What ‘modern Australia’ is and isn’t.

‘The Yes campaign for the Indigenous Voice to federal parliament failed despite Rich Listers, charitable foundations and major corporates backing it with almost two-and-a-half times as much in donations as was spent on the No campaign.

The Paul Ramsay Foundation, Australia’s largest philanthropic foundation spent more than $7 million, the largest donation to a Yes vote that raised more than $60 million to influence the October referendum. New Australian Electoral Commission data released on Tuesday showed major No campaign groups spent about $25 million.’

– The Australian Financial Review, 2 April 2024

‘I am honoured to announce that His Majesty The King has approved my recommendation to appoint Ms Samantha Mostyn AO as Australia’s next Governor-General… Sam Mostyn is an exceptional leader who represents the best of modern Australia.’

– Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, 3 April 2024

This morning I realised I got something wrong in my column in today’s Australian Financial Review. I wrote about prime minister’s Albanese’s announcement of Sam Mostyn as the next Governor-General, and I said this:

Albanese says Mostyn ‘represents the best of modern Australia’. Seldom have truer words been spoken. Sadly. Australia has become a nation of talkers, not doers. Mostyn has collected numerous credentials and titles, but in truth, her achievements are thin. She has talked about how she gained some of her roles because of her gender.

If Albanese was so determined to appoint as governor-general a cool, woke, get-with-the-vibe of whatever progressive cause is trending identity from business, he should have gone the whole hog. Mike Cannon-Brookes has at least built something, employed people, and generated wealth. (We’ll probably never know whether Cannon-Brookes was considered for the position.)

Of the numerous puff pieces written about Mostyn over the years, one consistent theme emerges. She is very good at lobbying the government. To say this is not to slight her. That’s the system, and Mostyn has devoted her talents to playing and playing it well.

You might have noticed my mistake. It’s not true that the next Governor-General ‘represents the best of modern Australia’. If she does, we’re in more trouble than we realise. What Mostyn does represent is the elites’ version of what they want ‘modern Australia’ to become. That’s why Albanese said ‘the best of modern Australia’. He didn’t say ‘the best of Australia’. In no way does Mostyn represent Australia or Australians. She supported a constitutional amendment that would have permanently divided Australians by race. It was a proposal rejected by 60% of us. Big business doesn’t represent Australia either – its stance on the Voice is proof of that.

Janet Albrechtsen summed up Mostyn and ‘modern Australia’ brilliantly on Wednesday.

…Mostyn reflects the worst of modern woke Australia. The same woke corporate Australia in which our biggest companies threw many millions of shareholder dollars into a referendum that sought to divide the country, using the Constitution, on the basis of race. The same woke corporate Australia that had no read on the country given the referendum failed so spectacularly.

This is the same modern Australia in which gender equality means corralling women into jobs they may not want so executives and board members can all feel good that the workplace is 50-50.

This is the modern corporate Australia that believes in every kind of diversity and inclusion except intellectual diversity, where corporate boards have become chorus lines of agreement on woke shibboleths, and dissenters are cowed into silence. So let’s just settle on acknowledging that Mostyn’s appointment is the crowning achievement for one of the country’s most outspoken quota queens…

Those who froth about a few old men’s clubs in Sydney and Melbourne are the same mob who are happy to impose a girls’ club on corporate Australia. And this new club comes with the added punch of being cemented into place with formal gender quota rules. The result is that the same small group of women keep getting the gigs.

There is nothing to celebrate here, unless you believe that inequality is the new equality.

The head of Advance, Matthew Sheehan, described Mostyn’s appointment as an ‘insult to mainstream Australians’. He’s right. And the Coalition was nowhere to be seen. I said this in my AFR piece.

As a private citizen [Mostyn] is entitled to, for example, endorse the slogan of radical separatism – ‘always was, always will be’ – and support the view that Australia was invaded by the British. But from July 1, Mostyn won’t be a private citizen. It’s never a good sign when people delete their comments on social media, which is what Mostyn has done.

Liberal leader Peter Dutton and Nationals leader David Littleproud were perhaps too quick to congratulate Mostyn on her new role.

At the very least, the Coalition was entitled to ask, on behalf of the overwhelming majority of Australians who don’t share the next Governor-General’s interpretation of the country’s history, whether she still holds her previously expressed views.

This is why, as you’ve heard me say many times, the defence of our freedoms and culture can’t be left to politicians.

Too many conservative politicians are too polite, too timid, and too afraid to take up the fight. The Voice was an exception to this – and look what happened. The Voice has been described as a ‘rare’ victory for the centre-right in Australia. That’s true. One of the reasons the centre-right in this country has had so few victories is that it’s fought so few battles. The success of the Voice referendum should have emboldened the Coalition to stand up to Albanese when the ALP pull a stunt like making someone like Mostyn the Governor-General. Unfortunately, it doesn’t look like it has.

You don’t win a war for our culture (or any other sort of war, for that matter) by dipping in and out of the battle.

The left doesn’t. The left fights all the time, everywhere, and they’re utterly brazen about it. I’m not saying that if the Coalition had come out and said, ‘The Governor-General must be above party politics and must represent and unify Australians – Ms Mostyn’s advocacy for radical left-wing demonstrates she cannot fulfil that role’ that Albanese would have withdrawn her appointment. Of course, the Coalition would have been accused of starting a ‘culture war’. But the Coalition should have asked itself on whose side of that war most Australians would be.

I concluded my AFR piece by giving credit to Anthony Albanese and the ALP.

This newspaper’s political editor, Phillip Coorey, got to the heart of what Labor is doing. ‘Mostyn’s appointment continues the trend of the Albanese government using new appointments to reshape the institutions as it sees fit, whether it’s the Reserve Bank of Australia, the Productivity Commission or, now, Admiralty House.’ To this list could be added numerous judicial and extra-judicial appointments.

