Well, in the end, the question occurs: what was that all about? As Israel moves remorselessly towards an annihilation of half of Gaza, as a mildly leftish government resoundingly falls in New Zealand, the referendum for recognition and a First Nations Voice to Parliament has failed absolutely.
The ABC called it at 7.20pm, before Western Australia had even finished voting. The only jurisdiction to vote Yes was the ACT, which feels like a booby prize. It was never even close. It was a night without succour or relief for those who had campaigned for years, and put their hopes into it. With early votes and postal votes to come in, the Poll Bludger projected a final result of Yes 40%, No 60%, and it may go lower.
Recriminations might now begin on how the Yes campaign was run, but this is largely irrelevant. The Yes campaign was indeed pretty terrible, but there seems very little likelihood that a first-rate campaign would have made a difference. Possibly Victoria, with its 46-54 result, could have been turned to Yes, but even NSW, with its 41-59, was beyond recovery, as were Tasmania and South Australia.
Queensland and WA were out of the question. This was a rejection of the Voice proposal at its core, and as such a rejection of the principle that underpinned it: that there was a significant division between First Nations people and other Australians, that should be recognised in the establishment of new institutions.
The rejection of the Voice proposal went pretty exactly as you’d expect. The Yes 40% will almost certainly be shown to be made up of majority votes among the inner- and middle-urban knowledge class of the major cities, those under 25, First Nations people, some non-European migrant groups and sections of the upper-middle-middle class in teal seats.
As Bob Birrell and Katherine Betts noted, tertiary education was an overwhelming predictor for a Yes vote. However the Voice came about, it quickly became a knowledge-class cause, a distinctive expression of how the world was and should be. Once it entered the referendum process, requiring double majorities, the Voice became a white, or non-Indigenous, object.
As a test of where national feeling about Indigenous/non-Indigenous relations and rights lay, the Voice was a terrible one. It proposed a complex and highly specific object, emerging out of the blue for most Australians, with fuzzy details at best, and a strange remit, of giving advice but having no power. It was part of reconciliation and recognition — whatever that was, many asked — but it was also practical, about Closing the Gap. No simple picture of what it was, was provided.
The Yes camp seemed to be pursuing a sort of “small target” strategy, trying to avoid the process getting bogged down in questions of detail of the proposed remedy to our nation’s plight. But that assumed that most Australians thought our nation had a plight, some unaddressed absence around which we were wrapped, defining us. Most Australians didn’t, and so the Voice seemed an answer to a question the world wasn’t asking.
Hence, the core of the electorate split along lines of knowledge and its absence, and universal morality, rather than specific group loyalties. That’s the tertiary educated in a nutshell, especially those on the humanities side. Non-European migrants have a basic solidarity around questions of colonialism, and the sham of colour-blind “equality”. And gen Z, tertiary-educated or not, has been formed in a radically networked world, in which position/identity itself is fluid. Such groups shared the same assumptions that the Voice proposal worked off: that oppression and disadvantage are structural, embedded in history, often invisible in action.
For the remainder of the voting public, this conception of a continuing process doesn’t operate nearly as strongly. Who Indigenous people are, where they live, how they live, are subject to all sorts of half-conceived notions. Few people are now unaware of dispossession and massacre. How accurately they calibrate that, or have some picture of how it occurred, is another question.
Protection acts, reserves, missions, the White Australia policy — how much do many know of it? Very little, apart from the Stolen Generations, one suspects. And how dominant a role do they believe such events play in current disadvantage?
The Yes case couldn’t convince any great slice of the “middle” 30% of voters that creating a Voice for Indigenous people was a necessary step in the nation’s journey, a completion as much for all “the others”, as for Indigenous people themselves.
But for this middle group, voting No was not about the passionate defence of a distinct set of values, or way of life, against an onslaught of change. It was for the most part, one suspects, because Yes hadn’t made the case that Indigenous people should be a special category of citizen, for reasons arising from our history, with special institutions, however anodyne they might be.
That is where the great divide between Yes and No lay — over the legitimacy of this complex manoeuvre whereby the path to full equality passed through the permanent recognition of specialness, and the creation of a rather unwieldy new institution to both express that and achieve it. The way the numbers look suggests a crucial asymmetry: No got almost all the undecideds and waverers. The Yes case was pretty much wholly composed of those committed to it, an end-point of what one watched across six months, the relentless grinding-down of the Yes response to polls.
