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Notes -
Following on from the defeat of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice referendum (seriously can we just include Torres Strait Islanders in the definition of "Aboriginal"? The whole phrase is too many words) Aboriginal leaders declared a week of silence to mourn the result.
Alas, all good things must come to an end, and the silence is now over. The leaders of the Yes campaign have published an open letter to the Parliament, and it is salty. So salty that reportedly some people refused to sign on to it - and perhaps that is why it appears without any names attached.
It opens by describing Australia's decision to vote no as "appalling and mean-spirited". It asserts that "It is the legitimacy of the non-Indigenous occupation in this country that requires recognition, not the other way around." It says that "the majority of Australians have committed a shameful act". So on and so forth.
In short, it is very much filled with the sort of resentment and hostility that turns people off, hard. Even on the normally far left /r/australia subreddit, posters are tearing strips off it.
This is of course a terrible time for the Yes campaigners to be acting in this way. With the failure of the Voice, indigenous policy is in a state of flux. The government is licking its wounds and weighing how to respond. These activists could not have made a better argument for why they should be sidelined in those deliberations.
AFAICT 'yes' outspent 'no' by orders of magnitude. Another nail in the coffin for those who think that you can just buy any election.
It's funny because lots of people across the spectrum follow "if you don't know vote no" when it comes to referendums where I live. It caught me totally off guard to see that this was such a vehement point of contention in the Australian referendum.
I'd be very tentative with this. 'Yes' might not have bought this election in particular but the fact there's money being thrown at it means they can continue bargaining. Who knows, maybe one day, unbeknownst to most, this particular issue might go on sale and if one side happens to have money in the pocket it's an easy buy.
I think this is a problem with the right in general where they don't have a positive affirmational stance to rally behind. Instead they lean on the implicit racism of the public. With how hands off the right is with cultural institutions it's just a waiting game until the Overton Window shifts far enough along that the publics implicit racism doesn't cut it. Or, of course, the demographics shift in such a way that the Abbo rallying cry gets carried along in a coalition of ascendent minority groups.
Your framing is basically backwards. People can be marginally swayed by advertising. The diminishing returns set in early. The issue will not "come up for sale" but people indeed may change their minds for exogenous reasons, at which point spending billions will still be a waste.
Of course, it benefits nobody in the political machine to notice that campaign spending is largely wasted.
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