What is there to say one day out from Australia’s historic referendum on the Voice other than this instance of a nation examining its soul has been a wee bit fucked. There has been love and courage and truth and hope, yes, but the air is thick with bile and bullshit, and it will linger.
Yes or No on Saturday, the Uluru Statement from the Heart was a staggeringly generous offer from Indigenous Australians, the easiest of olive branches to clasp, moral and justifiable legally, economically, philosophically; a course of action with precisely fuck all negative consequences for anyone except mining companies and the sick fucks that still get a kick out of Indigenous subjugation. I sincerely hope we accept this opportunity in good faith, with open hearts and minds. I am worried we will not.
The love, hope, generosity and goodwill of the YES campaign has moved countless Australians deeply. Far more minds and hearts have opened to the unreconciled bedrock of Australia, the violent and enduring truth of dispossession, than had we not had this discussion – and that in itself is a win. But Australia has a giant, flashing FEAR button buried deep within its soul and we now have an uncomfortable clarity on how staggeringly low Australia’s establishment right-wing is willing to go to push it. Whether Australia chooses to acknowledge it or not, there is so much intergenerational pain here, and even more intergenerational fear and denial.
We are playing a different game from here on out – nastier, more adversarial, less cooperative, more American, and considerably dumber. Whatever the result tomorrow, the discussion around the Voice should trigger alarm bells for the future of reality-based conversations within our democracy – in that they just won’t fucking happen all that often anymore.
The NO campaign, powered by the Liberal and National parties and steered by an array of right-wing think tanks with links to America’s whacky Christian right, has flooded the airwaves with shit. It has lied, it has confused, it has obfuscated the truth. And it has done this because it has had to. Logic is not on its side. Fear is. Chillingly effective but scummy-as-all-fuck modes of political communication appear to be the most powerful shapers of history today.
The NO campaign was effective in truly hideous ways. It very carefully ensured it was Indigenous people saying the most offensively stupid and racist things, like Jacinta Nampijinpa Price’s assertion that colonisation had no negative impacts whatsoever – a claim contradicted by every single economic or health measure we record. From this starting point of unreality, repeated uncritically in the broken echo chamber of mainstream media, trolls of a lesser stature can then twist words around until they are all but meaningless. All of a sudden listening to Indigenous people would be a racist thing to do, they shriek! This is apartheid! This is division! This is the globalist UN seizing our 5G vaccine mandates or whatever it is you need to say to get stupid people scared and upset. The details do not matter – everyone has their own facts – only the prodded emotion is king.
The conversation has been discombobulated to the dizzying point that Pauline Hanson, racist Queen of the Racists, the OG racist from way back in the day, a stupid person who has been racist-ly racisting it up, racistly, since I was in primary school, claimed my support for the Voice was racist.
Pauline “we are in danger of being swamped by Asians” Hanson thinks consulting Indigenous Australians on matters that concern them would be “racially divisive”. Words don’t mean anything anymore!
For the record, Poooooorline deleted this tweet because of the typo and then tweeted it again, the underlying inaccuracy and stupidity still intact. I can say from the perspective of an editor, sometimes it’s not about the typos and the problem with a piece of writing is that the underlying argument is just too fucking stupid to entertain. This was one of those, Pauline.
Yes, there is a “progressive NO” vote, but there was also a progressive NO vote for Brexit, and that was quite clearly a victory for xenophobia, not for ultra-left socialists critical of the EU corporatocracy. Running out of affordable food isn’t exactly a victory for the working class. A NO vote for Australia will only embolden our worst impulses.
Peter Dutton’s disgusting role as wrecker in this historic lurch towards a brighter, more reconciled future should not have come as a surprise to anyone. But it did, for some reason. The man’s public life is synonymous with his enthusiastic cruelty to desperate people with darker complexions as Minister for our Offshore Gulags and race-baiting dog whistles like his claim Melbournians can’t go to restaurants because of African gangs. I can’t go to restaurants because next month broccoli will cost three hundred thousand dollars!!
And yet the media establishment, and the ALP, chose to treat Dutton as though he was a participant in this debate in good faith. Both institutions need to consider just how seriously they take themselves, because Australia’s political right is on a suicide trip to the depths of the American Republican Party. We will not adopt the personality cult aspect of it, because we are too cynical of tall poppies for that, but the unceasing hostility, uncooperativeness, weaponised misinformation and prodded stupidity is here to stay. It will be grim, and journalists and citizens alike have a grave responsibility to pierce the bullshit at every opportunity.
If you have concerns about missing details before your vote tomorrow, they are out there. If you feel you might have been sold some nonsense and want it unpacked, it’s highly likely that this is true, so try this. If you are feeling any degree of shame around your decision to vote NO, don’t run from that: examine it. Unpack it. Be brave and face it, don’t run from the queasiness in your gut. One day your grandchildren might ask you about it, and I’m sure you’ll want to feel comfortable with your answer.
If an issue has been muddied to the point that up feels like down, left feels like right, and the future is unclear and clouded, know that that is a deliberate strategy of the NO campaign. When seeking True North, look to who stands alongside you for clarity. There is no greater moral compass than the company you keep. On the YES side of the fence you will find roughly 80% of Indigenous Australians, Australia’s health experts, Cathy Freeman, Patrick Dodson, Noel Pearson, Marcia Langton, Adam Goodes, Paul Kelly, John Farnham, Senator Briggs, Jimmy Barnes, the Greens and ALP, Midnight Oil, the overwhelming support of corporate Australia (minus mining and the media), and Collingwood Premiership captain Darcy Moore. On the NO side you will find Pauline Hanson, Jacinta Nampijinpa Price, Peter Dutton, Kamahal (occasionally), Anthony and Warren Mundine, News Corporation and every casually racist asshole in the country. At the very least, ask yourself which BBQ you’d rather go to.
On Wednesday Pat Dodson spoke to the National Press Club. I will finish with his words. Be kind to each other tomorrow.
“[Voting No or Yes] is a division based on whether you understand our history, that this nation was colonised and Aboriginal people were forcibly subjugated, that they were denied the opportunity to have a say in how they were going to be impacted, or whether you think it’s all cosy and we were picked up in a truck and taken to a winter wonderland, and we lived there forever in a rose garden”
“We’re not living in the garden of Eden here.
“Why have so many of our kids been taken away? Why is there so much domestic and internal violence? Why are we living in poverty? Why are we still suffering from mental health problems?
“If we’re in the promised land, like so many like to pretend, then why are Indigenous people lagging behind on so many social indicators?
“Are we going to be at the table? Or are we going to be picking up the crumbs?”
