Lessons From the Voice Campaign

By Sherry Sufi

The lessons from the Voice referendum will be discussed for many years to come. The vote on 14 October 2023 was one of the most consequential in Australia’s history. Australians were asked to agree to overturn a fundamental principle of liberal democracy: that all citizens have equal political rights. And 60% of voters said No, instead voting for equality.

In this essay, I discuss three lessons from the Voice. My analysis draws on my experience in both political philosophy and real-life politics, as a long-time Liberal Party member, a candidate in a federal election, a campaign director, convenor of the Liberal Party’s policy forum in Western Australia, and State Coordinator for Fair Australia’s No campaign. Needless to say, like 63% of my fellow West Australians, I voted No.

What’s also clear is that in Australian democracy, vague and untested proposals are likely to struggle for public support, at the constitutional level. The Constitution of Australia is our nation’s founding document. It’s the law that governs all other laws. Although it has been in force since 1 January 1901, when our independent British colonies united to form the Commonwealth of Australia, debates about the constitution’s nature and limits began a decade earlier. Between 1891 and 1898, a series of Constitutional Conventions led to the final draft, after rigorous discussions. While this document was meant to be the ultimate ‘rule book’ for the new country, its founders knew it wouldn’t remain unchanged forever. They understood that times change, as do social norms and political realities. They appreciated that while the Constitution should be difficult to change, it must be able to accept changing circumstances.

The stroke of genius that struck the right balance came with Section 128. According to which, the national rule book could only be changed through the will of the people — via an open referendum — rather than being left to the whims of politicians, and only if the referendum result produced a double majority. This means a majority of all votes and a majority of the states. To date, Australia has held 45 referendums, with only eight passing. This suggests that Australians are not fond of our national rule book being constantly revised. Anyone over forty would remember the 1999 Republic Referendum. That also resulted in a resounding ‘No’ to the question of whether Australia should abandon the British Monarchy and become a Republic with a President as our Head of State.

Talk of potentially amending the constitution to recognise Indigenous Australians had been around for at least a decade before the October 2023 Voice referendum. In the early 2000s, it began as a suggestion to include a reference in the preamble of the constitution to acknowledge Indigenous Australians. This idea met with significant opposition from the conservative side of politics, but a referendum never eventuated. Then, in May 2017, a conference at Uluru shifted the focus from mere recognition to a constitutionally enshrined advisory body, known as The Voice to Parliament. The idea of simply adding a reference in the preamble took a back seat, and momentum began building for this Voice. Yet public awareness that something like this could come to a referendum remained limited in the years following the Uluru conference.

Given that there hadn’t been another referendum since 1999, younger Australians, who were either too young or not yet born at the time, had no experience of what a referendum even involves. Naturally, this proposal caught many people, especially younger voters, by surprise. In the early days, there was little clarity about what the Voice proposal meant or what its long-term consequences might be for the nation. Being well-intentioned and fair-minded, Australians initially leaned towards supporting the ‘Yes’ case, as reflected in early opinion polls. That initial public support was almost a gut reaction nationwide.

Through my involvement in politics over many years, and as the state coordinator for Western Australia for Fair Australia’s No campaign, the Voice referendum and its outcome offer several lessons for the future. These lessons include understanding that opinion polls do not necessarily provide a guide to future voting intentions. Asking people whether they are in favour of a vague concept such as ‘indigenous recognition’ or ‘reconciliation’ will produce a very different answer than asking them whether they believe it is a good idea to change the Constitution to entrench race as a determinant of political rights permanently. The Voice referendum also demonstrated the importance of the quality of leadership in shaping the public debate.

For months before the vote, journalists and political commentators predicted that the Voice would pass because opinion polls indicated a majority of Australians would vote in favour. When the leader of the opposition, Peter Dutton declared the shadow cabinet’s opposition to the proposal, the Voice was polling well above a 50% approval rating in every published survey.

