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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.
Well, it was an exciting night.
It was a very solid result. Antony Green called it at 7:24 PM AEST, only 84 minutes after polls closed in the eastern states. Polls were still open in WA at the time the result was known. I'd say this is about the best result No could have hoped for - they crested 60% nationally, and achieved a full, six-state sweep. That's about the same margin of victory that same-sex marriage had back in 2017, except this was more difficult. SSM was a plebiscite (i.e. optional voting), not compulsory voting like this referendum, and SSM was overwhelmingly supported by media, government, academia, and so on. For No to achieve the same margin of victory with the entire population, and going against the will of the elite blob, is very impressive.
I'd like to suggest, though, that the No campaign not take too much credit for it. There are now Yes leaders specifically blaming the No campaign for the result - Marcia Langton is predictably blaming disinformation - but I'm not sure that's accurate. Even leaving aside that, as you correctly note, the refrain of "misinformation!" was itself sufficiently questionable, some might even say dishonest, as to qualify as misinformation, we have to reckon with the relative lack of power and reach of the No campaign.
Anecdotally - I'm from a Victorian electorate that went No with around a 53-47 margin. Yet the No campaign had almost no public presence here. Yes yard signs were relatively common. I visited two different polling booths on the day, and both had Yes signage and highly engaged Yes campaigners handing out flyers, but no No campaigners. Businesses put up large Yes signs in their windows and by their doors, but there was no equivalent for No. The Voice campaigns, on both institutional and grassroots levels, may be examples of Hanania's theory about cardinal preferences. For better or for worse, the Yes campaign seemed more organised and had a louder voice.
To step beyond the anecdotal for a second, just glancing at the endorsements is striking - Yes had so many more endorsements, including five out of six state premiers, a huge number of professional associations, pretty much every sporting club, all the big banks, almost every religious institution and charity, even the grocery stores. Financially, in terms of ad spend, Yes spent far more money than No did. Given the relative weakness of the No campaign compared to Yes, if the conclusion is indeed that Yes failed to get their message across in the face of opposition, then Yes must have been punching considerably under their weight.
Money aside, the No campaign does strike me as having been more effective than Yes, though. They were running a 'fear and uncertainty' strategy, but that was probably the right call for them. People vote No for a huge number of different reasons, and No doesn't need a one-size-fits-all argument. In general, however, they found a few central arguments (the Voice will divide Australians on the basis of race; the Voice is a vehicle for radical activists; the Voice is expensive and wasteful; the Voice is legally risky) and pushed them clearly enough. The No cause, if not the campaign, also did a good job presenting Aboriginal people themselves as harbouring legitimate differences of view about this. Remember that most Australians do not see or interact with Aboriginal people on a regular basis, so probably most people's image of Aboriginals is coming from media representation. The fact that this referendum made us all familiar with prominent Aboriginals in every camp - Conservative Nos like Jacinta Price or Warren Mundine, Progressive Nos like Lidia Thorpe or Michael Mansell, and Yeses like Marcia Langton, Noel Pearson, or Thomas Mayo - effectively disarmed the Yes campaign line that "this is what Aboriginal people asked for". (Even on polling day I saw Yes placards touting the claim that 80% of Aboriginal people support Yes - a figure that was known to be false at the time.)
The Yes campaign, on the other hand, badly struggled to make its case. I feel that one of its major issues was the inability to imagine the mindset of someone who disagrees or has doubts, and they often resorted to clichés. "If you listen to people you get better outcomes" is so generic as to be uncontroversial, but it doesn't speak to why a constitutionally-enshrined Voice is necessary for that. In other cases I felt they never quite reached the point - they argued that it should be constitutionally-enshrined so that governments can't get rid of it, but given that bodies like ATSIC were abolished with bipartisan support, it seems as though there might have been popular support for abolishing past bodies that failed. It's not clear why we should want to give up the power to abolish a body if it isn't working.
In other places I feel they fell for the fact-checker's fallacy - that if you can quibble the factual accuracy of a statement, that's somehow going to win an argument. I've talked about the way the argument went around race before - if you're responding to someone worried that it's wrong to divide Australians on the basis of something they can't control, like their race or their ancestral background, nitpicking "indigeneity is different to race" or "the word 'race' is already in the constitution" is going to be ineffective.
But overall I feel their biggest failure was, in a sense, typical-minding the entire country. It's understandable that Yes supporters have positive affect around the idea of Yes, but obviously other people don't, so appeals to moral righteousness or attempts to guilt-trip people aren't going to be effective. Take statements like this - McManus and Albanese ask for Australians to be 'decent', to 'show what a wonderful country this is', to 'show kindness', to show 'generosity of spirit', and so on. But anybody who believes that voting Yes is the decent, kind, or generous thing to do is already a Yes voter! You have to win over people who don't believe that! Anecdotally I had Yes-supporting friends telling me things like, "Ask yourself the old question, what would Jesus do?", apparently seeing it as obvious that that leads to a Yes vote. But it doesn't.
This is a refrain I make a lot of the time, but things are not obvious. I think the Yes campaign thought that Yes was obvious. But it wasn't.
My understanding is that this would be a bit like calling a US presidential election for the democrats when California hadn’t finished counting; California/WA has such predictable partisanship that you don’t really have to actually check.
It's not exactly like that - they didn't assume anything about what the WA result would be.
To pass, the referendum needed a 'double majority'. That means both a national popular majority (i.e. over 50% of all voters nationwide) and a majority of states (i.e. at least four of the six states need to vote over 50% in favour).
Polls closed at 6 PM in the eastern states, and results started coming in quickly. Tasmania and New South Wales were both rapidly called for No, and then South Australia was called for No shortly after. By that point, three states had voted No, which made it impossible for a majority of states to vote Yes. At that point even if literally every single voter in WA voted Yes, it would not have made a difference.
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Do you mind if I ask if your friends were actually Christian themselves? I'm try to gauge how common these sorts of arguments are made by the agnostic and atheist.
Most people irl who say things like that are at least nominally Christian, although often not true believers. It’s only on the internet that there’s an epidemic of atheists using that argument for spurious reasons.
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The person who told me that specifically was an old family friend who I'm close to via church. She's the local organist, and I sometimes preach and lead worship. So we're both Christians. That said, she is an extremely progressive Christian, whereas I'm more traditional, so we do have our theological disagreements. It would probably be fair to call her a churchgoing agnostic.
Thanks for this detail.
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I don't disagree, particularly, on the No campaign per se, although I don't know all that much about it since my main source is the ABC which didn't want to talk about it very much (I suppose that's evidence in its own right). On the other hand, there are two people who I'd say do get quite a lot of the credit (or the blame, I suppose, depending on your allegiance) - Pauline Hanson and Peter Dutton. Hanson and One Nation did the hard work of being the first to say "no", which started an honest-to-God respectability cascade, and Dutton's JAQ and insistence on the booklets were masterful. I'm not saying I endorse Dutton's strategy - more Machiavellian than I'd like - but it was very effective (looking at the polling shows a pretty-clear effect from the booklets).
I think Jacinta Price did more than anyone. The fact that she was against it so strongly and so early, was able to articulate the reasons why so well, and was visibly Aboriginal herself was in my view a major factor in getting the Nationals and then the Liberals to commit to a No position.
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