Could Yes still stage one of the greatest turnarounds in political history?

Two weeks before the referendum there was the triumph of a team whose colours are black and white, preceded by a much-loved band and a child army replete in black and white. Could one see it as an omen of sorts? Probably no, but whatever else is happening, or not, the energy of the Yes campaign is phenomenal.

An army of volunteers has steadily built, and been built, thousands of organisers are ensuring early polling places are covered, and the ads are mobilising the inherent energy and positivity of the word itself. Has the Yes campaign got it right? Did it avoid peaking too early, ensuring that the public didn’t have their Yesgasm before they could aim it squarely at — okay, I just threw up in my own mouth. 

Well, if it did, it’s going to be among the greatest and most staged of turnarounds in political history. The joy will be unconfined, the nation will rock, and the Yes leadership will be insufferable, just insufferable, I warn you. You’ve got no idea. But God knows what historical force will underlie that shift; indeed it will be God herself, more or less; the pure force of good — as the Yes case understands it — moving in the hearts of a couple of million or more undecideds and soft Nos. 

That the shift will have to be dialectical is evidenced by the steady and relentless decline of the Yes vote over months. Some of this is due to the flagrant falsehoods that have come from sections of the No camp. But at least some of it, and possibly the lion’s share, must come from the raised awareness of the Voice’s details as the campaign’s got fully underway. The Yes camp will be hoping that the middle period of unpopularity was a dip between two peaks. The theory, I suspect, is that people liked the idea when they were blissfully ignorant of its detail, became suspicious and distrustful as partial information emerged, before being transformed and taken up by the inherent generosity of spirit of the proposal. 

But that has to go up against the shattering fact that support appeared to go down — dipping below 40% — just as a series of rallies kicked the Yes campaign into exuberant overdrive. Whatever the growing exuberance on the ground, that “paradox” — in the eyes of Yes supporters — was a final kick in the guts to many in the higher reaches of the campaign, especially those in the pro-Yes commentariat. They know that polling has been substantially tightened up from a brief decline, and that the further decline in support may be a product not only of greater knowledge about the Voice proposal, but also a reaction to the exuberance, and to who was doing the exuberating.

What the Yes rallies might have achieved — though they were worthwhile and necessary — was to confirm the suspicion of many that this was someone else’s party. Which produces in some a compensatory defiance, a reversal of generosity. The ramping up of the Yes campaign has made a No vote a meaningful act, even among people who do not care much about the issue either way. This cultural conflict was heightened because the rallies occurred at the same time as the AFL finals season (and there was some rugby league thing as well). This was Australian cultural life and ceremony on a vast and genuinely popular scale, and it shows up how partial the Yes campaign is. 

Which is as it should be of course, because it is a political cause after all. But from the start, there has been an attempt by the new Labor government and the campaign itself to manufacture consent, by turning the Yes cause into a pre-political one, something which it is impossible to disagree with. This has backfired spectacularly. Indeed, it has been an absurdity due to the sheer number of No campaigners who are First Nations. People can see this dissent visibly, on camera, all the time, and they can see that the dissent is not a case of the white No case finding a few stooges (though there are one or two of those), and that the dissent is various, and has differing and contradictory sources. 

The Yes case never course-corrected to allow for this very visible and multiple dissent. Instead, it doubled down on a deeper absurdity — that those opposing it were sowing division. This was a false claim that there was a real unity “out there”, that was being distorted by fear-based propaganda. But it also failed to recognise that at a deeper level, the Voice proposal relies on the notion of the virtue of division, in certain cases. 

No-one, after all, is calling for a constitutionally embedded voice for Chinese Australians or Australians with a disability. The underlying social organisation principle of the Voice is a form of corporatism, deriving from the notion that there are collective social entities whose separateness is real. Corporatism sees a parliament as ideally composed of representatives of different social groups, such as business, churches, controlled unions, religious or ethnic minorities — with some level of state recognition of their distinctiveness. 

Proposals like the Voice, or mandated seats for First Nations peoples, are a sort of partial, “orphan” corporatism, adjusted to settler colonialist societies. They are meaningful initiatives because they posit division as prior to, and permanently denying, unity. The Voice, Treaty, mandated seats, a specially carved out Indigenous majority seventh state — all rely on the notion that we are two peoples on one continent. 

