When faced with having to explain something that feels like it should be big — like, say, the vote to deny a First Nations Voice — Australia’s media lurched for the comfort of the easy explanation of proximate causes that let them look away from confronting the challenging questions of history and power.
So it’s been with Saturday’s result, marking the collapse of an almost 30-year reconciliation project. We’re being offered not one, but three choices: blame it on the century-long inertia of partisan referendum failure; blame it on the decisions of the Yes campaign (or, better yet, blame Prime Minister Anthony Albanese for forcing us to vote); or blame it on the maligned campaign of misinformation from the No partisans.
Each choice has the luxury of pandering to priors. Each (particularly the role of often racist misinformation) has the benefit of having just enough supporting evidence to be satisfying. And all offer the comfort of letting the news media (and everyone else, for that matter) off the hook.
It’s a blindly unselfconscious, non-Indigenous journalism suiting up, hot dog meme guy-style, to assure audiences that we’re just all trying to find who did this.
The finger-pointing is just a continuation of the same failures of understanding that have marked the media’s reporting of the Voice since Albanese’s election night speech finally woke up journalism’s opinion leaders to what was going on.
Until that moment, the long march of the Uluru Statement from the Heart through the Australian community had been reported and analysed with nuance and care by a handful of engaged reporters, such as the ABC’s Patricia Karvelas or Paige Taylor in The Australian. News Corp’s Chris Kenny worked constructively in the consultation process run by Ken Wyatt under the Morrison government (and remained a rare passionate advocate within the US company for the cause.)
Suddenly, with the new PM’s announcement, the gallery discovered its own voice. It picked up the peoples-to-peoples invitation of the Uluru Statement, turned it over, ruminated on it for a moment or two and then tossed it into the box marked “big P-party politics”. Once trapped in that gallery vortex, the Statement from the Heart was stripped of what gave it strength — its grounding in community — and was reforged as just another shiny gee-gaw to be tossed around in the parliamentary conflict that passes for the Canberra news cycle.
This media-driven reframing drove everything that followed. As Niki Savva wrote last week, it made all but inevitable Opposition Leader Peter Dutton’s willing embrace of the opportunity to grandstand a No with increasingly false statements, as even the most cautious of reporters, such as the Nine newspapers’ David Crowe, was compelled to comment.
It wedged the Uluru leaders, wary of being caught out being angry, as Isabella Higgins patiently explained to her non-Indigenous panellists on ABC’s Insiders this weekend (and as Indigenous leader Professor Marcia Langton was reminded by News Corp’s civility police during the campaign).
It jemmied the coverage into the always useless balance of “both sides”, as one of the gallery’s better thinkers, Laura Tingle, called out in the referendum campaign’s dying days.
It gutted plans at the ABC, SBS and Nine mastheads to cover the Voice with a supportive “culmination of reconciliation” narrative, limiting the power and potential of a rising generation of Indigenous journalists — such as the ABC’s outstanding Voice reporter Dan Bourchier — to light up our understanding. It drove Stan Grant out of broadcasting.
Opposing recognition turned out to be as easy as Indigenous activist and leader Noel Pearson foretold in last year’s Boyer lectures: “An inane thing to do — but easy. A heartless thing to do — but easy.”
It was a tragedy for the Uluru Statement which was developed and designed by First Nations peoples with the hope that it could break through the wall of culture wars and politicisation of Indigenous policy erected by the Howard government, reaching out a hand past political gatekeepers to non-Indigenous Australians.
The reward of the Indigenous-led Yes case for its offering was to be sneered at by much of the non-Indigenous professional political class and its pundit hangers-on for not understanding how “real politics” should be done in Australia.
It made it a broader tragedy for anyone who hopes for the sort of different way of doing politics that the Uluru Statement offered — one grounded on the agency and passions of an active citizenry, rather than a passive hand-me-down from Canberra’s national triangle mediated through social media.
It was a tragedy, too, for those of us who yearn for a better way of doing journalism, one bottom-up, not top-down, one better suited for shaping and telling our national narrative.
It leaves Australian settler media — and that’s most of us — trapped in an enduring liminal space between colonial and coloniser. Sure, it’s a media that’s done its job of building the “we are one and free” national narrative of what “Australia” means. It’s belatedly stretched that narrative back with a passive recognition of the previous 65,000 years of human occupation of the continent.
But while we like to think we’ve sloughed off our past colonial dependency, last Saturday showed we’ve still got a long way to go to shake the coloniser mindset out of our narrative.
Is it fair to sheet home the blame on Australia’s media? Or did political misinformation do its share of damage? Let us know by writing to letters@crikey.com.au. Please include your full name to be considered for publication. We reserve the right to edit for length and clarity.
