The Voice promises more efficient government, but try telling the No camp that

One of the more complex contradictions in the No campaign against the Voice to Parliament relates to how it views government. Sure, it is made up of disparate viewpoints, but they nearly all come from the conservative, or right-wing, side of politics — though there are plenty of conservatives, and even a few right-wingers, who are Yes supporters.

But given that, you’d expect the No camp would be supportive of anything that either reduces the power of government, or improves its efficiency.

In the view of the No camp, the Voice to Parliament is certainly a threat to the power of government — one of its core, and entirely baseless, arguments is that a Voice would act as an unfair (i.e. Black) check on Parliament, tangling government up in High Court challenges, following Nyunggai Warren Mundine in changing the date of Australia Day, vetoing Reserve Bank interest rate decisions, etc, etc. For a side of politics that professes to believe in smaller and less powerful government, opposition to a Voice — if they actually believe their claims about it possessing too much power — makes no sense.

In fact it’s not surprising that No conservatives hold such a contradiction in their heads. It’s virtually the same one many of them hold over a bill of rights, which would reduce state power in relation to individuals, but which they see as some sort of socialist plot — an idea that would strike pretty much any American conservative or right-winger as ludicrous, given the centrality of the US Bill of Rights to American thinking around freedom from government.

As for improving the efficiency of government, that’s a line Anthony Albanese has tried out in relation to support for the Voice, saying back in June:

This will save money. And the reason why it’ll save money is that everyone knows that there’s been billions of dollars expended on education, health and housing. Governments of all persuasions have, with the best of intentions, expended a lot of taxpayers’ money trying to close that gap between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australia. But the truth is that in so many areas, it’s not going forward, it’s going backwards. It’s not going forwards to the targets, for example, on Year 12 completions. Now, if the money is spent better and more efficiently and in a way that gives people that ownership over the way that programs are run by being listened to…

The only real No camp response to that is to argue that too much money is spent on First Peoples now, by wildly exaggerating the amounts spent. Or, in Peter Dutton’s case, to argue that a legislated Voice to Parliament would do the same things as a constitutional Voice.

But Dutton’s embrace of both a legislated Voice and the idea of a second referendum has isolated him from the rest of the No campaign — indeed, even from his own Indigenous Affairs minister, Jacinta Nampijinpa Price, who holds that First Peoples should simply be assimilated and there is no need for any separate Indigenous programs or even an Indigenous Affairs portfolio.

Albanese’s argument that we can govern better, more efficiently, with a Voice to Parliament seems to have fallen on stony ground. For open racists, it’s a non-issue — they want less or no spending on programs aimed at First Peoples and don’t care about governing more effectively and efficiently in their interests. But there may also be deeper views about government at work.

A lot of hostility towards the idea of a Voice comes from people who don’t trust governments. The links between No supporters, anti-lockdown activists, anti-vaxxers and COVID sceptics are well established — even No supporters have tried to dissociate themselves from the conspiracy theorist fringes of the No campaign, while conspiracy theories about the referendum being “rigged” have been peddled even by Dutton.

Albanese has rightly decided that restoring trust in government is important for his political prospects and for Australia’s political and social cohesion, focusing on showing that his government keeps its promises, tells the truth and performs competently. As opposed to Scott Morrison, whose government was marked by announcements instead of policy substance, favours for political donors, mendacity and corruption. But Morrison was only the symptom of a wider malaise — the perception that the political system and particularly the economy is run by or inappropriately shaped by vested interests, especially big business, which has been growing over the past two decades.

Fake political “outsiders” such as Pauline Hanson and Clive Palmer have sought to exploit this sentiment, with varying degrees of success — the great example of an establishment insider exploiting it is Donald Trump — while media elites such as the Murdoch family’s companies have relied on it to manufacture and amplify white grievance and victimhood. The narrative offered by Trump’s and Murdoch’s outlets, such as Fox News and Sky here, is that the “system” is indeed run by vested interests — liberal “elites” antithetical to the values and interests of ordinary (read: white) people, and what is needed is a revolution that seizes control back from them.

In this mindset, there is no governing in the public interest, merely making sure that it is your side, your tribe, your race, that governs, and governs in the interests of your side, your tribe, your race. There is no contest for good government, merely to make sure you and people like you govern, because governing in your own interests is good government.

That’s why the argument that a Voice to Parliament would improve government, limit government, and make it more efficient fails to register for so many voters, and why the argument that a Voice is needed to help improve educational, health and economic outcomes for First Peoples falls on deaf ears. The task is not to govern well according to some objective standard, but to govern in your own interests.

And while neoliberalism gets blamed for everything bad in the past 30 years, it’s hard not to see this as the natural consequence of the application of a political and economic system that elevated the wants of large corporations to the pinnacle of public policymaking, that made government the handmaiden to capital. When politics is reduced to making sure government serves vested interests, it slowly obliterates the idea that politics can be about government in the public interest.