Are things going backwards? A history of Indigenous peoples and the constitution

Support for the Yes campaign for the Indigenous Voice to Parliament continues to plummet. Guardian Australia’s poll tracker has the Yes vote dropping by about 21 percentage points nationally over the past year. Victoria has seen a smaller decline — about 18 points — while in Western Australia the decline is closer to 25 points.

At the current rate of decline, how will the Voice referendum compare with previous attempts to change Indigenous peoples’ relationship with the constitution?

1999

It’s semi-forgotten now, but in 1999 Australia becoming a republic was not the only constitutional amendment put to the Australian people. Then-prime minister John Howard, with the help of poet Les Murray, had put together a constitutional preamble that would have put Indigenous recognition in the founding document. However, this was largely in an incidental manner — the “honour” which we were to extend to “the nation’s first people”, tossed in among Australians’ “hope in God”, “the sacrifices of all who defended our country and our liberty in time of war” and “achievement as well as equality of opportunity for all”.

It was poorly received — then-Labor MP Gareth Evans gleefully recounted in Parliament the coverage that described it as “a shambles”, “corny”, “flat and lifeless”, “turgid”, “unintelligible”, “bizarre” and “archaic”:

If he had listened for a start to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australians, they
would have told him that his flora and fauna-type reference to their being here before we
were and his theme park reference to their cultures were just not good enough. If he was
really serious about reconciliation, they would have told him if he would listen that what
was necessary was a warm-hearted and generous acknowledgment of their ownership or at
the very least their custodianship — maybe even their stewardship; we could debate that — of this ancient land.

Indeed, Indigenous groups were furious at the lack of consultation over the wording, and the preamble was voted down even more conclusively than the referendum question, carried by no states and attracting just 39.34% of the national vote.

The response of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission chairman Gatjil Djerrkura
was to welcome the “resounding” defeat of the preamble:

The preamble, which was meant to be an aspirational document to unite the nation, had been drafted behind closed doors without any meaningful consultation with the Australian people, Indigenous and non-indigenous … It did not promote reconciliation or advance our aspirations. I welcome its resounding defeat. The republic question suffered a similar fate for similar reasons. I look forward to a new era of proper consultation between the major political parties and the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples.

1967

Famously, the 1967 referendum, held to remove the exemption of Indigenous peoples from Commonwealth laws and of being counted in Australia’s population, is far and away the most successful referendum in Australia’s history — carried by all states with more than 90% of the votes.

There was no official No campaign, less of a split among Indigenous groups on the desirability for change — though people alive at the time have noted some confusion then, and since.

Possibly equally significant, there was no Facebook for any claims of questionable provenance to stew and spread. And rather than, say, building days of coverage out of the twisting of a Yes campaigner’s words, the news media at the time, particularly the growing medium of television, coalesced around narratives of Australia’s “shame”, “admirable activists”, “the fair go”, which helped inform a widely accepted national consensus.

1944

What came to be known as the “14 points” referendum, an attempt by the Labor government to extend some of the extraordinary powers it had assumed during World War II for a further five years after the war ended, might not have been as wildly ambitious as it seems in hindsight, given the unprecedented majority the Labor government at the time had received a year earlier, in an election fought on who would do the better job on national reconstruction. Among these was a clause conferring the powers that would eventually pass in 1967.

Historian Charlie Fox has argued that while there was substantial support for the change among the political class even then, the Aboriginal clause was placed last on the list of powers, as an afterthought, and, in the national and state debates about the referendum campaign, it was generally overshadowed by other issues.

It failed, receiving 45.99% of the vote. However, it received a majority of support in Western Australia and South Australia. On current polling, that would mean it would still outpoll the Voice, which enjoys that much support only in Tasmania.