How do we save The Voice?

With a whimper not a bang

Photo by Andy Makely on Unsplash

In a new advertisement promoting a “Yes” vote in next month’s referendum, an indigenous boy wonders if he’ll grow up in a country that hears his voice. 

“Will I live as long as other Australians?” he asks. “Will I get to go to a good school?” 

The ad is a hopeful sign that the brains trust behind the thus far abysmal campaign for constitutional change have finally seen past their own vanity.

Video: the newly released ad for Yes23

For my overseas readers: next month Australians must vote “Yes” or “No” on changing the Constitution to enshrine an indigenous “voice,” a body that would advise the parliament and government “on matters relating to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.” This is a proposed reform about process in the hope of doing better on the substance of tackling entrenched disadvantage in indigenous communities. 

An earlier “Yes” ad featured John Farnham’s iconic song “You’re the Voice.” You’d think this coup alone was going to clinch it, if the accompanying hype was anything to go by. The ad ended in tears; my tears, certainly, as a nostalgic Gen X’er susceptible to flattery. Opening with black-and-white footage of the successful 1967 referendum allowing the Commonwealth Government to legislate for indigenous Australians, sprinting through pivotal moments of national leadership and pride as witnessed in the lounge room of a typical Aussie family, growing larger with each decade, all against the soundtrack of Farnsey’s rousing ballad, a song lodged in my subconscious ever since its release in 1986, when I was 17, and exploring the potential of my own power. 

I blubbered: so what? I was always going to be a “Yes” voter. I’m not convinced of the Voice beyond a shadow of a doubt, just satisfied that the case “for” outweighs the most legitimate of the arguments against. Yes, I understand the ad was supposed to galvanise and mobilise people like me, the already converted. But I wondered about the still-to-convinced; the people less moved by appeals to align with the Right Side of History. Did the You’re the Voice ad merely leave them cold — or worse? Irritated? Defensive? 

Video: the “You’re the Voice” ad released two weeks ago

To those of you leaning No, either from a conservative or leftist perspective — stick with me here. This piece is less about the merits of the Voice itself than about how we talk about the Voice. By “we” I mean the politically-engaged “progressive” class who must persuade the disengaged class of the righteousness of our causes — and utterly suck at the task.

We no longer know how to persuade, the muscle weakened from disuse in an age of media fragmentation, political polarisation and the corrosive influence of “no-debate” wokeism. It is sheer laziness, for instance, when Government ministers seeking to debunk some of the No camp’s arguments wave around like a talisman the term “misinformation,” a term so misused and weaponised that even when appropriately deployed, the effect is counterproductive.

Support for The Voice has tanked so badly, polls tell us, some Labor MPs are privately conceding it would take a “miracle” to turn sentiment around. Ominously in today’s Guardian Essential poll 42 per cent of respondents report being a “hard” no, although 29 per cent appear open to persuasion.

As with Trump’s 2016 win and Brexit, the dividing line on the Voice is education. Last week’s Resolve poll showed that while support for the constitutional amendment is at 54 percent among university-educated Australians, those without a degree are 61 per cent against, and tradies 65 per cent against. Meanwhile, in the crucial 35 to 54 age group support for “Yes” is only 42 per cent; these people are busy raising families during a cost of living crisis and don’t feel their voices are being heard at all. 

And the more we turn up the volume — amplifying the “Yes” message in Big W stores, bleating out the song time and again — the more pissed off they get. The “soft Noes” live in the outer-suburbs and regions where the foot-soldiers for both Yes and No are “least present,” the pollster Kos Samaras tweeted a week ago. Samaras’ RedBridge Group does not advise either camp; his running commentary of What’s Going Wrong is compulsory reading. 

“Honestly, most are not that into the whole debate,” he explains. The soft-Noes express “empathy” for indigenous Australians, and would happily endorse recognising them in the Constitution if that were the only question being asked — it’s the reference to the body advising “executive government” that’s thrown them. After all, Samaras reminds us, more than 60 per cent of Australians supported the Voice at the start of the year. 

What’s gone wrong? Everything that was going to go wrong considering the playing field was from the outset skewed against Yes: the steep electoral bar requiring a majority of voters in a majority of states, the innately conservative electorate. Then factor in the more-than-foreseeable absence of bi-partisanship from the leader of the Opposition, the inevitable sowing of doubt and fear by the No campaign, and the disinhibited bigotry on social media poisoning our public discourse.

And then tell me with a straight face that on this skewed playing field the Yes camp was going to find the discipline and self-restraint not to take the bait and accuse their opponents of racism, not to further alienate the people they need to convince by insinuating they’re a “basket of deplorables,” Hillary Clinton’s infamous, and fatal, slur on Trump fans. 

I’m not even referring to long-time indigenous advocate Marcia Langton, engulfed in a firestorm of criticism for claiming many of the No camp’s arguments were rooted in “base racism” or “just sheer stupidity” and that Hard No voters are the ones “spewing the racism.” While the off-script remarks, made on separate occasions, are certainly unhelpful, she has otherwise maintained a forensic and dignified poise. Considerable effort seems to have gone into excavating her comments for “gotcha” purposes. 

No, I’m referring more to what passes as persuasion in the union movement. The Victorian Trades Hall Council’s thousands of volunteers were explicitly instructed to convince voters that the anti-Voice movement is punching down on indigenous voters, and “seeking to divide the working class” — an observation all but guaranteed to divide the working class. The working class has every reason to be sceptical of a campaign where corporate Australia leads the chorus; no less its villain of the moment, Alan Joyce, whose lasting legacy at the helm of Australia’s national carrier — apart from his personal fortune — is laying to rest any lingering illusion of Qantas being even modestly invested in the national interest.

