Albo was always a bit of a plank. A poor imitation of Bob Hawke, he could turn on the charm when he needed to, but it was always very superficial and clumsy. Still, Peter Dutton has been somewhat bland as opposition leader. Had Albo played his cards wisely, he would have had an easy go of it. Of course, that’s not what he did.
Albo chose to call a referendum on a “voice to parliament”. For those of us who don’t know, Australia’s constitution is notoriously tricky to amend and Australians are immensely fond of voting “no” to any changed to their constitution. Bob Hawke’s efforts, with bipartisan support and input, to make even modest, inoffensive changes to the Australian constitution were voted down.
Perhaps having been stung by Australian voters emphatically rejecting the 1999 referendum on becoming a republic based on a combination of the broad distaste for the model on offer and a view that there’s little point in fixing what isn’t broken, Albo and Ilk were rather secretive about the details. Was the Uluru Statement From the Heart one page, eighteen pages, twenty-six pages? Nobody really knew. What form would the voice take? There were no real specifics. Nor, for that matter, was there any real bipartisan support or even an effort placed into getting a broad spectrum of Australians to contribute to a final product. The vote, in the end, became a hyper-partisan war of words with accusations of racism and bigotry being hurled at even the most measured criticism. When indigenous Australians like Jacinta Price and Warren Mundine dissented, they were smeared and degraded. When Warren Mundine wouldn’t let himself be talked over by the ABC, he was subjected to ad hominem attacks on air.
In the end, it failed. In fact, the referendum was voted down in a landslide in each Australian state and the Northern Territory. The ACT voted yes, but nobody wants to claim responsibility for that. The response to that has been vicious. The claws have come out and the veneer of politesse by many backers seems to be wearing off. When the UK voted for liberation in 2016, when US voters refused to accept the chosen president, the gloves came off. I dread that Australia will now be subject to the same abuse.
Boadicea's Chariot 
Pretty well summed up Christopher!
The biggest problem Albo had was that he knew that were the full extent of the ‘Uluru Statement of the Heart’ made public it would, as it was, be firmly rejected.
We were told that we should vote for it on a ‘vibe’ – one doesn’t change such an important thing as a Constitution on emotion. We pretty soon worked out that the title of the statement was designed to tug our heartstrings, and, of course our sense of guilt, and that the extra pages, well kept in the background, meant even more unaccountable funding for projects which had already failed.
I knew of Jacinta Price before she hit the headlines opposing the ‘divisive’ referendum. She was deputy mayor of Alice Springs and I knew about her plain common sense on how to deal with the problems that infest that town.
All I heard from the ‘Yes’ side were what I would call ’emotional blackmail’ to provide money and power to those in charge of the programs, and what would the world think of Australia should it return a No vote. There was little or nothing on how the Voice would work – but it seemed pretty obvious that it would end in countless appeals to the High Court to clarify the powers of ‘The Voice’. Oh! and as you say, plenty of accusations of racism and bigotry.
From the ‘No’ side we heard that it was against the Aussie principle of a ‘Fair and Equal Go’ for everyone – regardless of race and that such a body divided Australians on the basis of race. That certainly struck home – since most of those leading the charge for a change were the rich ‘elite’ of aboriginals whose ancestry probably only included one great-great-grandparent.
Jacinta proudly calls herself a Celtic Aboriginal, acknowledging all her ancestors. Both she, and Warren demanded that all Australians, whether their ancestors had been here for 60,000 years or had only just arrived, be classified as Australian. The word aparthied was bandied around a lot.
They also demanded an audit of where the some $40bn p.a. of funding to close ‘The Gap’ have gone – and many Aussies are asking ‘to whom’. This was repeatedly refused – and still is.
Too much secrecy about what ‘The Voice’ entailed, too much play on emotions, and far too many insults thrown at anyone who dared to ask questions or disgaree brought the downfall of the referendum.
Since then the insults have increased – and it has not and will not be productive.
Many are now questioning the ‘Welcome to Country’ ceremonies (made up in the 1970s) and other such modern-made ‘ceremonies’ for which aboriginals charge fairly large sums. We are wondering why works, essential for our prosperity, are being stopped because such works might disrupt the ancient song-lines of whales, etc. and questioning why just over 3% of the population can halt modern progress.
It is not a good outcome – and has soured relationships badly.
I don’t think that such a referendum will ever get through. There are far too many people here from non-British backgrounds who do not suffer from ‘English colonial’ guilt and came here with nothing and made something.
For what it’s worth, I do know something about the ‘Aboriginal Industry’. I spent my first four years in Darwin, and saw where the sums of government funding went – and it wasn’t to those who most needed it.
Boadicea: When the vote was held, I was back home in the UK for a long weekend. One of the other people staying at the B&B was a Dorset-born Aussie who was visiting ageing family. We had a long and interesting discussion on this topic. Of course, we were very much in agreement on it. The absurdity of how things were framed was telling. In Australia, much as in New Zealand, Canada and the USA, few first nations people don’t have European ancestors. Especially in the US and Canada, most people who’d be classed as “white” have indigenous ancestors. Centuries of contact and intermingling has resulted in near-universal miscegenation. I’ve been reliably informed that it’s much the same in New Zealand. The self-appointed elite, as you rightly point out, are so very far removed from the reality of most indigenous people. The Americans managed to get a lot wrong, but one thing that they weren’t entirely wrong about was requiring there to be some sort of objective, legally definable measure of what being “indigenous” actually means. It’s absurd that someone like me, by the “yes” side’s reasoning, has more say over what happens in Australia than people who were born and raised there, or people who’ve put all their eggs in the Australian basket simply because some centuries ago, one of my ancestors managed to have children with an aboriginal woman.
Noel Pearson did as much harm as he did good. When he said that a “yes” vote would put him and his camp in a strong bargaining position and started to list off a number of demands (including a treaty), he betrayed the nub of it. Although, strictly speaking, there’s nothing preventing a referendum to be used in lieu of an enabling act, it still leaves a bad taste in the mouth. The odds are that the Australian people would not have been asked if the final product of the negotiations over what a voice to parliament is something they actually wanted. Increasing restrictions on the public enjoyment of natural sites, Western Australia’s heritage laws and neighbouring New Zealand’s ongoing issues with what its Treaty of Waitongi actually means in practice showed just how great a risk that was.
In Canada, New Zealand, Australia and even the UK, a new dynamic is emerging. Reconciliation sounds good on paper, but what does it actually mean? For New Zealanders and Britons of Hong Kong origins, for example, a focus on the racial history of empire is esoteric at best, silly at worst. It is so remote, so petty at this point that it’s a waste of time. For Portuguese, Italian and Greek Canadians, the shortcomings of early Canadian indigenous policies are meaningless. Why should they, as people who themselves, or whose parents/grandparents took the risk and gave it a go, be held in perpetual government-enforced guilt over something they have no personal connexion to? For Korean and Malaysian-Chinese immigrants in Australia, it’s a waste of time. Accusations of Trump-style politics were hurled, but all that proved was that so many had adopted the politics of personal destruction and vilification that mark left-wing politics in the US.
This is not going to end well, and I fear Australia will come out diminished — much as the US came out much diminished in the wake of the BLM riots.