Jacinta Nampijinpa Price, Nyunggai Warren Mundine, Gary Johns, Michaelia Cash et al
In the defining political debate of 2023 — whether Australia’s constitution should be amended to institute an Indigenous Voice to Parliament — there were mainly two branches to the case against. One involved arguments put forward by figures such as Lidia Thorpe, Ben Abbatangelo and many other Indigenous activists: that at best the Voice was a symbolic and useless sop to white guilt, and at worst a reinforcement and strengthening of the paternal and fundamentally illegitimate settler colonial domination over Indigenous peoples. Whether one agreed or not, these arguments contained ideas — important, provocative ideas about what Australia really is, how it might truly come to terms with itself, and what it might yet be.
But thanks to the coverage enjoyed by the winners of Crikey’s Arsehat of the Year award for 2023 — winning by a landslide with around half of all reader votes — you’d barely know such ideas existed.
This year the conservative No campaign, led by Jacinta Nampijinpa Price, Nyunggai Warren Mundine, Gary Johns, Michaelia Cash and others*, left on Australia two gashes that will fester long after the details of their opportunistic hectoring have faded from memory.
The first is the most obvious — the prospect of any program to meaningfully address the disadvantage experienced by so many Indigenous peoples in Australia is dead for the foreseeable future. Any government with the ambition, vision and above all honesty required for such a program will have taken on the lessons of the catastrophic and damaging defeat suffered by the Albanese government thanks to its signature 2023 policy. As will, more importantly, any such government’s opposition.
The second injury Australia suffered at the hands of this group is the methods by which they achieved their victory. The gleefully spread misinformation, whether attacking independent bodies such as the Australian Electoral Commission or misrepresenting their opponents’ words. The proud, reheated appeals to ignorance (“If you don’t know, vote No” returned to the national discourse for the third time since 1999).
And, of course, the stoking of white grievance — the aggressive assertion that nothing that happened during the European colonisation of this continent could possibly continue to impact its material reality, and thus it was an affront to seek redress (see “special treatment”) for a group whose disadvantages could only be of their own making.
Feeding each other like a decaying tape loop, these tactics and their animating logic inevitably combined to produce vile, racist rhetoric. Once you accept the above argument, statements from Johns, Kerryn White and others were just the sun-bleached litter floating on a pollution-choked river’s oily surface. Which is why, we suspect, this cohort won so easily against such worthy candidates as Ben Roberts-Smith and Alan Joyce (who came in second). There is a sense that what they have done will be with us for a very, very long time.
Australia had previously largely been spared the post-truth, conspiracy-addled politics that have beset other comparable countries in the past decades, and have generally roundly rejected politicians who’ve attempted to operate according to that logic. But as Bernard Keane put it earlier this week, there is a sense that 2023 marked the year that such resistances started to conclusively wilt, with potentially “hideous” consequences in the years to come.
Should that prove to be the case, the anti-achievement of this year’s winners will be all the more vast and all the more horrifying.
*Obviously we have to mention Opposition Leader Peter Dutton, who has really proved his genius at arsehattery by finding a way to get an implicit win in AotY despite having been removed from contention because he won too easily in previous years.
