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The ABC's called it: the Australian referendum to enshrine special Aboriginal representation in the Constitution has utterly failed. They needed a majority nationally and a majority in four of the six states; they've gotten at last count 41% (possibly less; pre-polls are counted last, and while I wasn't expecting it they seem to have more No than the on-the-day vote) of the national vote and have lost in all six of the states (again, I was expecting Tasmania and/or Victoria to buck the trend - Victoria being the most urbanised Australian state, with 75% of its population in the state capital of Melbourne, and Tasmania having a long tradition of hippie-ism and being the birthplace of the Greens; they were also polling the highest Yes).
Most of the Yes campaigners - at least, those the ABC talked to - seem to be going with the line of "the No campaign was misinformation and this doesn't count because they were tricked"*. That's wrong (there were a few people with crazy ideas, of course, but for the most part what the SJers are decrying as "misinformation" is true or plausible), but it's at least wrong about a dry fact and not nearly as divisive as going "this proves Australia's a racist country".
The result does seem to have emboldened people to actually stand up against SJ; Opposition Leader Peter Dutton was very hesitant to go with No (though he eventually did), but in his speech upon hearing the result he specifically said that this result was Australians rejecting activists' claims.
At-least-partial credit to @OliveTapenade, who said:
...the last time we discussed this on theMotte. They mostly seem to be leaning on "ignorant" rather than "racist", but yes, they're saying "this demonstrates need for Truth".
*NB: this doesn't, for the moment, include Prime Minister Anthony Albanese; all he's said on the matter of "why No" IIRC is that referenda never succeed without bipartisan support.
One of the things that was remarkable about this campaign was how overwhelming the Yes campaign's resources were. Over the course of the campaign I saw ads and billboards and people handing out pamphlets and even a choir promoting the Yes case. In comparison I saw exactly one (1) bumper sticker for No and nothing else. At the polling booth there were half a dozen volunteers for Yes and the whole fence was blanketed with their signage while No had one guy with one sign. And I've heard there were other polling places that didn't even have that.
I really wish people would learn that all this campaign paraphernalia is completely worthless, and arguably counterproductive. It was extremely clear the people with money and power wanted a Yes victory, but that doesn't actually convince anyone.
The proposal was the result of starting with the idea of putting Aboriginals in the constitution and then jerry-rigging it into an advisory body after people complained that they wanted something practical, but also trying not to do anything concrete or specific that could offend someone. It was a mess of an idea and really someone should have had the balls to stop this process before it got to this point instead of shunting off the responsibility of putting it down to the voting public.
I don't feel any joy in this result, though it's the outcome I voted for. We've had a bunch of angst and drama for no gain, and it seems clear no one is going to learn anything from the experience. All the talking heads are busy convincing themselves that the problem is somehow the sales job and not the product. No one is even thinking to ask if maybe it just wasn't a bit implausible that you needed a constitutional amendment to create an advisory committee, or that an advisory committee was going to somehow fix all the massive problems Aboriginal Australia faces. Maybe we just need to lecture people not to be racist harder next time. Yeah, that'll work.
The amount of resources there are behind progressive politics is pretty much always immense, basically every influential institution was supporting Yes. At the entrance of my train station, there were Yes campaigners outside for days, handing out flyers to people. Even bodies that should strictly be impartial such as local governments (City of Sydney) were putting up advertisements all over the place telling people to support the Voice, which is frankly inappropriate and clearly overstepping the bounds of their ambit. As you note, it ended up being very clear that this was not some grassroots campaign for change, but a well-funded, dominant group filled with people who have an overwhelming influence over what the public gets to hear and see.
It's also very clear that the well-funded progressive elite, the people who populate the opinion-setting parts of the media, academia, and various other institutions, have hugely lost touch with the rest of the country and simply don't care to listen to them. Then every single time people turn against their policies, there always seems to be such a great amount of surprise and dismay that people would disagree with them, and a knee-jerk assumption that the reason for lack of support can simply be chalked up to stupidity or racism. Perhaps some of it is performative, but I do think that they really believe it.
From the descriptions of the amount of resources thrown behind the yes campaign(eg people handing out fliers in train stations for days) it almost sounds more like it was people who don’t have day jobs.
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Well, why should they listen to the opinions of a mass of inferior peasants, if they "really believe" those opinions are driven by stupidity and racism? If you have power, why not enforce the objectively correct and moral position over the objections of the ignorant and the wicked?
The issue is that this kind of rhetoric and behaviour only really helps you gain status within a peer group that already agrees with you, it doesn't help get people on board. It may be fashionable to dehumanise your outgroup and form representations of them as evil and stupid that justify not listening to them or trying to sympathise with their concerns. But the reality is that if you fail to try and properly understand the rest of the country, and form caricatures of them that simply do not align with how they really think and act, you're almost certainly not going to be able to convince them nor will you be able to convert people to be in favour of your policy proposals.
The entire Yes campaign has seemed to believe that the morality of an indigenous Voice is so self-evident that they don't even need to try and form much of a coherent argument in favour of why it's a good decision (well, outside of empty sympathy-mongering, sloganeering and other such tactics that attempt to substitute actual argument for emotional appeal, I believe @OliveTapenade has covered that topic in detail in this thread and in previous ones too).
