Anatomy of the Defeat of the Voice Referendum

Attempts to Rewrite History

As the architects of the Uluru Statement from the Heart, and leaders of the Yes campaign ponder the majority No Vote that defeated the proposal, there is a fair bit of rewriting history. That the Albanese Government should not have proceeded when it was clear that there was no political bipartisanship once the Nationals declared their opposition, led by Indigenous Senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price, now the Shadow Minister for Indigenous Affairs in the Coalition Government. 

But the reality is that the Albanese Government, led by Minister Linda Burney, promised the Indigenous leaders who created the majority consensus of the Uluru Statement from the Heart’s call for Voice, Truth and Treaty, that they would listen to them. That they would take their lead from them. And with the exception of Mick Gooda, not one of them publicly said, stop, we can’t proceed. 

Like many non-Indigenous Australians who strongly supported the Voice, I was shocked and saddened when the majority No Vote rolled in, including in my own community in the so-called progressive Blue Mountains. I think there were these things in play:

1. Having the No campaign led by Indigenous leaders such as Senator Price and Warren Mundine – articulate and educated, one from Alice Springs, the heart of Aboriginal Australia, and one from the coast and the well connected Mundine family (although most of his family disagreed with him). Senator Price and Warren Mundine provided a strong Indigenous cloak behind which lingering ‘white’ racism could easily hide.
2. In contrast to the focus on a Deficit approach, linking the Yes campaign to the ‘practical’ measures of addressing Indigenous disadvantage, we also needed to hear about the Asset approach. This brings the focus to culture and knowledge systems, to the huge contribution that Australia’s First Nations’ peoples make in the arts, and can make, through their ancient knowledge system, to how to better Care for Country as we face the many challenges of climate change.
3. The idea of Indigenous Australians having a separate constitutional Voice was uncomfortable – forcing ‘white’ Australians to truly acknowledge the structural cultural racism at the root of the establishment of Australia as a nation state—where Indigenous people did not count as ‘people’ till the 1967 Referendum. Where ‘white nationalism’, in the form of the ‘White Australian Policy’ aimed at immigration, was a dominant idea at the time of the drafting of the Australian Constitution.

Other ‘progressive’ Indigenous voices also muddied the water, stuck in the groove, ‘sovereignty was never ceded’. Lidia Thorpe mounted a No campaign on the basis that Treaty should come first. But as the Voice proponents said, ‘Treaty with whom?’ There is no one group with whom any national treaty could be forged. There are hundreds of language groups and many of them internally conflicted. The complexity of this is now being played at the State level.

Although the majority of Indigenous people, especially in remote communities voted Yes, many coastal and rural Indigenous people spoke against it, either because they felt left out of the Uluru consensus, or because they were suspicious of the Aboriginal ‘elites’ prominent in the Yes campaign. These oppositional voices within the Indigenous community meant that many non-Indigenous people were left confused and conflicted, even if sympathetic to the cause of Aboriginal reconciliation.

Now there is an emerging view that Truth-telling should have come first because not enough non-Indigenous Australians understand the brutal impact of British colonisation on Indigenous Australians, including the forced separation of children from their parents that lasted well into the 1970s. Instead the focus is on Indigenous ‘criminality’ – on levels of incarceration, youth crime, alcohol addiction, family violence, in a country that says everyone is equal before the law, a law entirely shaped by ‘white culture’ that pays little heed to the complex forces at work in the lived experience of many First Nations peoples. Too easily we forget the words of Keating’s famous Redfern Speech:

• We took the traditional lands and smashed the traditional way of life.
• We brought the diseases. The alcohol.
• We committed the murders.
• We took the children from their mothers.
• We practised discrimination and exclusion.
• It was our ignorance and our prejudice. And our failure to imagine these things being done to us.

Denial – The Great Australian Silence 

The other ‘brutal reality’ of Australian life is that many non-Indigenous Australians who do understand this history are prone to denying the ongoing impact of this history and expect Aboriginal people to ‘get over it’ and ‘move on’. They refuse to see any link between the intergenerational cultural marginalisation of First Nations people and high rates of youth suicide and incarceration, and the so-called Indigenous youth crime epidemic, which is said to be sweeping Australia. Where the ‘lock them up’ solution is widely supported: children as young as 10 years old said to be adults under criminal law, subject to treatment that should be seen as ‘torture’ in its vengeful mental cruelty.

