It’s time to end the myth that there could have been a different, better referendum

The prime minister predicted months ago that this would set back reconciliation, that it would create an international reputational risk for us, but did he stop? Did he change the wording? Did he tighten the wording? No, he did none of that, because Alan Joyce and others were telling him not to.

Peter Dutton, October 4, 2023

Peter Dutton is keen to make sure not only that the Voice to Parliament referendum fails, but that Anthony Albanese wears the blame for it. Indeed, the former outcome without the latter is virtually useless for Dutton — especially if he himself wears the blame.

But Dutton isn’t the only one peddling a counterfactual narrative about the referendum, an alternative history in which a different, better referendum takes place and is successful. It’s a narrative that many share right across the spectrum — from No voters who claim to support constitutional recognition but not a Voice to Parliament, to people like Dutton (if there are any people like Dutton) who want a legislated Voice, to Yes and No supporters who think the wording should have been different and there should have been more detail (or a delayed referendum to give it a greater chance of success), to progressive No voters who think a Voice isn’t a priority or doesn’t go far enough.

But the “different referendum” idea is a fantasy. It’s nonsense, peddled by people who are either self-serving or self-deluding. And it should be knocked down before it takes hold as the given explanation for a defeat, the conventional wisdom that the press gallery adopts as groupthink in the aftermath of October 14.

The idea that a different referendum question would have been successful entirely defies what we’ve learned over recent months. After witnessing the lies and systematic use of misinformation and ignorance by the No campaign, the unrebuked involvement of open racists in it and the emergence of an explicit assimilationist campaign led by Jacinta Nampijinpa Price and her News Corp boosters, who seriously thinks a different question would have elicited a different response? The idea that some tweaks around wording, or addressing arcane and far-fetched legal claims about the power of the Voice to Parliament, as called for by many conservative Yes supporters, would have headed off the systematic racist campaign of opposition, is nonsense.

And after Peter Dutton’s opportunism in opposing the referendum, who can seriously claim that a referendum purely around recognition of First Peoples — white people’s recognition, imposed on First Peoples in defiance of their stated preference about what form recognition took — would not have prompted exactly the same kind of hostility and opposition? Would Dutton not have manufactured a reason to oppose that, too, given that his position is dictated purely by the need for political advantage over Labor?

And look at the arguments of Price, outfits like the Institute of Public Affairs, and News Corp commentators (not including Chris Kenny, who deserves praise for his hard work of campaigning for a Yes vote deep in hostile territory): that the very principle of recognition of any kind is divisive and racist, there is no need for specific Indigenous policies, let alone constitutional recognition.

Does anyone credibly think we wouldn’t have heard 90% of the same rhetoric deployed against the Voice deployed against recognition of any kind — let alone a Voice carefully tweaked so as not to offend Liberal sensibilities, or one with the extra “detail” demanded by Dutton and other opponents? The call for more detail was only ever a pretext for opposition, and the basis for a campaign of obscurantism and appeals to laziness and ignorance — if you can’t be bothered to know, vote no.

Ditto with arguments that a delayed referendum would have been more successful — as if the same powerful and wealthy elite opponents wouldn’t have poured the same volumes of money into a 2024 referendum, or one in 2025, or 2026. Constitutional recognition has been around as a proposal since the Howard years — how much longer do “different referendum” types think we should wait?

It’s noteworthy that even Dutton admits that a failed referendum — i.e., a display to the world that the majority of Australians are indifferent, or even hostile, to the people who were dispossessed in the foundational act of the Australian state — would damage our international reputation. This, he says, is on Albanese — and not, by implication, on Dutton himself.

But it’s not on Albanese, or anyone in the Yes camp, or for that matter Dutton or anyone in the No camp. It’s on voters. At some point in a democracy you have to recognise that voters have agency. If the majority of voters reject recognition of First Peoples, they’re indicating what the nature of Australians truly is, however unpleasant that may be. All Anthony Albanese has done is give them the opportunity, the platform, to show their real nature to the world, and to First Peoples. The consequences are ours to own.