When the No camp attacks ‘division’, words have lost all meaning

If there’s one point of unity across the disparate factions of the No campaign, it’s that a Voice to Parliament is “divisive”, and that is a bad thing (albeit, Peter Dutton only thinks a constitutional Voice to Parliament is divisive; a legislated Voice to Parliament is, presumably, unifying). By “divisive”, they of course mean racially divisive, the implication being that First Peoples are getting something based on their race that white people aren’t getting.

Yes campaigners and some commentators have responded to this by arguing — correctly — that the Voice is unrelated to race, that it is not racial difference motivating the Voice but the unique status of First Peoples as the original inhabitants of this continent whose dispossession was the founding act of white Australia. The Voice is about recognising historical reality, not race.

While that argument, correct as it is, is perhaps too subtle for the kind of voters the No campaign is relying on — the ones encompassed by that barrel-bottom, focus-group-from-hell slogan “If you don’t know, vote No” — it’s worth digging a little into the obsession with “division” as a trope for those who want to keep First Peoples silent.

The immediate irony of the emphasis is clear: the malice towards First Peoples that has characterised much of the No campaign; the effort to erase them from the history of this continent that lies at the heart of the rejection of recognition; the denial of the trauma of colonisation; the rejection of evidence-based policy to address systemic disadvantage and the peddling of fictions about a hidden agenda of property seizure all represent a singling out of Indigenous peoples for hostility, lies and rejection.

And unstated in the focus on “division” is what it is in contrast to. What is the “unity” that must be preserved? The status quo — in which First Peoples are uniquely divided from white Australians through the vast gap in educational, health and economic outcomes? A No vote will preserve, intact, this nation-scarring division — one that only Indigenous peoples bear the consequences of. Perhaps it’s not “division” if white people don’t feel it.

Alternatively, in the vision outlined by Jacinta Nampijinpa Price and endorsed by her right-wing media supporters and party colleagues, we would have far greater “unity” by pretending that Indigenous peoples no longer exist. In this assimilationist agenda, there would be no Indigenous programs or even an Indigenous affairs portfolio, the existence of intergenerational trauma would be wished away, the dispossession of Indigenous peoples by European invasion erased, colonisation celebrated as the bringer of bountiful gifts; First Peoples would become honourary white people as part of a one big, presumably happy white family.

That assimilationism reveals more about many No proponents than they might care to admit. The “unity” they want to preserve from “division” is a white-dominated unity, one that all other groups must conform to, one characterised by white privilege. To term something “divisive” is code for “threatening white privilege”. The heavy reliance on “divisive” as a criticism of the Voice to Parliament is thus a grand exercise in sarcasm: the status quo that must not be divided is already divided into those in the dominant group — white Australians — and those who aren’t: First Peoples, but also a revolving culture cast over the years and decades: people of colour, Muslims, LGBTQIA+ people, trans people…

Indeed, being “divisive” is the core product of the populist right and right-wing propaganda outlets such as News Corp and the Daily Mail. Division is their stock-in-trade — the identification of an eternal parade of enemies to be othered, indeed to be smitten hip and thigh, in the quest of convincing their readers and voters that they are under threat.

The grand pot-kettle irony of the Voice referendum is the sight of politicians and propagandists who literally draw their salary from flogging division lamenting that a measure designed to close the gap between white Australians and First Peoples is “divisive”, while promoting the maintenance of a unity characterised by exclusion, demonisation and racial privilege.

There are, as it turns out, some people worth being divided from. The No campaign has put them up in lights.