(Image: Zennie/Private Media)

Say this for the right’s perfidious No campaign: it’s as clever as it is slippery and dangerous. 

For several months, its cadre of right-wing fabulists and fellow travellers has painted an ominous portrait of the Voice: one shaded in hysterical lies and the paradigmatic colours of Frankfurt-like “bullshit”, but also one that skilfully conceals the extent to which the right’s screeds against the Voice wink at and sanitise a version of the “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory. 

The regnant consensus underlying this racist theory — variations of which have gradually migrated from the fringe to the mainstream in many countries, including the United States — broadly turns on a premonition that a secret or sinister force, acting through a network of left-wing elites, is promoting policies that will herald the end of life as we know it, and ultimately strip white people of their sovereign power. 

Ordinarily these policies are identified as those which encourage non-white immigration or increase racial diversity. Here, by contrast, the geyser of discontent is confined, at least on appearances, to the Voice. But presumably because replacement theory is so unhinged, so weighted in a sea of unreality and what would otherwise pass for edgelording, the No campaign rarely draws on the language of replacement in explicit, unvarnished terms. 

Instead it speaks of democracy giving way to what Opposition Leader Peter Dutton calls a dark “Orwellian” future in which “we’re all equal but”, worryingly, some “more than others”. It summons in his view an unravelling world of “wokeness” gone mad; a country that threatens to permanently teem with racial division and rank unfairness as it remains forever shackled to the whims of a group of vindictive or corrupt Indigenous “elites”. A spectre, in other words, which strikes at, rather than enhances, the egalitarian ideals that supposedly give expression to our national character. 

Others, chief among them former prime minister Tony Abbott, have consciously amplified this incendiary rhetoric, telling Australians the Voice conceals what is in truth an unashamed “power grab” on the part of Indigenous peoples or the “4%”, as he so often calls them. The proposal is a “Trojan horse”, he says, whose true purpose is to snatch “sovereign power of the future direction of the country” and repose it in the hands of a few at the expense of those whose “ancestry in this country dates only from 1788“. 

It’s in such ways the right borrows from the poisonous canon of the Great Replacement. The scourge of racism, in these fever dreams, is never erased. On the contrary, it’s instead identified as something which manifests as a form of reverse discrimination against white people — the “true victims”, the right would have you believe, of the hectoring wokeness of today. Each and every iteration of replacement theory is grounded in some variation of this apocalyptic sensibility, and here it’s no different. 

Underlying the right’s moral indignation against the Voice, if we’re to take it seriously, is an irrational, self-implicating fear Indigenous peoples will use the constitutional change to exact revenge for the dark chapters of Australian history. Hence those deranged mutterings of many in The Australian and on Sky News, who lament the Voice as an existential force that beckons a chancy and destructive form of “co-government” wholly inconsonant with our way of life. And those endless lies that the Voice will afford First Nations peoples a “special say” over everything and everyone, inevitably paving the way for reparations, higher taxes, the demise of private land ownership and even a “Black state” carved out of the Northern Territory. 

It’s true a long lineage of conservative thought stretching from the heyday of John Howard predates this racist fearmongering, as La Trobe University’s Dominic Kelly so neatly enumerated in Crikey yesterday. Yet what’s clever about this latest rendition of white proselytising is that it explicitly smuggles and monopolises the universalism of liberal values into its toxic blend of shitposting and disinformation, making equality the rallying cry from which it denies the legitimacy of the Voice proposal. 

The reason the right draws on equality and unity as its basic organising principles is, of course, obvious: to broaden the appeal of its opposition to the Voice. It achieves this, on the one hand, by lending a veneer of disarming reasonableness and pseudo-erudition to the disdain with which it holds the discrete rights of Indigenous peoples as First Nations peoples under international law (the true and uncontroversial basis of the Voice proposal that the right, unsurprisingly, never mentions). And, on the other, by distracting attention from the lived experience of those rolling tides of injustice — be it overt racism, poverty, medical discrimination or incarceration — that continue to animate the lives of First Nations peoples in this country. 