Labor plays politics and fights for its vision harder than the conservatives.

Labor ends up changing the country despite losing many more elections than it wins because when it’s in power, it does something with that power.

Starting in a few months, Sam Mostyn will be Australia’s Governor-General for the next five years – regardless of the result of the next federal election.

The Coalition was in government in Canberra from 2013 to 2022. In that time it made no attempt to use appointments ‘to reshape the institutions’ as it saw fit. This goes to explain why, after the removal of Tony Abbott, the Coalition left a negligible legacy. Many of the Coalition’s appointments were, frankly, terrible. In the two now infamous High Court cases of Love v The Commonwealth and Thoms v The Commonwealth, in 2020 when, in a majority 4-3 decision, the court decided that non-citizens who had committed offences and been convicted in Australia but who had some element of Aboriginal ancestry could not be deported. Chris Merritt, the vice-president of the Rule of Law Education Centre, wrote at the time the cases were more than simply an example of judicial activism. They were ‘an illegitimate exercise of judicial power that ignores the separation of powers and endangers the community’s confidence in the High Court as the trusted guardian of the Constitution… Decisions taken by Aboriginal elders and other community leaders now have the power to limit the reach of parliament’s laws on migration – a precedent that comes close to giving the Aboriginal community a rival form of sovereignty.’ Three of the judges in the majority: Geoffrey Nettle, Michelle Gordon, and James Edelman were appointed by the Coalition. There’s another point to this too. If the Voice had passed, it would have been the High Court adjudicating on its reach and authority.

The list of donors to each side of the Voice referendum is a stark reminder of who it is that defends the principles of freedom and liberal democracy. It’s not usually political parties, it’s not our cultural and civic and religious institutions, and it’s definitely not big business. It’s individuals. Who donated their own time and their own money.

The difference between the total amount collected by each side of the referendum and the source of the donations is striking. Big public companies dominated donations to the Yes campaign: ANZ $2.5 million, Woodside Energy $2.1 million, Commonwealth Bank $2.05 million, Westpac $2.04 million, Telstra $1 million, Lendlease $1 million and so on. Company directors were spending other people’s money so that directors could signal their virtue. Not a single large public company donated to the No campaign. Its donors were individuals. That tells you something about where the future of freedom lies.

The Yes campaign spent approximately $9.50 for every Yes vote. The No campaign spent roughly $2.60 for every No vote.

Paige Taylor, the indigenous affairs for The Australian newspaper and a supporter of the Voice, wrote following the release of the donations data about the ‘David versus Goliath’ battle of the referendum. She pondered whether the Yes campaign might have won if it had spent its money better.

The official list of who donated as Australia made up its minds about the Indigenous Voice appears as yet more proof that the Yes side was the Goliath in this battle… For the Yes voters, emphatically outnumbered on referendum day, the figures are sad reading. Doubtless evidence of the large sums will fuel discussions about what could have and should have been done differently. Was it right for the Yes side to have two strands? Should the Yes23 campaign that drew big names have tried to merge with the Uluru dialogue campaign that concentrated on the difficult and slow work of workshops in small towns and remote communities?

At one level, Taylor is right. Measured only in money, the Yes campaign was a ‘Goliath’. But the real Goliath in the contest was the No side – measured by the power of its principles and the quality of its leadership (Jacinta Nampijinpa Price and Nyunggai Warren Mundine).

Arguments about whether a different strategy of the Yes campaign would have produced a different outcome miss the point. The problem was not the strategy of the Yes campaign—the problem was its product. No amount of clever advertising could overcome that. In blaming the Yes campaign’s tactics, Taylor does what so many Yes advocates continue to do, which is to refuse to acknowledge the principle at stake. The No campaign’s tagline was simple and accurate: ‘Vote No to the voice of division’. The adage of advertising doyen David Ogilvy applies to the No campaign – ‘A good advertisement is one which sells the product without drawing attention to itself.’

The Yes campaign used some of Australia’s best-known advertising companies. Clemenger BBDO created many of the Yes television commercials, while the advertisement featuring John Farnham’s ‘You’re the Voice’ song was produced by The Monkeys agency. Its clients have included Telstra, Ikea, Asahi, Qantas, Australia Post, and the Tuvalu government. The Yes23 tagline was ‘Yes – Together, for a better future’. Which on some readings doesn’t even make sense. Permanently separating categories of Australians in the nation’s constitution is hardly bringing Australians ‘together’.

Ogilvy also said, ‘Great marketing only makes a bad product fail faster.’

One of the lessons from the Voice referendum is that money isn’t everything. Ideas matter, and ideas are powerful. The Voice referendum was, at its core, a vote on a simple question: Should all Australians be treated the same under the country’s constitution and be entitled to equal democratic and legal rights, or should groups of Australians be treated differently because of their background? Throughout human history, few ideas have proved more powerful than the idea of equality. And so it proved in Australia on 14 October 2023.

If the Yes campaign hadn’t just been more than twice the size but ten times bigger than the No campaign referendum – the result would still have been the same. It’s easy to get disheartened (and worse) when you see the forces arrayed against these ideas. Until recently, these were the ideas of Western Civilisation that we took for granted as the foundation for human flourishing. $60 million in cash plus the resources of federal and state governments, big business, the media, and nearly all of the country’s professional, educational, and cultural institutions were devoted to overturning a fundamental principle of liberal democracy – that all citizens should have equal political rights.

But when the issue was decided by a democratic vote – with every vote counting equally – the Australian people said yes to equality. The idea won.