The Voice. One year on.

You haven’t heard from me for a few weeks because I’ve been working away on my book about the Voice referendum and its meaning for Australia.  It will be published in the first half of next year by Connor Court.

A year ago on Monday, 60% of Australians voted for all Australians to be equal.  We did so in the face of a Yes campaign that had the overwhelming support of the media, big business, religious organisations, civil society, and elite opinion.  Not to mention Yes had four times the funding of the No campaign.  And not to forget the efforts of the social media companies, the federal government’s eSafety Commissioner, and ‘Fact Check’ organisations that attempted to censor and control what the No case could say.  Yet…despite all of this, equality still won.  Australia has had 45 referendums.  Never has a side in a referendum been supported like Yes, and never has a side been so comprehensively defeated.

Fraser Nelson, who was then the editor of the UK Spectator, was in Australia last year at the time of the referendum.  As an outsider he had an interesting perspective on what was happening. Fraser wrote this the day after the vote.

I’m in Sydney for the Voice referendum result – and it’s already over.  No has won, by what looks like to be a 60/40 margin… Aussies have voted to protect the principle of everyone being equal before the law and in parliament.

It’s hard to describe what the campaign has been like here.  Corporates embraced Yes and advised their staff to vote accordingly (some have offered a day off work on Monday, to mourn the result).  Sydney is draped in Yes flags put on flagpoles by the city authorities.  I spent results night with a friend whose daughter had been given a Yes badge by her school to wear in class.  The pressure was huge but the public refused to relent – and by a resounding margin.

[Bess Price, Jacinta’s Price’s mother on election night] gave an extraordinary speech, saying the vote showed that Australians had said ‘said no’ to the ‘gaslighting, the bullying and the manipulation’ that the No supporters had been subjected to.  The vote was a rejection of the idea that Australia had an original sin to absolve.  ‘We are absolutely not a racist country’, she said.

The gap Australia needs to worry about is not between indigenous and non-indigenous people, she said: the Aboriginal middle classes ‘are doing very well for themselves’.  The gap to focus on, she said, is that between the most marginalised and everyone else.

The Voice referendum is one of the milestone events in Australian political history.  It’s hugely significant for many reasons.  It revealed that the overwhelming majority of Australians reject the progressive, left-wing agenda being imposed upon them by the country’s elites.  It’s an agenda Australians don’t want and have never asked for – yet it seems to continue apace.  It’s too early to tell whether the Voice referendum result will be a roadblock to identity politics becoming a permanent feature of Australia’s politics and public life or whether it will be merely a speed hump.  There are many parallels between the Voice result in Australia and the outcome of the Brexit referendum in the UK in 2016.  The British Tories failed utterly to understand the meaning of the Brexit vote and to take advantage of it and use the mandate of the British people to create a new policy and cultural agenda.  Part of the explanation is that two-thirds of the Tory cabinet at the time was against Brexit.  In Australia, some Liberals seem apologetic about the Voice result.

To coincide with the first anniversary of the referendum, the Institute of Public Affairs last week released its analysis of a survey commissioned with Advance, of referendum voters conducted last year.  The survey, ‘Australians Speak 2023’, conducted by one of Australia’s leading market research firms, Insightfully asked 3,526 Australians some 40 questions about their vote.  It’s the most detailed survey of its kind, and its findings correspond with two other surveys taken after the referendum by the Centre for Social Research and Methods at the Australian National University and by the Australian Population Research Institute.

In The Australian week, Janet Albrechtsen wrote about the report of the survey ‘The Voice: Why Australians voted to be equal’. Her comments from a few days before the vote are quoted in the report.

If the referendum fails, equality will be the single idea that did most to defeat the proposal to set up a race-based boy in the Constitution with special rights not accorded to non-Indigenous Australians.

And this is precisely what Australians Speak 2023 found.   70% of Australians who voted No said they believed the Voice would divide the country.

Other findings from the survey were:

• Even with bipartisan support the Voice would have failed.
• Big business and elite support for the Voice likely increased support for No.
• More than a third of Labor voters voted No.
• A significant proportion of young Australians voted No, and a majority of males in all age groups voted No.
• Social media was the biggest influence on young Australians.  Mainstream news media was the biggest influence on older Australians.
• The leaders of the No campaign had significantly higher profiles and approval ratings than the leaders of the Yes campaign.
• Despite the defeat of the Voice, there remains majority support for Indigenous recognition.