The media was just not prepared to report on such a sensitive issue with any sort of nuance. I’ve said repeatedly, but the media was obsessive about platforming NO voting First Nations people. I know they existed but the results out of booths really reinforces that there’s was a minority. It was also one with a varying degree of nuance that just was never conveyed. Instead it was “X issue matters to Aboriginals. Here is one who thinks the Voice is good. Here’s one that thinks it is bad”. It presented division that just didn’t exist.
100% though that the media turned this into a party politics issue. The fact that so much of the reporting is now focused on whether Albanese’s leadership is secure is just absurd.
Media, or ‘medium’, is not fit for purpose in dealing with substantive long term policy issues and understanding any issue at hand vs. flood of imported US RW strategy and tactics.
Including hollowing out, more generic presenters, lack of diversity, constant polls, centralised, threats of SLAPPs, stacking panels, 20 second sound bites, too much fluff, too many closed or ‘gotcha’ questions directed at the centre vs. selective use of open questions allowing the right to elaborate, blather, bluster etc. without interruption.
I’m now over the blame game. A genuine request for help and collaboration was roundly rejected. Every single person who voted has their own brain, their own capacity for critical thought and therefore we are all to blame.
We’re a hearless country based on the primacy of competition and profit – we are the ultimate outcome of the Neo-Liberal order ushered in by Thatcher and Reagan. Australia is not about people it’s about economics because the market will look after the people provided the government protects the markets
Lots of the No fraternity are of the “it all happened long ago and it’d nothing to do with me” viewpoint. A favourite of Howard’s, completely untrue in his case and pretty brass faced given we settlers are all direct beneficiaries of dispossession. Takes a good dollop of ignorance mixed with a poverty of reason and imagination to hold that view but it clearly meets some people’s emotional needs.
But last Saturday was not something that happened long ago that was nothing to do with us. This generation will have to wear it. But we can say around 40% wanted the opposite to occur, this is some solace and something to build on.
I like that little ditty of theirs? How does it go…
“Invasion on the whole
Is good for the soul,
Depending on who does it
And how long ago”?
Sure their ‘relevant’ cases happened a long time ago, in a different morality.
But then there have been some of those more (‘forgettable’?) recent … WW2, Vietnam, Iraq, Ukraine, Israel/Gaza …. ?
… And if it is ‘so good’ why are we wasting so much Chinaproofing the place?
…. Maybe it’s just ‘colour-coded’ … like Sports Rorts?
…. Maybe it does just depend on who does it?
Waiting to see detailed voter breakdown e.g. comparison of age groups as one presumes that many of the above median age deferred to ‘No’, the same cohorts, esp in regions, are crowded and dominated by boomers and oldies; the latter have much shorter horizons (ditto Brexit similar, now regret &/or passed on).
Another factor is how many younger people are enrolled or not out of potential pool, what was their turnout?
Also, know many literate boomers who are not engaged, do not follow any media and do not bother to be enrolled for voting…. their own personal protest….
Glad someone recognised the sidelining of the Uluru Statement was central to the NO strategy, assisted by the media. Then the referendum was easily misrepresented as coming from the government, not indigenous people. The neo-liberal and Blak Sovereignty groups assisted in this process for their own different reasons, but it was largely never spelled out to the public that the Uluru Statement came out of the official consultative process initiated by Malcolm Turnbull (which I imagine ultimately caused it to assume toxic substance status for the Liberal Right).
Don’t forget the fourth choice being offered by Guy Rundle in these pages:
“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.”
Class, the changes to Australian society advocated by the powerful classes of Australia, and the response to those classes and changes un-mediated by parties and preferences, can also describe the result (in much the same way they can explain the republic referendum result).
More’s the pity no-one else writes about class, but it is a persuasive explanation.
The reason more people don’t write about it is that the journalism class is part of the knowledge class. Tenured mainstream journos are as rich, privileged and comfortable as anyone. Of course Tingle, Savva, Crowe, Karvelas, Taylor and Kenny are going to sieze on Indy Oz activist blaming of racism, misinformation, inanity and heartlessness for ‘No’ getting up.
Otherwise they’d have to examine their own complicit membership of the rapidly growing Class War divide.
I support your concluding paragraph Warren. But I will go further than you have, particularly in a very brutal manner. This country will continue to be looked upon as a ‘colonial outpost’ as long as there is a particular foreign flag in the top left of the current Australian flag. As the U.S. comedian Seinfeld stated in a stand-up comedy show (a sketch devoted to flags of participating sporting nations) in Atlanta during the 1996 Olympics about Australia’s flag: “LONDON OVER NIGHT”. The US audience had a ball according to witnesses. Strange how there was no media reports as to how the Australian athletes present responded. Cheers.