With those numbers, Indigenous Australians have no partners in reconciliation on the other side — not because the narrative of arrival, dispossession and oppression is being actively denied by a pro-western story that has any great support, but simply because this group of the non-indigenous simply do not acknowledge that there is now, in this period, a significant difference at all.
They do not see themselves as on “the other side” of a struggle, and hence there is no defining struggle as such, no agon. Whatever racism and disadvantage people will acknowledge as currently existing, they do not see it as necessarily expressing the “colonialist” narrative that the Voice requires, in order to be legitimate.
If that’s the case, then this resounding No vote marks the end of the period known as “reconciliation”, one that began in the late ’80s, whose arc rose through the ’90s and 2000s and which began to fall in the 2010s. That curve upwards had some nasty stuff beneath, such as the intervention and its continuation. But however inadequately, “reconciliation” still seemed a real and living notion. If it no longer does, it is not because we have returned to conflict, but because the “other side” to the Indigenous demand — a surviving notion of Anglo destiny and invested meaning — has dissolved in the last decade or so.
What’s dissolved it? What hasn’t? What was once a bounded continent nation-state, with a few TV and radio channels and a dozen newspapers, is now a society connected to everything, everywhere, all at once, its conceptual borders thinning. What was once an Anglo society with a growing migrant supplement is now, in its major cities, a post-Anglo space with migrant notions of arrival, autonomy and self-creation at its dynamic centre. The No vote thus contained both a section of people who felt they were passionately defending something against an onslaught, and those who lived in a space where there was nothing to defend. But also nothing to change.
Thus, though many non-European migrants voted Yes, the historical fact of their steady, decades-long arrival has renewed the vitality of the notion, strong in Anglo culture for decades, that the meaning of this country is as a place where one can arrive and remake oneself, build a life. The stronger that gets, the more it must undermine the claims of Indigenous specialness, no matter how much migrants would not want it to.
Mass voluntary migration, to be possible at all, must not only achieve the recognition that it is possible to make your life over again from a suitcase, but it also pushes it to the centre of the Australian experience — the creation of something from nothing at all, the excitement of new existence. While the content of Indigenous culture has moved to the centre of Australian life over the past decade or so, the form it required — the cultural centrality of inherited place — has been, well, displaced in a way that has deprived Indigenous people of the heroic narrative it needed to win a referendum. That Australia is a country of newness, of no ground, of lightness, of largely individualised trajectories through time, and of such a love of novelty that many white Melburnians will say they live in “Naarm”. What could be more ungrounded than that?
Should one be correct about that deep shift in culture, really a shift in being, on this continent, then the struggle for First Nations recognition — as it has been conducted — is largely concluded. The continent is redefining itself. Having dethroned Anglo suprematism, it has now passed by Indigenous recognition, on the way to something else.
Labor state governments may continue treaty processes with multiple groups. Big capital-T treaty appears out of the question. There seems a sudden, general feeling, that the need to do this, the old “fierce urgency of now” has departed. The same goes for any truth and reconciliation commission — unless Labor still has some perverse courage. But one presumes that the Albanese government will now back away from Indigenous causes very, very rapidly, and become a government of the suburban masses (some of whom are Indigenous, of course), aligning itself with the many, not the few.
What Indigenous leaderships will do remains to be seen. But they may have time out of the spotlight to think about it, as the country and the world moves on, and the bombs rain on another Indigenous people half a world away.
Thank you Guy – insightful and interesting analysis as usual.
You are one of the few commentators that can really make me stop and think.
I don’t always agree, and sometimes it get a little dense, but more often than not you uncover some deeper truths and insights that are lying in plain sight.
… and sometimes it get a little dense
It sure does. About halfway through I recalled the comment made by Salieri in the film Amadeus.
In this referendum the yes supporters were defeated. I feel disappointed. I had hoped it would be otherwise.
Guy cites the long term issue unwittingly, those who promote and rebooted old colonial or white Australian settler culture of the 19thC inot the mainstream; like UK it replicates US experience of rebooting ‘deep south’ or ‘segregation socio-economics’, with a ‘thin veneer’ of academic research.
Like Atlas is Koch, the latter’s fossil fuel donors’ network is shared with that of dec. white nationalist John ‘passive eugenics’ Tanton, ZPG fame, admirer of white Oz policy, visited and hosted by a local faux environmental NGO masquerading as centrist; he still has influence on current Anglosphere and European policies.