Worshipping opinion polls has often led to some of the most divisive and counter-productive decisions in modern politics. When campaigning, it’s one thing to ignore reliable opinion polls completely, and another to obsess over them as if they’re gospel. The smart move is to take the results with a grain of salt, use them as a rough guide to gauge the mood of some voters, but always believe that with the right strategy and messaging, things can turn around. This sense of optimism is far better than caving under pressure. Even worse is becoming desperate, trying to mimic our opponents by adopting their policies, regardless of our principles, and hoping the public will somehow reward us. Malcolm Turnbull made himself a hostage to fortune when he gave the opinion polls as the reason for his challenge for the Liberal leadership against Tony Abbott in 2015. Turnbull said the Coalition has lost ‘thirty Newspolls in a row’. Turnbull himself was later to lose thirty Newspolls too.

In May 2022, Anthony Albanese became Australia’s 31st Prime Minister and promptly announced his intention to push for this Voice to Parliament. By August of that year, the debate about a potential referendum on the Voice was intensifying in the media. Early on, public support for the Voice was polling at around 66%. Many on both sides thought this would be a repeat of the 2017 postal survey on marriage. It’s in our national DNA as Australians to back the underdog and stand up for a ‘fair go.’ So, whoever manages to convince the public they’re the underdog often has a far better shot at winning the majority. While the marriage postal survey wasn’t a referendum, it was run almost like one, with its campaign advertising and marketing. The Yes case for what was then called marriage equality was supported by 62% of those who voted. So, it wasn’t unreasonable for commentators to think that the same Aussie sense of fairness might deliver a Yes win for the Voice. But as the debate intensified in the months following the 2023 referendum announcement, public support for the Voice steadily declined as the public began to focus on the proposal. Asking voters whether they support a vague concept is not determinative of how they’ll vote when a specific permanent change to the Constitution is put before them.

In February 2023, I wrote in an article for Sky News Australia:

Newspoll results last week revealed that most Australians support the proposal to establish an Indigenous Voice. Yet many have expressed concerns for various reasons. Not the least of which is that we’re a race-blind country where everyone gets the same rights, and the Voice would override this by giving one group special privileges. Those opposed also include some prominent Indigenous Australians. Despite these concerns, it isn’t surprising that the proposal seems to be resonating. We’re a fair-minded mob. It’s built into the national psyche. As early as 1967, almost 91% of Australians voted ‘Yes’ in the referendum to count Indigenous Australians in the census to be able to make laws for them. That win was a shining example of Australian fair-mindedness in an age when even the United States was torn by racial tensions…

Once anything is put to Australians as a question of fairness or equality, we struggle to think of a good reason to oppose it. This is where the ‘Yes’ campaign has a head-start…

If the No campaign is to have a realistic shot at winning, it has to be based on exposing the actual principle itself. It has to be spelt out, this Voice has little to do with fairness or equality. Its underlying principle is that sovereignty was never ceded. Even though Australia was conquered more than a century and a half before the prohibition on territorial acquisitions by right of conquest in the United Nations Charter in 1945. We can’t get behind this principle because it poses an existential threat to the country we live in.

Six months later, in August 2023, the tide had turned on the Voice, as Australians began to consider the principles at stake in the referendum. I wrote another article for Sky News Australia:

As the year has progressed, it would appear that more and more Australians have started to realise what the Voice is actually about. Western Australia has been at the forefront of this debate. After Rio Tinto accidentally destroyed ancient rock shelters at an iron ore mine site at Juukan Gorge in 2020, the pressure was on the McGowan Labor Government to overhaul the existing Aboriginal Heritage Act. After the landslide win at the last election in March 2021, Labor went on to pass reforms to protect Aboriginal cultural heritage, which ended up going too far. Fast forward to 2023, and the Western Australian public realised how over the top these laws were…

The now-repealed laws were so extreme that almost anything could be argued to be a sacred Aboriginal site. This included such amorphous concepts as ‘intangible heritage’, which potentially risked Western Australia’s legitimacy as a sovereign state within the Commonwealth.

Add to this, the enormous amount of red tape that Western Australian land-owners needed to go through under these reforms to own, occupy or operate on land that was deemed to possess Aboriginal heritage.

