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News from Australia: we're probably not going to have a Constitutionally-enshrined "Voice" for Aboriginals.
Background: there was a statement by a bunch of Aboriginal groups a while back that they wanted a constitutionally-enshrined advocate in the governmental system*, along with a couple of other things. Opposition leader Anthony Albanese, of the Australian Labor Party, included this in his platform for the 2022 election, which he won**, and we're a bit under a month from a referendum***.
New information: support started high, and certainly the Usual Suspects want a Yes vote. But support has now crashed to the point that it's considered highly unlikely to pass.
Up until now I'd been thinking "well, maybe the US people are right about SJ having peaked in the USA, but that's cold comfort to me", but this has given me some real hope that it's peaking here as well.
*NB: Aboriginals can vote and run for office, and are slightly overrepresented in Parliament compared to the general population.
**Labor is our centre-left party; the other major parties are the Liberals (city-based centre-right), the Nationals (small-town conservatives, in a semi-permanent coalition with the Liberals), the Greens (historically a "hippie" party, and they still do hold basically all the stereotypical "hippie" positions, though they've gone majorly SJ of late), One Nation (alt-rightists since before it was cool) and the United Australia Party (alt-rightists since after it was cool, because an alt-right billionaire had too big an ego to support the existing alt-right party). I actually wound up voting Labor; the Liberals had gotten too comfortable in government to the point that they refused to discuss a bunch of what they were doing, which I consider a threat to democracy, the Greens want to ban One Nation and the UAP, which I consider a much larger threat to democracy, I live in a city so the Nationals weren't on my HoR ballot, the UAP is a bad joke, and while I preferred One Nation's stance on this particular policy (i.e. "get the fuck out of here with your reverse racism") I preferred the rest of Labor's platform to the rest of One Nation's by more.
***Our constitutional amendment procedure - a majority of citizens and a majority of citizens in at least four of the six states must agree to the amendment. Like most other Australian votes, it's mandatory.
Something that's really stood out to me during this referendum process is, well, just how bad the Yes campaign is at making arguments or trying to convince people. There's a lot of quibbling minor points, or a simple inability to conceive of anyone genuinely disagreeing with them.
Meanwhile the No campaign is largely throwing mud at the wall - it knows that it only needs one reason to vote no per person, so it's focusing on throwing lots of ideas out there, suggesting that even one concern is enough reason to not go for the proposal, and consistency be damned. This isn't a great strategy from the perspective of ideological purity, but it is a great strategy from the perspective of actually winning a referendum.
Let me give an example. One of the most common No arguments is simply that the Voice is racist. The Voice is a proposal to give permanent additional democratic representation, in the form of a permanent lobby group attached to parliament, to a single ethnic or racial group. This cuts against Australian values like a fair go, and would 're-racialise' Australian society or the Australian constitution. How does the Yes campaign respond to that concern?
One common response is to point out that the Australian constitution already mentions race, so this can't re-racialise it. This is technically true - parliament only has enumerated powers in Australia, and section 51.xxxvi explicitly allows parliament to make laws on the basis of the race. However, by convention that power is almost never used, and No voters worried about race seem like they would oppose that section anyway. Moreover, the fact that section 51.xxxvi exists is obviously not a carte blanche to pass any racial law whatsoever. If there were a referendum to reintroduce the White Australian Policy and the No campaign claimed it's racist, pointing out that the constitution already mentions race would not be a defense. So too here. The Yes argument is to pedantically nitpick without at any point addressing the No voter's real conviction - that it's wrong to treat people differently on the basis of a response.
Another common response is to claim that the Voice isn't about race by nitpicking the word 'race'. For instance, here's UniMelb arguing that 'The criterion is indigeneity, not race'. Here's RMIT taking the same line. Here's the Human Rights Commission arguing that the Voice debate shouldn't be made about race, and that 'it's about participation, it's about equity, it's about elevating the position of First Nations' people'. But of course all of this is just irrelevant quibbling. Whether you call it 'race' or 'indigeneity' or 'culture' or 'heritage' it is still unambiguously a proposal to establish a permanent advisory body for a particular group of Australians on the basis of that group's ancestry - on the basis of who their parents and grandparents and so on were. It's still dividing Australians and giving greater representation to some Australians on the basis of something they were born with and did not choose, and that's the thing that the No voter is worried about. James Patterson in that third article says it in so many words: "either way what we are doing is putting into our constitution something that treats people differently because of a characteristic over which they have no control".
And so on for other arguments - it feels like this all the way down. The Yes campaign struggles to understand why anyone would vote No, so the Yes campaign just repeats clichés and slogans and tries to ineffectively obfuscate the nature of the proposal. At some point the fact is just that it's a proposal to give special additional representation to people whose ancestors were Aboriginal, and the Australian public don't like that idea.
Honestly, the all-to-all-people approach worked for Brexit. But in this case, one side (Remain) had a coherent, positive vision of what would be won, while the Voice referendum has inconsistency and emptiness on both sides. This is probably naturally conducive to the status quo.
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