‘If they lose, it’s going to reflect badly’: Albanese needs to campaign for the Voice, experts say

The federal government should throw its full support behind a Yes campaign for a Voice to Parliament, experts say, as new polling suggests that if a vote were held in December it would manage only a narrow victory.

The government has ruled out publicly funding a Yes or No campaign, but will instead roll out a “neutral” civics education campaign early in 2023.

On Tuesday, Roy Morgan released the results of a snap SMS poll of 1499 eligible voters conducted between December 9 and 13, which found that 53% of voters would vote to establish an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice to Parliament.

An “Australia-wide cross-section” of voters were asked: “If a referendum were held today that establishes an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice to Parliament would you vote yes, no or are you undecided?”

The results, which assumed the undecideds would not swing to a Yes vote, fell largely along party lines. More than three-quarters of Labor voters would vote Yes, and 89% of Greens voters would vote Yes too. Fewer than 10% of Labor voters and just 2% of Greens were firmly opposed.

Just under two-thirds of Coalition voters said they would vote No, just 15% would support it, and 21% were undecided. One Nation voters were the most “firmly against”: more than 70% of the right-wing party’s base said they would vote No, with just 18% in favour. 

Andrew Jakubowicz, a professor of sociology and an expert on government and ethnic communities at the University of Technology in Sydney, said the findings should prompt a campaign strategy rethink for Labor, which has indicated it would bank on public support from unions, businesses and the Minerals Council of Australia on a Yes campaign, alongside the independent official campaign.

He said the Albanese government should take greater steps to address the information gap faced by undecided voters who might be asking: “What’s the point?” That area of the debate had been left wide open to commentators and members of Parliament committed to cannibalising the Yes campaign and running opposition “primarily designed to confuse people”. 

“I think the Australian government, on behalf of the Australian people, has a responsibility to pursue this campaign,” he said. 

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has suggested Australians could be asked before the end of the 2023 financial year whether they “support an alteration to the constitution that establishes an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice”.

But details on how the framework would function and its membership make-up are not finalised, and their absence has offered the No campaign enough ambiguity to leverage confusion. 

During an address to the National Press Club in late November, Uluru Statement from the Heart co-chairs Pat Anderson AO and law professor and international human rights lawyer Megan Davis called on the Australian media and federal government to help maintain the campaign’s momentum and combat misinformation. 

Anderson urged the government to announce a date for the referendum as soon as possible, and suggested voters could head to the polls as soon as October next year. 

Davis dedicated part of her address to acknowledging an “impatience for detail” on the framework, which has so far been debated in a way “divorced from policy settings that plague our people’s lives on the ground”. 

In News Corp newspapers and on the panels of Sky News talk shows, meanwhile, a throng of commentators have leaned into vying for the undecideds by sowing doubt over the ways an Indigenous Voice would impede Australian law-making to their disadvantage.

Most recently, the National Party followed the same playbook when it announced in November it would not support the Voice. Nationals Senator Matt Canavan claimed it would create a “separate race-based representative body” in the constitution, reminiscent of the “third chamber” rhetoric coined by former prime minister Malcolm Turnbull in 2017. (Turnbull has since pledged his support for the Voice.)

Murray Goot, one of Australia’s leading academic analysts of Australian politics and a professor emeritus at Macquarie University, said that as more opinion polls roll in vindicating the positions taken by the major parties, the less likely it is that voters will see the opposition offer its support. 

“The government, I suspect, [was] holding back not only because [it] wants others to ‘own’ the referendum, but also because it hopes that the Liberals, and perhaps the Nationals, [would] come on board, so that there can be a Yes campaign that all three leaders, plus the Greens, can sign up to, as there was in 1967,” Goot said.

The force of leaders coming out opposing the Yes campaign will see Albanese “come under much more pressure” to use his personal standing, and that of his government, to actively campaign in favour of a Voice to Parliament. 

Rodney Tiffen, a professor emeritus of government and international relations at the University of Sydney, agreed. He said the government should not only be concerned with its efforts to swing undecideds, but also with whether the 53% voting Yes “will hang on or not”. 

“As the date draws closer, I think [the government] should really step up their efforts,” he said. “If they lose, it’s going to reflect badly on them, whether they’ve been actively campaigning or not. So by launching [the policy platform], they’ve got a political interest in succeeding.

“And they therefore, just in terms of pragmatics, should make every effort to make sure it succeeds.”

As well as the “neutral” civics education campaign, the government will try to push through legislation set to be debated next year that would allow it to do away with mail-out pamphlets that outline the cases for and against the proposed framework. 

Goot said a Yes vote at or about 65% of eligible voters, as it stands, is “about as good as the Yes campaign can hope for”. It was normal for Yes campaigns to lose a bit of ground, but the fact that the referendum has been floated so far ahead of an actual ballot could put Labor in a bind. 

“Time is on the side of the No campaign,” he said.