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Notes -
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 suggestion that occurs me, particularly as regards strategy, is this note:
I'm sure we've had discussion before of how excessive deference to identitarian concerns comes at the expense of competence of merit - this might be a good example of that.
But it's also potentially a good example of how celebrity or ego-driven campaigns can fail. Foreigners might not recognise them, but Noel Pearson, Marcia Langton, and Megan Davis are very prominent names that any Australian who's been paying a moderate amount of attention to indigenous issues would recognise. All three of them have been active in the field for decades.
However, the way the world looks from the relatively small world of professional Aboriginal activism - Pearson and Davis are lawyers specialising in indigenous issues, and Langton is a full-time activist - can be distorting, or might have contributed to poor judgement of the state of the Australian people. It might have been better for the Yes campaign if politicians or non-indigeneous campaign managers had been able to push back or develop other strategies. But a politics of deference, whether that's deference to Aboriginal people or deference to supposed subject-matter experts, cannot allow that.
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