This reality doesn’t match the story Yes advocates are still telling themselves a year after the vote.  In an interview in The Australian Financial Review last week, Megan Davis continued to blame the defeat of the referendum on ‘false claims and racist attacks about the Voice’s powers’.  Nothing could be further from the truth and Davis’ attitude perhaps explains why the Voice lost so comprehensively.  In the words – not of the IPA – but of the ANU study:

The data suggests that Australians voted no because they didn’t want division and remain sceptical of rights for some Australians that are not held by others.

Amongst those who voted no, the factor that was most likely to be given as very important was concern about dividing the country.  This was given by 66.1 per cent of no voters.

In that same interview, Davis claimed time would eventually favour Yes.  ‘You have a really dramatic change 10 years ahead from now, because all the Baby Boomers are gone, and our multicultural brothers and sisters are going to overtake the Australian-born population.  We are on the cusp.  We thought we were on that wave, but we weren’t  We’re on the tail end of old, white Australia.’  Again – Davis is wrong.  Australians born overseas were more likely to vote No than Australians born in the country.

The Yes campaign was relying on strong Yes vote from young Australians.  While a majority of those 18 to 24 years old voted Yes (59%), it was not quite as overwhelming as the Yes campaign had hoped.  Some Yes supporters had been talking about a 90% Yes vote from that age group.  The difference between how males and females voted in this age group couldn’t be more stark.  55% of males between 18 and 24 voted No, while 74% of females of that age voted Yes.  For those aged between 25 and 34, 55% of males voted No, and 59% of females voted Yes.  In the age groups over 35, a majority of both males (63%) and females (54%) voted No.

The claim that most young people are ‘progressive’ is disproved by Australians Speak 2023.  Nothing in the data shows the Coalition ‘must move left’ to appeal to younger voters.  If anything, to get the youth vote, the Coalition should be more conservative, not less.  While 55% of 18 to 24-year-old men and 26% of women voted No, at the 2022 federal election, only 34% of men and 15% of women in that age group voted for the Coalition.  The Labor vote in this age group was not significantly different from the Coalition vote, and in fact, more young men voted for the Coalition than for Labor (27%) while 17% of young women voted Labor.  But more young women (59%) voted for the Greens than for the Coalition and Labor combined, while only 22% of young men voted Greens.

The Voice referendum will be discussed and argued about for years to come – as it should be.  We lived through some history.  Many conclusions can be drawn from what happened and here are three.

• Ideas matter

The case for No was simple and moral.  It was that all Australians should be equal.  It’s not often that a matter of principle is on the ballot paper (or, in this case, a referendum paper), but it was on 14 October 2023.

• Democracy won

In parliament in September 2023, Anthony Albanese said:

…every major business in Australia is supporting the Yes campaign.  Woolworths, Coles, Telstra, BHP, Rio Tinto, the Business Council of Australia, the Catholic Church, the Imams Council, the Australian Football League, the National Rugby League, Rugby Australia, and Netball Australia are all supporting the Yes campaign in this referendum.

But for all that, Australians thought for themselves and made up their own minds.

• Leadership counts

No matter how powerful the message, it requires a messenger.  The No campaign had a powerful message and two powerful messengers, Jacinta Nampijinpa Price and Nyunggai Warren Mundine.

Outside of the leaders of the two major political parties, Price had the highest profile of anyone involved in the referendum campaign, followed by Lidia Thorpe and Mundine.  77% of Australians had heard of Price, a first-term senator from the Northern Territory who had been in parliament less than twelve months before becoming the shadow minister for Indigenous Australians.  68% of Australians had heard of Mundine.

While there was no one single turning point or decisive event of the campaign, Price’s speech to the National Press Club in Canberra on 14 September 2023 stands out as an example of her willingness to speak out and not take a backward step when confronting the narrative around the Yes case. Price criticised Indigenous organisations that attempted to ‘demonise colonial settlement in its entirety and nurture a national self-loathing about the foundations of modern Australian achievement’. When asked ‘Do you believe the history of colonisation continues to have an impact on some Indigenous Australians? Price replied, ‘No. I’ll be honest with you, no. I don’t think so.’ She went on to say that Australia’s democracy was the envy of the world, which is why ‘migrants flock to Australia to call Australia home’.

You can read ‘The Voice: Why Australians voted to be equal’ here.

Thank you for your support.

kind regards John