His journal TSCP The Social Contract Press was described by SPLC as ‘routinely publishes race-baiting articles penned by white nationalists. The press is a program of U.S. Inc, the foundation created by John Tanton, the racist founder and principal ideologue of the modern nativist movement. TSCP puts an academic veneer of legitimacy over what are essentially racist arguments about the inferiority of today’s immigrants’ (& minorities etc.).
Same TSCP published and promoted Jean Raspail’s Camp of the Saints, inspired both Renaud Camus’ ‘Great Replacement’, Bannon et al.
In the article above Rundle cites Bob Birrell and Katherine Betts, of APRI, a paper lacking sources?
By coincidence, why did ‘Australia’s best demographer’ Birell and collaborator Betts both contribute to Tanton’s TSCP in the past?
For example Betts had interview with Jean Raspail author of ‘Camp of the Saints’……published in TSCP ‘A Conversation With Jean Raspail (Reprint) By Katharine Betts Published in The Social Contract Volume 15, Number 4 (Summer 2005)’
https://www.thesocialcontract.com/artman2/publish/tsc1504/article_1340_printer.shtml
In the article above Rundle cites APRI, a paper lacking sources, credibility?
By coincidence, why did APRI and ‘Australia’s best demographer’ Birell and collaborator Betts both contribute to Tanton’s TSCP in the past?
Interview with Jean Raspail author of ‘Camp of the Saints’……published in TSCP ‘A Conversation With Jean Raspail by Katharine Betts
Guy, please give up this twaddle about what “the people” think. How do you know? Over the past month or two, you have increasingly been making random assessments of what “ordinary” people really think, that someone the rest of the media don’t understand, yet it’s not backed up by any evidence or reasoning.
Apart from that general criticism, your specific reasoning here is very flawed.
The Yes campaign was lacklustre, mediocre and seemed, as you pointed out early on, to just assume it would win.
The No campaign was vicious, deceptive and manipulative – and very successfully so. The sowing of doubt, the suggestion that the Voice was about Division, the Vote no if you don’t know suggestion, all this piled on to change a solid majority in support of the proposal to a solid minority. A lot of people weren’t voting on the proposal, they were voting for something else that Dutton and his cronies managed to conjure up. It probably didn’t help that there were significant Aboriginal voices across the spectrum (Price, Mundine, Thorpe, Mansell) on the No side, enough to convince many waverers that this was not something uniformly approved of by Aboriginal people.
The fact that Country is so widely acknowledged, that many meetings and events start with a dedicated Acknowledgement or Welcome, that curricula are changing to reflect history more accurately, that there is a general agreement with the fact that Aboriginal people were here first and got a very raw deal, which is continuing, doesn’t suggest that “Reconciliation is dead”.
If you were more plugged into this issue, you may have been able to write a more interesting article about the changes in Aboriginal politics, such as the rise of a new generation, some of which is solidly radical (Blak sovereignty), some of which is quite conservative, but much of which stands outside the cosy relationship between government, business and Aboriginal leadership that has existed for quite a while. Of how a whole range of Aboriginal people, and their supporters, across the country, in the grassroots, has become involved in political advocacy and how this might change Aboriginal politics into the future – whether it results in a new determination, with new skills, or recrimination and in-fighting, or something else, remains to be seen, but it’d be far more interesting that a loose article about how this vote means something it doesn’t.
A mite confused there BtB – “…Country is so widely acknowledged, that many meetings & events start with a dedicated Acknowledgement or Welcome,…”
It is precisely the tedious overegging of that sort of trite nonsense (thunked up by Ernie Dingo in 1976 for a troupe of Pacific Island dancers – sic!) that, if it “…doesn’t suggest that “Reconciliation is dead”…”, is certainly digging its own grave.
Not confused, but not going to engage with this silly comment.
So, very big on declamation but no good at debate.
To call a welcome to country ceremony trite nonsense is where you lost me and everyone else I suspect. That most if not all Indigenous elders are quite happy to conduct and contribute to welcome to country ceremonies is very telling despite your disdain for them.
You do realise that it is as ‘legitimate’ an “ancient tradition” as the CIA created kwanzaa in the USA, don’t you?
Do the d/vs mean butthurt feelzies to learn the reality that both are confected twaddle?
Now we’re re-hashing right-wing conspiracy theories … seriously?
For those who don’t know, Kwanzaa was created by a US Black radical, Ron Karenga, in the 1960s as a cultural event combining what he saw as the core elements of African culture. His faction was in conflict with the Black Panthers and the CIA funded them in the hope they’d destroy each other. Ann Coulter wrote some insane article in 2005 alleging the CIA invented it and it is really only a holiday for white liberal Marxists or something like that. Now right-wing nut jobs perform their own annual festival in response, talking about how it’s not a “real” holiday and it was invented by the CIA.