Now Joyce is poised to take the reins at the Sydney Theatre Company because Australia’s cultural elite doesn’t care how much bosses short-change customers and screw over workers as long as they emote about all the right-on things.

Listen, I’m not denying the vexed conundrum here; as Katharine Murphy observed in in the weekend’s Guardian, the nation is debating a proposal to combat inequities that are a legacy of racism. Yet, “we end up in the ludicrous situation where the only politically acceptable way to combat racism at a structural level involves never expressing frustration about racism just in case someone weaponises community discomfort about racism against the group experiencing it.” 

And yet what to do when the denialist talking points, such as colonisation being all good because it brought running water, themselves come from indigenous elders, in this instance from Senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price? Dismiss her as an Aunty Tom? Now there’s a racist trope if ever there was one.

This is a partisan dog-fight, that’s all. One for which the Government and Yes campaign managed to be unprepared. They thought they could fudge the detail on how the Voice will work and persuade the public simply on “the vibe of the thing” — and even the vibe was the wrong one. 

Because the soaring appeal to national sentiment was always discordant with assurances the Voice is but a modest tweak to our democratic infrastructure, nothing to get worked up about. As Anthony Albanese likes to stress the Uluru Statement from the Heart is a “generous” offer from indigenous Australia: “It’s a hand out, just saying please, hold it .. That’s all people are asking for.” 

Though here too I have to ask: when has the assurance, “really, I’m offering you a generous price,” ever closed a deal? And I don’t think Albanese’s characterising the Voice as “generous” properly captures what’s at stake here. Sure, according to one frame of reference, the Voice is “generous” for its implied acquiescence to the legitimacy of a settler state. But we might also see the proposal less as an offer than as a demand from indigenous Australia to assume responsibility — a theme most powerfully articulated by indigenous leader and Voice architect, Noel Pearson — as a wish to break the cycle of helplessness, blame and recrimination. 

Photo by Hussein Abdullah on Unsplash

How it should be done

To change “the vibe” on the Voice we need to meet the soft-Noes where they’re at, as the cliché goes. And of all the entreaties I’ve read in recent times none bests a widely-shared column published earlier this month in the tabloid The Daily Telegraph.

The author, Joe Hildebrand, delivers a masterclass in persuasion. 

His piece is headlined “Reasons you can just vote Yes and get on with your lives.” Immediately, we sense a drop in the emotional register, the tamping down of soaring rhetoric. And frankly, it’s been the soaring rhetoric, the emoting from white do-gooders, the useless billions spent with the best of intentions that’s kept indigenous Australia on the road to hell. 

Hildebrand refuses to conflate apathy about the Voice with antipathy towards indigenous Australians. Even more startling: he affirms people’s sense of apathy, writing: “There are plenty of people struggling to make ends meet or worried about losing their house who are right to think this is a second order issue at best.” 

He grounds his pitch in the concrete reality of people’s lives; the economically-stressed lives of the soft Noes and of indigenous Australians, who he implies — without stating outright —  are doing it tougher still, “often living in third world conditions, with diseases unheard of elsewhere in the western world, with appalling education and employment outcomes and levels of violence and deprivation few of us in the suburbs could survive, let alone tolerate.”

Notice his list omits the disproportionately high rates of indigenous incarceration — something we hear about often because it’s stark evidence of disadvantage. But the incarceration theme also leads some people to hear an excuse for criminality and the undermining of individual responsibility. Hildebrand instead focuses on the lack of equal opportunity for indigenous people in remote communities; how they start life with the deck stacked against them. This same idea is encapsulated in the new Voice ad with the indigenous child, and not before time. 

As for that other “r” word — “racism” — Hildebrand mentions it not once. 

He addresses the “No” camps arguments without even saying they’re the No camp’s arguments. The Voice is “divisive,” it’s legally unsafe, it should be legislated first as a test run, it’ll lead to reparations — all these he demolishes without a wasted word.

The Voice, he writes, “means nothing to most of us but it means everything to some of us.” Then he brings it home: “And it would be a sorry and senseless shame if those of us for whom it didn’t matter crushed the dreams of those for whom it could mean the world.”

This closing is pure genius. Hildebrand doesn’t try to guilt the working class into caring about the Voice or even into caring about the problems of indigenous people. In fact he aligns himself with his readers, with the phrase, “those of us for whom it didn’t matter.” He simply draws attention to an inequity — the (understandable) apathy of one group against the other’s “dreams” of a better life. He then turns this inequity of feeling into an action, the potential “crushing” of something that could make “a world” of difference to a tiny group of people. 

To the last, Hildebrand keeps the focus on actions and not feelings; on agency and not victimhood. He invites people battling for a sense of control over their lives to see their situation as not entirely dissimilar to that of indigenous people seeking more control over theirs. 

He takes for granted his readers’ basic goodwill, and saves his energy for changing their minds, not giving a damn about whether they come away thinking he’s a good bloke.

Hildebrand’s column ought to be the prototype for the Yes campaign from here on. The powers-that-be should put a copy of it in every letterbox. 

Because atheist though I am, miracles can happen, underdogs can win, public sentiment can shift as suddenly as the weather. Fatalism is yet another prerogative of the privileged. 

We have four weeks.