Human being are complex animals. We need love, meaning, and a sense of purpose to grow and thrive or we too easily self-destruct. The wounds linger on in the psyche like time-bombs, ready to go off.

We insist, even when all the evidence is before us that ‘lock them up’ is expensive to the public purse and self-defeatingly counterproductive. We can only conclude that this type of insanity is driven by fear and pure, mindless vengeance. A refusal to see that this ‘out-of-control’ behaviour among marginalised young people is a sign of cultural rage  in a world of media saturation that celebrates luxury materialism and wealth.

De-colonisation—The Master Project

The failure of the Voice Referendum shows just how far de-colonisation remains the master project for shaping Australia’s future as the ‘world’s most successful multicultural nation’ as frequently claimed by politicians of all persuasion.

De-colonisation is not just about addressing historic injustices to Australia’s Indigenous peoples and recognising the unique contribution their knowledge systems have to make to Australia’s future in this age of climate change and environmental degradation. It is also a project to address the entire way we modern people have come to understand the nature of reality based on the idea of intrinsic separability, expressed in hyper individualism and human exceptionalism over the rest of the natural world. We now face the daunting prospect that we not only have to de-colonise our relationship with Indigenous Australians.

We have to decolonise our minds.

The Indigenous Question in Australia

As we mark the anniversary of the failure of the Referendum to change the Australian Constitution to establish an Indigenous Voice to Parliament, we have to recognise that this failure has deep roots. Led by Senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price, the Shadow Minister for Indigenous Affairs, who led a spirited campaign to defeat the Referendum, we face her proposition that no Indigenous Australian culture survived colonisation, because this would create a racial division at the heart of Australia. Coupled with this is the fight over who is really ‘indigenous’, when race rather than cultural heritage is the marker. Who gets to authenticate claims of indigeneity, especially when it comes to land rights, legal claims, and creative production?

Price’s position asserts that the only way to address racism, and the socio-economic marginalisation of Indigenous Australians, is radical assimilation. That everyone should become culturally ‘white’, made in the image of the British heritage and its ‘civilisational’ intent. An idea that, between 1910 and 1970, led to the forced separation of Indigenous children, who physically showed signs of being of mixed European-Indigenous heritage from their Indigenous parents (and therefore capable of being assimilated), to distant orphanages and missions—and the whole tragic sorry legacy documented in the 1997 ‘Bringing Them Home Report’.

Senator Price is at the centre of the conflict: herself of mixed heritage, with a ‘white’ Irish father and a ‘black’ Aboriginal mother, and living in Alice Springs, the geographic heart and cultural heart of Australia’s continuing colonial legacy, cultural conflict and crime.

Multiculturalism?

There is a logic in Senator Price’s position if you deny the entire premise of multiculturalism that is now core to the modern Australian identity and its ability to create a sense of inclusivity among people from disparate cultural backgrounds who have migrated to live in Australia. Are we being asked to consider what unites us, rather than what divides us, without requiring that the only answer to this is that we all become culturally ‘white’?

How can our multicultural-ness be no more than a reduction to the diversity of cuisine and music, reluctant spaces for some religious faith diversity, particularly when they insist on dressing differently to ‘us’, and a tolerance for ‘brown’ faces in our ethnic mix?

As we see the ‘black’ faces of members of the UK Tories and US Republicans, staunch defenders of ‘white culture’ we realise the issue is not ‘race’. It is culture. It is the underlying knowledge systems that inform how we see the world.

The Post Colonial Response

Multiculturalism invites us to consider that cultures and languages encode particular knowledge systems—ways of thinking about reality, knowing and actions. The hegemonic status of ‘white’ culture (the techno-rationalism inheritance of the Enlightenment and Scientific Revolution and Judaic-Christian religions) is now being challenged by post-colonialism. The once disregarded and suppressed knowledge systems of the colonised are talking back, via academic schools of Indigenous knowledge systems, and the global cultural vitality of First Nations’ artistic flowering—most vividly apparent in the impact of Australian Aboriginal Art in major exhibitions across the world.