Last week, former prime minister Tony Abbott was on a tour of Perth to campaign for the No case. In a sell-out community forum on Thursday night alongside Upper House MP Nick Goiran, Mr Abbott went on to make the point that, while WA Labor’s reforms could be repealed, if the Voice got up, it would be permanent…

More and more undecided Australians are starting to feel turned off by the divisive rhetoric of the Yes campaign. The push for a type of dual sovereignty in Australia, split between Anglo-Celtic Australians and Indigenous Australians – the supposed oppressors and the oppressed – is fundamentally un-Australian and, as such, unfair.

We believe in the idea that every Australian, regardless of whether our ancestors have been here 60,000 years or six years, should be treated the same. We don’t have a hierarchical class structure as the English and European aristocratic systems had maintained for centuries. Two days after the Voice referendum, ‘The Green Left’, the weekly newspaper of Australia’s socialist movement, published an article titled ‘The No vote was a racist vote’. Sometimes those on the centre-right dismiss such ridiculous claims, but in fact we have a responsibility to refute such arguments, and the rebuttal is straightforward. In 1967, Australians voted overwhelmingly for the equal treatment of Indigenous Australians in the Constitution, which is precisely what happened in 2023. There was nothing ‘racist’ about it.

Think about this — there was another referendum in 1967 that was about including Indigenous Australians in the national census and giving the government power to make laws for them. The referendum in 2023 had the opposite intention of the 1967 referendum while 2023 went beyond equality. The Australian public worked it out.

The Voice referendum transcended party lines. While it’s true that Labor Party supported Yes, and the Coalition No, the debate was not so much between parties as between philosophies. Regardless of who the party leader is at the time, political parties have long-standing brands and allegiances, and many voters will vote according to a party’s brand, regardless of its leadership. (Which explains why conservative-leaning Liberal voters continued to vote Liberal, even when Malcolm Turnbull led the party.)

The ‘Australians Speak 2023’ survey of referendum voters commissioned by the Institute of Public Affairs and Advance shows that 37% of Australians who voted for the Labor Party at the 2022 federal election voted No, and even 14% of Greens voters voted No. These results clearly show that the referendum was not simply just a test between the major political parties. Unlike in a regular election, where candidates are out there pushing the party line in every seat, referendums lack the boots-on-the-ground support, making it harder to communicate the message. Even though referendums are run like State or Federal elections — television and radio advertising, letterbox drops, fundraising, volunteers — it’s all focused on one issue. Without local candidates, the campaign lacks the personal networks that typically attract donors and volunteers. People often think political parties have an army of volunteers ready to go, but that’s not always the case. Campaigns are usually driven by the party headquarters with a small core team. In a referendum, you still need to reach every voter, do the letterboxing, man the pre-polls, and set up booths on the day. It’s a considerable effort, and without local candidates, it can be challenging to build the required campaign infrastructure, which is why the work of Advance was so important.

A referendum focuses on a single Yes or No question, which is why the messaging is so crucial. In a sense campaigning in a referendum is easier than fighting a general election. Elections are a hodgepodge of various promises, soundbites, and themes. It is precisely because referendums are about a single issue that this also means the stakes are much higher. A mistake that’s made in the messaging during an election can potentially be compensated for by something else. In a referendum, there is no such luxury. The nature of a referendum is such that campaigns may have only one opportunity to gain voters’ attention before their minds are made up on the question. In an election campaign, a new and perhaps unexpected policy promise from one of the parties has the potential to alter the entire course of the election. In a referendum, political leaders don’t have the ability to make promises that will sway voters’ opinions.

‘Australians Speak 2023’ identified that the leaders of the No campaign, Senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price and Nyunggai Warren Mundine, had significantly higher profiles and approval ratings than the leaders of the Yes campaign. The conclusion of a La Trobe University study of the Voice campaign is important:

…the decision to centre the campaign around two high-profile and articulate Indigenous leaders, Price and Mundine, appeared to pay off, with the pair proving to be a potent combination.

By contrast, the Yes camp deployed multiple messages and messengers – among them sporting groups, trade unions, universities, charities and businesses – which gave rise to commentary about possible message overload and predictions of a voter backlash.

The argument for the No case, based as it was on the philosophical principle of equality, required strong and articulate spokespeople to communicate the idea. In Price and Mundine, the No campaign had such people. Both had powerful and personal stories to tell about why they opposed the Voice. Price and Mundine would not have been so effective had they merely been ‘a Liberal Party spokesperson’.

