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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.
The letter says that there was a lot of misinformation/disinformation about the referendum and the mainstream media was complicit in this by showing both sides. Is Australia's media really like this?
I mean I have no doubt that there's probably a lot of partisan media but I'm wondering how true this is because my exposure has usually left me thinking that media there is about as left-leaning as America's.
Anyway, it's probably a good thing they went for that invective though if you don't want the pending disinformation bill to pass. I'd bet if that letter was a lot softer they could convince a lot more people that "a 'false sense of balance' over facts." needs some agency to force the media to make rules to be policed.
No, Australia's media is not like this. It's similar to America in terms of its partisan split (a large centre-left blob with some right wing counter-outlets), but less extreme and much more responsible in terms of the accuracy of its reporting. Most of the complaints about "misinformation" in the voice referendum refer to arguments like "this will divide us by race" - e.g. David Speers tried to nail down Julian Leeser on the Insiders program to "admit" that this was misinformation. But of course it's an entirely reasonable argument.
And of course the Yes campaign engaged in plenty of misinformation of their own, for example by touting that 80% of indigenous voters were in favour of the voice - relying on out of date polls from January-March while recent ones found the numbers were more like 59%.
The sheer nebulousness of the Yes case made it hard to directly misinform, too. So many of the 'X is misinformation' articles I saw were of the 'The No campaign's speculative rebuttal of a potential aspect of the Voice is inaccurate since we've yet to establish what the Voice actually is/does'
This whole debacle sounds like an episode of
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I did feel that the Yes campaign came off as... a bit slimy, if that makes sense? Big on claimed moral authority, but not very willing to nail down specific points. It felt like being asked to vote not so much on a specific proposal, but on the vibe of the thing.
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