Beginning with the French Afro-Caribbean philosopher, Franz Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth (1961) and Black Skin, White Masks (1967), the Palestinian-American philosopher, Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978) warned of the whirlwind of decolonization and the transition to a neo-colonialist, globalized world. Since then, the strength of the post-colonial voice in dismantling the comfortable civilisation claims of ‘white’ culture has grown stronger and stronger. There are now many more voices who have mastered the language and grammar of ‘white culture’ and use its very logic to dismantle and deconstruct it’s claims to ‘neutral’ hegemony.

This is considerably advanced by the failure of ‘white’ culture to measure up to its own humanist claims as regards inclusivity and truth. The very logic that underpins ‘white’ culture in its latest manifestation in marketised techno-capitalism is at the core of the intersecting global crises engulfing our world.

Any true claim to multiculturalism, particularly in a country like a Australia, which acknowledges its cultural foundations in the world’s longest continuing living culture—that of Aboriginal Australia, has still to come to grips with how multiculturalism must logically include First Nations knowledge systems, which are radically different to ‘white culture’. Not just as an artistic flourish and input to regenerative land management, but deep down into the core of how we frame the very idea of ‘reality’ and truly embrace the ecological-system logic that encodes life on Planet Earth—the core indisputable Law of Caring for Country in all its many manifestations.

The Limits to Australian Multiculturalism

The Australian citizenship test, created by the Australian Government for immigrants, refugees and asylum seekers, aspiring to become Australian citizens, is the clearest expression of how multiculturism is framed in Australia. It requires that they have:

• a basic knowledge of the English language
• an understanding of what it means to become an Australian citizen
• an adequate knowledge of Australia and the responsibilities and privileges of citizenship
• an understanding and commitment to Australian values based on freedom, respect and equality.

The government booklet, Our Common Bond, sets out a basic understanding of the core historical, legislative and normative values of what it means to be Australian. It acknowledges the unique place of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander’s 65,000 year cultural heritage before colonisation and the reasons for the cultural practice of ‘Welcome to Country’ and ‘Acknowledgement of Country’ before many events. And it documents the recent nature of the colonisation of Australia by ‘white’ culture, a mere 236 years ago. It tackles questions of gender inclusivity and sexual orientation, but it fails to deal with knowledge systems diversity.

Australia’s Indigenous peoples were brutally colonised by the British, their lands summarily expropriated, their languages suppressed, their cultural beliefs and practices declared without validity and even illegal. Their very participation in the family of humanity denied to some hinterland of a ‘disappearing species’. This was an epistemic violence of considerable devastation.

That the cultural threads of their knowledge systems and its creative flowering has endured is a miracle worth contemplating, existing as it does under the shadow of persistent racial and cultural exclusion from modern Australia.

The ‘blood and soil’ claims of ethno-white nationalism in Russia and much of Europe have no logical purchase in Australia. Nor, unlike the USA. was Australia the ‘promised land’ of the Christian pilgrims that fought their American War of Independence against the British 1755-1783, and established their own Constitution of the United States, declared in 1789, later amended to include its Bill of Rights. Australia’s ‘white’ culture constitution was only written in 1901, was replete with an assertive ‘white Australian policy’ in which Aboriginal Australians held no place. It is sobering to consider that they were not recognised as citizens till the 1967 Referendum. Imagine that!

Some of Our Common Bond’s core statements as to what constitutes a modern Australian identity include:

• While we celebrate the diversity of Australia’s people, we also aim to build a cohesive and unified nation.
• All Australians are expected to treat each other with dignity and respect, regardless of their race, country of origin, gender, sexual orientation, marital status, age, disability, heritage, culture, politics, wealth or religion.
• Australian citizenship rests on shared values based on freedom, respect, fairness and equality of opportunity that are central to our community remaining a secure, prosperous and peaceful place to live.
• These are expressed in: commitment to the Rule of Law, compulsory voting in democratic elections at all levels of government, freedom of speech, freedom of association, freedom of religion, equality of all people under the law, equality of opportunity and a ‘fair go’, mutual respect and tolerance for others.
• This speaks to the spirit of ‘mateship’, which underpins a strong tradition of community service and volunteering, to look out for each other and strengthen the community

This multicultural project to find and celebrate what we can hold in common as our key values and understandings, now faces a new challenge: how to respect and learn about the very knowledge systems that are our cultural foundation, preceding what has become the unexamined hegemony of ‘white culture’, despite claims for multiculturalism.