The Yes campaign for the Voice made a similar mistake to that made by another Yes campaign twenty-four years earlier. In their book on the history of referendums in Australia, People Power, George Williams and Dave Hume say this about the Yes campaign for the Republic in 1999:

The establishment, for the most part, had bought into the Yes case. The Yes campaign exploited the support of the rich, powerful and famous. One advertisement was headed ‘Yes, yes a hundred times yes’ and listed names of 100 people, mostly professionals and politicians, who supported the republic. Another advertisement featured Gough Whitlam and Malcolm Fraser. The advertisement included Whitlam saying ‘it’s time’, with Fraser responding, ‘it is’. The Yes campaign trotted out a litany of famous figures, including former Prime Minister Bob Hawke, former Governor-General Sir Zelman Cowen and retired High Court Chief Justice Sir Anthony Mason and Sir Gerard Brennan.

The message the Yes campaign intended to convey was that its model was safe, respectable and worthy of a Yes vote even if voters did not understand all the details. But the No campaign, with ruthless effectiveness, twisted the message. The result was that the message the Yes campaign, in fact, conveyed to many people was that the minimalist model was fundamentally elitist… The strongest support for the Yes campaign came from the press, which was virtually unanimous in advocating a Yes vote. The Daily Telegraph in Sydney even handed out stickers to all purchasers urging a Yes vote.

In the years leading up to the republic vote, various polls indicated that a majority of Australians supported the country becoming a republic. But in 1999, when voters were presented with a concrete proposal, they overwhelmingly rejected the idea, with 55% of Australians voting No.

The $450 million that the Albanese government spent on the Voice referendum could have been devoted to any number of other causes, such as hospitals, schools, roads, or just about anything else that would have made a practical difference to Australians’ lives, whether Indigenous or not. The Australian Electoral Commissioner, Tom Rogers, gave evidence to a hearing of the Senate Estimates Committee that the cost of the referendum was approximately the same as the cost of conducting a federal election. There is no shortage of such Australians who genuinely believed that the Voice was the ultimate solution to the many problems confronting Indigenous Australians and feel that the defeat of this referendum is the end of all hope.

The sentiments that led to the Voice referendum had their origins decades earlier. The Indigenous flag was created in 1971 and given official status in 1995. Every other state, territory or military institution that currently has an official flag represents legal entities and not a race. Allowing a distinct group of people to carry their own flag sows the seeds of division and separatism. By acknowledging this flag, what we’ve done is conceded that Indigenous Australians are a distinct subset of our society, so then it becomes natural for sentimental supporters of the Yes case to support policies like the now defeated Voice.

There is now a moral and intellectual responsibility for those of us who campaigned against the Voice to demonstrate that we genuinely meant it when we said our problem was with the policy, not the principle. If the principle behind the Voice was to empower further those Indigenous Australians who are doing it tough, then we all agree entirely. This is where a closer examination of publicly funded programs in remote communities is warranted. We need programs that are focused on helping people overcome substance abuse and domestic violence. We need apprenticeships that offer the skills necessary to secure permanent employment, enabling people to take on responsibility and achieve financial independence. Equally importantly, we need an inclusive national narrative.

One thing we as supporters of the No campaign in 2023 must understand is that reconciliation isn’t merely about policy fixes. There is undoubtedly an emotional aspect to reconciliation. We need to recognise that for some Indigenous Australians, when they see the Australian national flag that carries the British Union Jack in its top left-hand corner, it is essentially a reminder of the conquest of this island continent. As much as we can talk up all the great benefits of British settlement (as in fact I have done in my recent book Australia On Trial: Accusations and Defence launched by Tony Abbott and Nyunggai Warren Mundine), the reality is that none of that negates that on an emotional level one cannot blame so many Indigenous Australians for feeling a sense of disconnect. What needed to have occurred, and perhaps still could with a bit of effort, is for our national storytelling to make the point crystal clear that we are a society that embraces its Indigenous heritage, and this doesn’t have to constantly be at odds with the British heritage of this country.