And now Crikey readers want to share US far-right obsessions as some sort of proof that Aboriginal protocols are fake …
Check out why &how Ernie Dingo invented the thangy from whole cloth in 1976.
My previous comment moderated into oblivion.
“Welcomes to country between Indigenous Australian communities have a history of thousands of years, but Dingo and Walley say theirs their’s was the first to be performed in the country for non-Indigenous Australians.”
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2016/feb/23/ernie-dingo-and-richard-walley-on-the-40th-year-of-their-welcome-to-country
Another non-starter conspiracy theory. Not that any of that would prove anything …
Untrue, but for some reason my comments are being deleted by the moderators.
Lee is correct. Welcome to Country started in the 1970s. It is not a traditional practice. And current elders are not just “happy to contribute”, they charge fees for it, often several thousand dollars. I know elders in inner Sydney who have confirmed this, as well as recounting amusing stories of turf wars over rights to particular venues and council events. If you like the ceremony, fine, but don’t make it out to be something it isn’t.
Would “…you lost (me and) everyone else I suspect.” include any of the 60+% NO voters or just those hiding in your shrinking echo chamber?
How lovely to be part of the majority in this best of all countries in this best of all worlds. A profitable way to spend time, spruiking far-right US conspiracy theories and their Down Under cousins to make barely relevant points.
Meanwhile, out here in reality, away from the Marrickville Probus branch …
The “tedious overegging” has some way to go before it catches up with that of longer established national anthems.
The perception that acknowledgments of country at the start of every football game, domestic flight, live show, workplace meeting, in email signatures and on website pages, is a response to popular demand – rather than conformance to escalating requirements of propriety by those who can impose such things – is a telling symptom of the miscalculations behind this referendum. For those outside the 40%, these acknowledgements are like the ‘Workers of the world, unite!’ sign in the window of Havel’s greengrocer.
By ‘more interesting article’, you mean one that you agree with. I’m making an argument based on actively talking to people outside the inner city, systematically, not in the hundreds, but certainly in the dozens. The strong impression got is that they simply didnt connect to the issue, didn’t feel its urgency, its moral necessity etc. The core narrative of reconciliation, recognition and redemption that was central to the knowledge class, didnt fire with them. It’s something I’ve been saying for quite a while now.
You argue that reconciliation feels are widespread – and then have to account for a 60% ‘no’ vote by resort to the ‘no’ case’s duplicity. So all those people going to Welcomes were persuaded around to ‘no’, by easy deceit? How stupid they must be. A dsperate false consciousness argument
Given that i thought the voice proposal was a mess from the start, which would hurt it, and that the ues camp were arrogant, which would defeat it, i think i was pretty plugged in, dont you?
As someone who lives in remote Australia, your claim to “talking to” dozens of people outside of the “inner city” is not particularly impressive as evidence for your broad statements about the true state of ‘ordinary Aussies’. I’ve been also hearing lots of No propaganda going around about and I know of Aboriginal people who voted no, not out of abstract political awareness, but because they got lots of the clever No messaging. My electorate is more than 40% Aboriginal, yet the Yes vote was below that. There’s a good amount of non-Aboriginal people who voted (and campaigned for) Yes, so that must mean there are a lot of Aboriginal people voting No. Are you saying that they are against reconciliation? (Hint: they’re not)
As far as “more interesting” article goes, I suggested some issues that could be covered, with multiple explanations, I didn’t suggest a particular line. If you’re going to base your analysis of political life on the odd trip to a shopping centre at the end of the tram line, good luck to you, but I’d like something based on a bit more rigour. And yes, you were one of the few that said upfront that the Yes proposal and campaign was a shambles, which I agreed with. And no, I didn’t say committed supporters of reconciliation were persuaded to No by easy deceit …. A desperate straw man argument.
Bob
The rigour is in the numbers, produced by studies like Birrell and Betts’s, which show the clear social split in the yes-no vote, and its substantial rigidity.
The talking to people in the middle and outer suburbs produces a substantially similar majority account, which is that they dont feel connected to indigenous conditions by our national history. Yes, talking to dozens of people is sufficient, if the same story, the same account, comes up again and again.
It’s far more accurate to go to a few shopping centres in outer Melbourne and ask people what they think, than anything you’ll get in a remote electorate, as you know well.