It’s done so in a nod to the good conscience of Australians, most of whom when confronted with the sobering realities of such deep-seated inequality discern in them a source of national shame. The same sentiment presumably explains why it was the Voice, until recent months, commanded such strong support across the nation. 

The same explicates the perceived need, in the eyes of the right, to irrevocably twist and refashion the Voice proposal into something perverse and dangerous — something which, so it claims, will “reracialise” the country. After all, how else, one might ask, to rally otherwise well-meaning Australians who are repelled by racism to its cause? How else to deflect public attention from the ugly racism inherent on the right which, courtesy of such deceptive tactics, disappears into its quicksand of deceit and rhetorical savvy every time someone dares to point out its existence. 

All of which brings to the fore Jacinta Nampijinpa Price’s striking foray into historical denialism last week. The content of the senator’s National Press Club speech, as Kelly emphasised, wasn’t novel to anyone versed in the history of racism that’s long characterised the right. In fact, the speech was given precisely a week after Abbott, writing in The Australian, declared the notion of intergenerational trauma arising from colonisation a “neo-Marxist fiction” which “permeates the full Uluru Statement”, and less than a couple of months after Howard described British colonisation as the “luckiest thing” to have happened to Australia. 

What conversely lends Price’s speech a sense of the singular is the fact of her status as one of the most prominent Indigenous persons in the country and the brazenness with which she falsely and flatly denied the ongoing consequences of colonisation on First Nations people and invoked the language of assimilation. 

By using the sober rhetoric of unity and equality to attack and dismantle the logic of public investment in Indigenous affairs, she arguably exposed the ideological gameplan of the right’s opposition to the Voice for what it is: little more than a Trojan horse to reintroduce assimilation thinking into mainstream thought. 

On one level, the dangers carried by this strategy are obvious, weaponising as it does zhuzhed-up opposition to any policy that by design reduces and recognises the fact of Indigenous disadvantage. We see this already in the right’s rising angst around Welcome to Country ceremonies; the suggestion that Indigenous people ought to be blood-tested for welfare and jobs; its lies about “vast” and wasteful Indigenous expenditure; its opposition to treaties and truth-telling; and, not least, in its crusade to dehumanise First Nations peoples, as the unconcealed racism of its recent CPAC Australia conference attests.  

Taken to its logical conclusion, however, the endpoint of assimilation heralds something altogether more dangerous, and that is the resurrection of eugenics-inspired thinking. For if we’re seriously to believe Indigenous disadvantage owes nothing to colonisation, that it flows in no way from past and present oppression, then it follows — on the right’s warped thinking — that its genesis must lie wholly or partly in inherent or biological inferiorities of some kind. 

If that seems decidedly far-fetched or inconceivable, you need only look to the US, where the trappings of this pseudoscientific racism not only find reflection in the manifestos of white supremacist mass shooters, but are enjoying a renaissance among a swathe of young, mainstream conservatives. 

Indeed, perhaps a return to assimilation has always been the game plan of Australia’s right. After all, it certainly cast the Coalition’s decades-long history wars and opposition to truth-telling in a new light. If young people are unaware of the fact of dispossession and its ongoing realities, it’s easier to persuade them as voters later in life racial discrimination is a myth. 

And so Price’s comments are possibly more an omen than an outlier of what conceivably awaits the country when the Coalition one day returns to power. This is especially so in light of Price’s comments last night, where she described herself as the (self-appointed) “vessel” for Indigenous peoples. 

The unflinching truth is the right, or at least the far right, has always been opposed to policies and measures that seek to level the playing field between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people in any way. It offends its twisted worldview of the natural order of things, which has as its apex white supremacy in all its truculent power. The allure of replacement theory to the right here stems from its insistence that any realignment of this worldview in favour of Indigenous people is necessarily threatening and must be extinguished. 

The problem confronting the country today lies in the force of the right’s poisonous rhetoric, which — if left unchallenged — could become the dominant story of our times, where the referendum’s defeat is taken, as Professor Marcia Langton has suggested, as a mandate to roll back Indigenous investment. 

It’s no exaggeration, in other words, to suggest the referendum heralds a rendezvous with history. The cultural winds are blowing, but perhaps in a direction few could have possibly foreseen before the campaign.