Our separateness is based not on ethnicity/race per se, but on the simple duality of presence and arrival, with dispossession and violence serving as the vinculum of that ratio. The only way in which unity could be achieved would be total assimilation and dissolution, and an engineered forgetting. 

If that sounds incredibly familiar, it’s because that drive to unity lay at the basis of the White Australia/Stolen Generations policy, and such a memory should make clear the profound contradictions of the drive to “unity”. These earlier policies were an answer to the question of how this persisting duality might be dealt with. 

Their answer — that one side of the division should be abolished entirely — is not ours, to put it mildly. But it came from a global collective existential panic about difference. So it is worth recognising the continuities between the drivers to unity both then and now. There is something bizarre about trying to sell the Voice as the true answer to social division, and to try to portray the No case — that wants a constitution of single, universal applicability — as the advocates of division. 

Strategically, it rapidly became clear that the Voice’s only hope for success lay in emphasising its potential practical and instrumental benefits, something the Yes case appears to have pivoted hard to. But there was never any way around acknowledging that the degree to which the Voice’s claim to legitimacy relied on both the specialness and duality of the division proposed. You want to kill the claims of the Voice? Propose an LGBTQIA+ one. Or a non-Anglo migrant one. And so on. The real history of this continent on which the claims to Voice and Treaty are based would then dissolve into a bizarre identity corporatism, impossible to enact as politics. 

It’s an open question as to whether or not one needs to make that duality generally established, in order for claims of Voice, Treaty and the like to acquire legitimacy. What we can say is that this has not occurred. Most Australians simply do not recognise that defining duality as real in any sense that grants a strong claim to right, as equal human beings. The “difference” they see between First Nations peoples and everyone else is a mix of culturalist and racialist conceptions of human beings.

For months, the Yes commentariat has been trying to present such a case as a matter of our national destiny, a time of reckoning. That has failed and most Australians see the Voice referendum as a sideshow to the struggles of their own lives. This is quite unlike Brexit or other comparisons many on the Yes side want to make. That was all-involving, split families and friendships, screaming arguments on the street, transformed politics etc.  

A similar role — the all-involving part anyway — was the aspiration from the Yes case, as evidenced by the stream of drivel coming from Guardian Australia about the hope that “we’d all become constitutional experts etc”. It has not occurred — which means, equally and fortunately, that the right has not been able to create a popular mass movement out of it — and now many in the Yes commentariat are moving on to the politics of defeat and the claim that a No vote will be our national shame, the failure to heal our blah blah and, to quote Julianne Schultz’s hilariously ghastly op-ed:

We are now participants in an existential struggle between myth and truth, between meaningful recognition and a void.

No, we aren’t. We’re off to the footy, and commentary of this sort — complete with clichéd Yeats “slouching towards Bethlehem” references — is desperately trying to foment a crisis that has not occurred. Has the expression of racial politics got sleazier and nastier? Yes, but mainly through making visible some sentiments that were already there — one very good reason not to use referendums to settle questions with such deep content. 

Thus the knowledge class core elite has been shocked to find that the mainstream do not have a view that can be constructed as an “other” to the simple progressive case for the Voice. Having made, and failed in, a bid to put this cause at the centre of the “soul of the nation” and draw increased cultural power to themselves, the elite are now using it to regroup and define themselves as moral dissidents in a fallen country. 

These op-eds tumbled out at the same time as millions of Australians streamed to football grounds and pubs and watch parties, as global schlock rock combined gloriously, exactly with local traditions, as a Welcome to Country was listened to with respect, as cities erupted in celebration, ecstatic or rueful, as families wore their team colours in the street the next day. 

This is us, take us or leave us, for better and worse, pretty much the most everyday civilisation history has yet produced. Those who want to achieve that one special division, that acknowledgement of difference at one level — but not every level — of our social life, do not make who we are dependent on our acceptance of a challenge to the legitimacy of our own lives.

The Yes commentariat will become more misanthropic and self-serving as a likely defeat looms. Yes will pull off a victory in less than a fortnight only by ignoring the commentariat and achieving that higher resolution of who we might be, by drawing on and affirming the better part of who we are. 

Are you feeling a little more optimistic? Let us know by writing to letters@crikey.com.au. Please include your full name to be considered for publication. We reserve the right to edit for length and clarity.