The argument of the article was that there wasnt any great multiplicity of explanations that mattered. Beneath the multiple causes, i was arguing that there was one substantial one – a rejection of the yes/progressive narrative of obligation arising from our history.
So we differ on the explanation, which you are presenting as a lack of coverage in my piece
Well, that at least is a clearer explanation that presented in your article – thank you. But it doesn’t account for the 20% of voters who changed their minds. Given the very moderate and unthreatening nature of the proposal (and the default majority support), the most likely thing to have shifted the one in five people who changed their mind is not that the Yes case was incompetent, but that the No case was competent.
I’ve heard and overheard snippets of No misinformation all over the place in random discussions (not just in remote Australia) over the past few months – actual, concrete misinformation, which was cleverly targeted to appeal to undecided voters. Take Dutton and his vicious campaigning out of the picture and I’m pretty sure we would have had a Yes result (which I had only lukewarm support for personally – I’ve got more sympathy for the Mansell / Thorpe position).
I’m largely with Bob. Rundle’s assessment, I reckon, is far too premature – just a bit too much off -the-top-of-the head sociology. Can’t the result – into which so much is being read here – be explained by some much more prosaic factors?
-successful referenda have a pretty dismal history in this country
– no referendum – as far as I know – has ever got up without bipartisan support
– this one featured a particularly vehement anti-change campaign
– the advancing of progressive causes generally, over a long period has been mainly a huge challenge – especially given state of Aus media.
Given all this, 60/40 seems unsurpising.
Rundle’s somewhat strident pronouncements about major shifts in the zeitgeist (what he knows Australians are thinking) are based on not much more – it seems – on some morning-after musings. His insistence that reconciliation is dead is a big call indeed, and dare one say it, a bit insensitive and unhelpful to an indigenous leadership who have devoted themselves endlessly to this cause, who have seriously put themselves in harms way to fight it – and, from what one reads, are feeling pretty shattered right now.
Thanks for taking the time to put a much more considered response than my own! I think the points you raise are all very reasonable.
Having gone back and looked at the third-rate analysis in the data Rundle is drawing on (Birrell and Betts, linked in the article), I’m somewhat surprised how much of Rundle’s recent thinking seems to be drawing upon this pretty lacklustre analysis. One interesting divergence is that Birrell puts “the 60%” down to “nationalism” and a keen sense of place and identity, rather than the weird mixture of parochialism and history-lessness that he sees on his tram trips to the shopping centres at the end of the line. And yet, at other times he’s echoing some disturbing old-style ideology in his juxtaposition of rationalist knowledge class internationalists (“rootless cosmopolitans”?) with the genuine Volk tied to traditional family and country. And just to be clear to the mouth-breathers, I’m not accusing Rundle of fascism, but his thinking seems to be showing unconscious parallels with some nasty currents.
The ever reliable laziness of progressive assumption: that indigenous people’s culture is country (good), and Europeans’ is Volk (bad). That any desire for particularity or centredness in your own culture is bad and trending to fascism, unless its indigenous (good). That if you tell off people for not being abstract and cosmopolitan enough, they’ll vote for you. Worked a treat on Saturday, didn’t it?
Guy, your reply is the lazy one. So many straw man arguments piled into so few sentences.
I can’t quite get my head around someone as abstract and cosmopolitan as yourself, whose whole life has been a rejection of mainstream culture, politics and identity giving us lectures on not understanding ye common man sufficiently.
I on the other hand have chosen a small town, particularity and place, in a locale that will never be in danger of gentrification, to spend most of my adult life. Yet amazingly I can still see other people’s points of view while being part of a particular place and small-scale social networks. And I can see the difference between celebrating place, people and society and fascist concepts of a pure and virtuous Volk, unsullied by conniving cosmopolitanism. Weird, eh?
Bob, it’s probably a conversation we should be having with Rundle himself – but I too bothered by the pitch in recent times – when previously such a fan. Whats with it with young people studying humanities, and their youthful enthusiasms? He was one once!. And the return trips on the tram go back to inner city progressive-ville and the similarly-educated neighbours for whom there seems to be increasing scorn. What’s that about? An anti-‘elitist’ elitism? (The ‘elitists’ here in the sense that the term was recently used by a ‘retiring’ nonagenarian media owner). It seems these preoccupations – increasingly strident, and also all a bit snide – have dimmed the focus on those who really are a deep concern & a danger. (In another of post for this article, he as good as said ‘Newsc#*p? Don’t you worry about that’’)
Our times seem to get more awful daily – for mine it’s a shame to being losing GuyRundle as a really acute and helpful interpreter of them.