Techno-Capitalist Colonisation

In reality we have all been colonised by a force even greater than the British Empire, that up until WWI could proudly claim so much territory across the world under its domain that ‘the sun never sets on the British Empire’. This force is the evolving extractivist logic of capitalism in its various guises: social democracy, neo-liberalism, oligarchic, autocratic, militaristic—or the many combinations therein. This is a logic that denies the essential relationality of the physical, social and cultural ecosystems that prescribe our world, stranding us in a mind-fog of psychic confusion—of cognitive dissonance.

The post-colonial scholar, Vanessa de Oliviera reminds us that we must always bracket modernity with coloniality because it cannot exist without expropriation, extraction and ecocides, as substantiated by economic, political and historical data. Yet it imposes a mode of representation that claims both benevolence and universality for itself, while denying its violence and unsustainability.

In this age of existential angst as we face unprecedented global environmental devastation from human-induced climate change, she draws our attention to how the deepest and oldest form of violence perpetuated by modernity/coloniality is the idea of separability—the imposed sense of separation between ourselves and the dynamic living land-metabolism that is the planet and beyond, as well as the theological separation between creature and creation, with humans as the superior species that deserves to conquer, dominate, own, manage and control the natural environment. 

As we witness the many manifestations of human narcissism, whether in the social media world of influencers and selfie culture, the warmongering of ethno-religious nationalism, or the insatiable greed of private equity-driven business practices, we see how separability is the basis of the different forms of narcissism of the human species that manifest in different ways in the various phases and contexts of modernity/coloniality.

This narcissism is on full display in the political sphere in the cynical and ruthless ‘politics of division’, the desperate MAGA cry to make American great again, the spreading ethno/religious-nationalism across the globe.

As the great Sanskrit scholar, Samdhong Rinpoche observed when he encountered the full force of Modernity’s reach, in exile from Tibet being remodelled by Chinese ethno-Han communism (Uncompromising Truth for a Compromised World, 2006, p. 52):

• The crisis we see in the external environment is basically a greater inner crisis. It is basically the crisis of the human mind. 
• Modern civilisation suffers from unmanaged conflict of the mind. Humanity has significantly enlarged its knowledge and know-how, but has failed to acquire a corresponding degree of wisdom.
• Madness is the inability to discriminate between what is harmful and what is not. And I think that, in this regard, modern people have gone insane.

Samdhong Rinpoche wrote these words back in 2006. Almost twenty years later, we can only conclude that the insanity has deepened. The contradictions have intensified.

Here in Australia, we have never had more material prosperity. Our houses are larger and more elaborate with ensuite bathrooms for every room; two-car families are the rule rather than the exception; overseas holidays to exotic locations are a given expectation; and more and more children go to private schools, have smartphones and dream of wealth and fame.

Yet while most of us think a secure roof over our heads, a home, is the basis of a reasonable life, more and more people, even people who are in full employment, are homeless. We saw this roll out in the US. We never thought it would happen here, this land of ‘the fair go’. While this ‘fair go’ never historically applied to marginalized groups such as Indigenous people and people struggling with drug addiction, disability and mental illness, we never thought this can happen to ‘us’, and not just ‘them’.

But the chickens are coming home to roost.

We look into a future of floods and fire, of climate refugees demanding to be let in past our ‘secure borders’, of houses that are uninsurable because risk no longer works as a mathematical equation for profit in the insurance industry. Where strident ethno-religious nationalism is sweeping away the political assumptions of modern democracy. Where the glorious achievements of ‘white culture’ and Modernity increasingly look like the emperor with no clothes