nations peoples a direct, foundational input to policymaking at the centre of where policy is made: Parliament. The only thing No campaigners can do is tell non-Indigenous Australians that they should feel aggrieved.

The pamphlet, which will make its way to every letterbox in the country, also contains some outright ridiculous statements. “This would be the biggest change to our democracy in Australia’s history,” it avers, ignoring, say, the Commonwealth social security power, or the 1967 referendum.

In a section trying to whip up fear about “what comes next”, it states, “by definition, a treaty is an agreement between governments, not between one group of citizens and its government”, a definition that might come as a surprise to New Zealanders, Americans and Canadians — who all have treaties with Indigenous groups (nearly a dozen in the case of Canada). It’s also an odd thing to say in a country that is a federation, in which allegedly indivisible sovereignty is divvied up between state and territory governments and the federal government.

That absurd “definition” also seeks to limit Australians’ ability to change their constitution. If Australians want to have a treaty with Indigenous peoples, or anyone else, they can do exactly that.

But the most offensive, egregious lie is that a Voice to Parliament would divide Australians. “All Australians are equal before the law,” the No campaigners insist, in total defiance of the reality of the vast overrepresentation of Indigenous peoples in the criminal justice system. “Enshrining in our constitution a body for only one group of Australians means permanently dividing Australians.”

This is a blatant restatement of the lie of terra nullius, which has been legally discredited for three decades. Indigenous peoples are not “one group of Australians”, like any other minority. They are this land’s First Peoples, separate and distinct from every other Australian by virtue of prior ownership of this continent, and their subsequent dispossession, attempted genocide and oppression. To demean Indigenous peoples as simply another minority group being unfairly elevated is to maintain the racist lie that they didn’t exist before white invasion.

“Our constitution belongs to all Australians,” says the No campaign. Patently, it does not. It is the constitution of white Australia, created by the British and colonial administrators, a document confirming dispossession and subjecting Indigenous peoples to second-class status in their own land.

The egregiously offensive lie of terra nullius — a legal vehicle of genocide and theft — is thus being sent to every home in the country, including to the homes of First Peoples, a gratuitous insult from a far-right campaign that can only conjure up maybe, ifs and coulds to scare the disengaged and ill-informed into the most basic act of Indigenous recognition.

And we taxpayers are coughing up for the privilege.