Agreed and hopefully it’s a temporary software error.
I can imagine on a human level he may be feeling pretty bruised and bitter at his treatment by some in the ‘cultural left’ (which I increasingly see as just the petite bourgeoisie of yore, with their strictures, manners and censoriousness), including the recent absolutely disgraceful by the Crikey leadership “team”, where he was thrown under the bus and left to die, unpersonned in an instant. This anger, most righteously felt, would warp the judgement of most of us. He recently described himself as a socially conservative socialist or something like that, which I thought was one of the most ludicrous things I’ve ever heard, given almost everything he’s written and most positions he’s held. But if, as you say, the News Corpse can say with a straight they’re anti-elitist, then anything’s possible …
Yes, the handling of things there was shocking.
I do think the way forward in the aftermath of all this is just to stick with the raw politics of it all – that the proposal was doomed from the moment Littleproud & then Dutton rejected – in aggressive terms – any thought of bipartisanship.
No point I reckon spending too much time getting hung up on the motivations of different social groups in the way they voted, or to waste energy impugning behaviour of whichever lot one might want to be offended by – whether shrill yes or no, nor to seek grand speculation about shifting social landscapes. The fact is that by history and logic of referenda – it was going down – same as republic.
Not sure how relevant to Guy’s opining but message came through from Sally McManus today that large majority of unionists voted yes. (I did my campaigning via Trades Hall – in country Victoria – the training provided was all about being respectful to all that one engaged with – regardless of their views).
For what it’s worth, a counterfactual I’ve imagined that might have seen a different outcome is – what dynamics might have emerged if Morrison had not so efficiently organised a purge of Lib moderates in last election. A larger moderate faction might have been able to push Dutton – assuming he got up as leader – to compromise and force a conscience vote to hold party together. A scenario like that might have provided a ghost of a chance.
But anyway this is where we are now – a country with the most militantly right wing version of lib party we’ve seen, with the most worrying, illiberal leader it’s ever appointed. And a party – via advice from its US counterparts – that will seemingly resort to literally any tactic to advance its position. The issue for all is what to do in days ahead to keep him and them as far away from government as possible. I hope our mate Guy sees things vaguely in similar terms.
It’s been good connecting with you Bob
Nice parody of Grundle’s wordy style though you got a bit carried away wielding the vorpal blade – as does he.
Hi Guy I just wanted to say how much I enjoyed reading this piece. I always like your writing, while not necessarily always agreeing with every argument (which is fine, as Crikey isn’t meant to be something like the Daily Tele where they only write precisely what they think their audience wants to hear, truth be damned). But not only did I enjoy reading this, I also had this overwhelming sense that you’d really hit the nail on the head in explaining what happened with the referendum. It’s the only piece of analysis I’ve read so far where I’ve felt this. Definitely saving for later
Even on other issues falling into the trap of generic writers and journalists offering ungrounded opinion and commentary across many topics.
However, that does not replace expertise or credibility through long term application to learning specific knowledge, analysis and synthesis of the same.
We complain when think tankers and grifters appear on and stack e.g. ABC discussion panels with similar?
What can be said about Australian society that is any better than Xavier Herbert’s summary of the first half of the 20th century in Australia.
Poor Fellow My Country
Far be it for us to sink into despondency. I think now is the time to get moving on where reconciliation goes next. I voted resoundingly and loudly yes, but a whole heap of good people I know voted no. Almost invariably they acknowledged that what we as a white society was doing, wasn’t working and acknowledged the need for dramatic change, but disagreed with this way of doing it for all kinds of different reasons whipped up by the no camp.
Forget the small target, dream big and get creative!
A master class in cut-through messaging by J.N. Price. As someone who was an active representative for the behaviour conservatives wanted, she was devastating to the Yes vote.
Also, too much noise. Too many other things going on.
Also, Albo (communications) was wishy-washy – not great stewardship. But how do you differentiate when your message has to be one of making connections and bringing people together?
I’m reminded of Chloe Hooper’s Tall Man as an allegory for the malignant gossip by some people around this issue.
It will be interesting to see how the voting patterns are segmented post-vote.
But let’s not forget a significant number of people voted in support of First Nations People. That will provide a foundation for further assistance to them.
Outcome of a consolidated RW MSM and influencer ecosystem that ‘informs’ voters; see Brexit and Trump?