One of the main arguments I see in favour of the Voice is that Indigenous outcomes are poor, it's the fault of whites and therefore Something Needs To Be Done. But even accepting the premise that the Indigenous deserve something, it doesn't answer the question of why what they deserve is a constitutionally mandated lobbying group that exists to promote their interests and their interests alone (especially considering the failure of ATSIC to solve these problems and how it became a corrupt, mismanaged fuckfest). Australia pumps lots of money into Indigenous causes all the time, does this not already constitute help? It's also unclear why providing help even requires any amount of differential treatment based on race at all (if the Indigenous are disproportionately poor, any policy focusing on socioeconomic status instead of ethnicity will also disproportionately help the Indigenous while also not neglecting other Australians in need). The woke arguments simply have not addressed these issues and do not stand up to this kind of scrutiny. Regurgitating empty platitudes about "listening to people affected" are not arguments, they are slogans, and not particularly convincing ones either.
The reality is that it's not as clear cut as they think, and their failure to make sensible arguments in favour of the policy or properly acknowledge the arguments of their opponents drives home to people just how intellectually vacuous the argument in favour of the proposal is and has always been. It really seems like Yes just can't conceive of reasons why one would vote No, and instead of actually dealing with the core-level issues inherent to the proposal they are supporting it mainly on vibes alone.
This is what I mean when I say they have "hugely lost touch with the rest of the country". Of course, I won't interrupt my enemies in the middle of making a mistake.
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So what? So long as you have your fellow elites on board, you can just use your power as elites to force what you want on the powerless peasant masses. You don't need to "convince" or "convert" the peasant masses, just find ways to punish them for being ignorant bigots and voting wrong until enough of them eventually vote your way — assuming that, as it seems to be in this case, that you can't just impose your goals through the permanent bureaucracy, courts, academic consensus, or other such powerful institutions more insulated from democratic feedback.
"Democracy" is, and always has been, more of a sham than a reality. Society is always ruled by a small elite, and that elite always ends up getting their way, and the masses are pretty much always just powerless peasants who can do nothing but submit. Why should lords, with their superior breeding and wisdom, bother to listen to the ignorant opinions of dirty, stupid peasants, as opposed to just whipping the low-born curs into compliance?
Probably the wrong time to be making this claim, seeing as the powerless peasant masses just beat the elites handily.
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Does the evidence pan out there? The impulse to avoid shame and being seen as part of a low-status group seems quite strong (e.g. I'd consider it the finisher of old school internet atheism, "in this moment, I'm ecstatic" or how that one went), and I don't know if the current Moral Majority was ever particularly more conciliatory on the path to its present degree of mass support. (If you do accept them as the descendants of the hippies of yore, they were already calling their outgroup fascists back in the late sixties!)
A lot probably depends on how many members of their remaining opposition still subscribe to their status hierarchy, and either side has a correct feel for this figure.
I remember once watching a rerun of an episode of Dragnet — which ran back in the 50s — with a couple of proto-hippy California college students calling Joe Friday a "fascist pig."
Or how many notables among their remaining opposition can be subjected to sufficient negative consequences as to make others among the opposition switch sides out of fear of the same — "Kill the chicken to scare the monkey" and such.
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The standard reply to this was, "This is what they asked for."
If you suggest that a legislated Voice would do, the reply is to note that the Uluru Statement asks for 'a First Nations Voice enshrined in the Constitution'. To counter with any other suggestion would be patronising and even racist, whitefellas once again failing to listen and telling Aboriginals what's good for them.
You might ask the question whether or not the Uluru Statement actually reflects the desires of most indigenous people. You might also argue that democracy is inherently a process of deliberation and compromise between different interest groups and there is nothing clearly racist about replying to a suggestion with, "We don't think that's practical at the time, but here are some alternatives that meet you halfway." However, I think the Yes campaign was very hung up on the idea that this is definitely the one thing that Aboriginal people asked for, and that it is so fundamentally reasonable that no one could possibly object to it. Both those ideas seem blinkered to me.
Ironically, at the time in 2017, Malcolm Turnbull's response was to say that "the government does not believe such a radical change to our constitution’s representative institutions has any realistic prospect of being supported by a majority of Australians in a majority of states". Despite being roundly criticised for that at the time, six years on it appears that he was entirely correct. Perhaps the drafters of the Uluru Statement might have done better to do some listening of their own, and consider what Turnbull - a sympathetic politician - was telling them was practically possible.
I'd add that what people deserve is a matter that is able to be litigated, not a matter that is unilaterally decided by the beneficiary and that everyone else is obligated to blindly agree with. Making "what people asked for" the basis for one's reasoning is untenable, as even in a situation where someone has been wronged and everyone agrees they deserve compensation there are indeed requests that can be made which are unreasonable or disproportionate or just plain impractical. Just because you deserve something doesn't necessarily mean you deserve to get what you want. And these are holes that can be poked even after one has assumed that the progressive framing of poor Indigenous outcomes is correct, and I don't.
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Are we sure this is not due to some Russian trickery with the elections?
As we know, it's not real democracy if the people vote for the opposite of what the establishment want them to.
Surely Trump/MAGA/QAnon must be involved somehow! 😀
The Sydney Morning Herald helpfully reports:
Anti-Voice rallies organised by pro-Putin conspiracy theorist
Putin strikes again.
I wish I was ten percent as competent as the left believes Putin is.
So does Putin.
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