I’ve been away for a bit. When I returned to my office on Monday after six months, three things struck me. The first was how noisy politics is; specifically, the noise around the voice to parliament. Bam. Bam. Bam. Like a sonic boom, or better, a NutriBullet grinding fibrous plants indiscriminately.
The second insight was Anthony Albanese has developed a clearer pitch on the voice during the time I’ve been away. The third was Peter Dutton still has some Trumpian fan fiction he’d like to sell you. This voice is apparently “divisive” and “unknown”. I’m not sure if we were treated to the opposition leader’s “Canberra voice” pejorative specifically this week. But versions of it are still in the mix.
Many readers of this column are politically engaged (bless you all – I have missed you) and will have followed every single voice development over the past six months. You guys can fill me in, because I haven’t and I’m confident I’m not alone. Many civilians chose to hide from the deadening noise pollution generated at the intersection of political opportunism and preening brand journalism – particularly at the moment. Fake fights with a pontification chaser can be about as restful as nails clawing down a chalkboard.
People who study the mood of the nation tell me national bandwidth is limited. Everyone who isn’t returning from their European summer holiday in a business-class cabin feels up to their neck in adversity: higher borrowing costs, high power and petrol prices, rising rents – relentless cost-of-living pressure – coupled with the relentless stuff of life – demanding or insecure jobs, ailing elderly parents, kids who need attention.
The pandemic and the accompanying economic shock have pushed us off the sunny uplands and changed the psychology of the country; we’ve folded in on ourselves. People are hard to reach. If they are hard to reach, then they are hard to persuade.
So when strategists report that a lot of people are yet to give the voice any thought, I believe it. But Australia’s democracy dragnet is about to remove the option of sitting this issue out. The referendum to determine yes or no to the voice to parliament will be held on 14 October. We are entering the season of civic participation; the realm of forced choice.
This leads us to Albanese’s sharper messaging. His pitch is clearer because the prime minister knows difficult times make a values proposition – in this case giving the First Australians more visibility, status and agency in their own land – a difficult sell. Strategists say there’s a pathway to victory for the yes campaign, but it’s a narrow one. Some Labor folks are more optimistic about a victory than they were a month ago and the prime minister is by nature an optimistic sort. Copping volleys of abuse in their electorates, others feel the campaign is already lost.
Albanese has focused his attention this week on reassuring the people tuning in for the first time and trying to coax soft no votes back into the yes column. Much of this courtship is playing out in FM radio studios, catching the commuters in cars who haven’t tuned out with Spotify.
For people coming at the concept cold, Albanese’s pitch is threefold: the voice is an advisory body, not this sinister plot you might be hearing about on TikTok; if you don’t know what the voice is, please find out – it won’t take much time; and voting yes will cost you nothing – “there is so much for Australia to gain”.
Albanese’s message to the soft nos is “don’t close the door”. The prime minister used this locution five times at the yes campaign launch on Wednesday. The next six weeks will be a pitched battle for the soft nos. Albanese and John Howard were bookends this week – the current prime minister with his don’t close the door exhortation at the Adelaide launch and the former prime minister declaring at one point when he was out and about: “If you are intending to vote no, hold hard to that intention.”
No feels is a gravitational current, a tide, carrying us to Dutton. Things are noisy and they will get noisier between now and mid-October, so let’s be clear about some things.
Public support for the voice started to wane after the Liberal leader declined to back the proposal. Indigenous Australians asked through the Uluru statement for a constitutionally enshrined structure – a voice – to end a couple of centuries of silencing. Dutton chose intraday politics. He coddled his base rather than reaching for the moment of national unity. After electing to stage the referendum as a partisan death match, Dutton now decries this “divisive” voice. (As if the current division wasn’t a core function of his political strategy. As if he’s a bystander.)
Persisting with his bystander fantasy, Dutton also decries an alleged lack of detail about the voice. This could be funny if it wasn’t a try-on. Dutton, one of the most senior parliamentarians in the country, is in the box seat to help shape the voice if Australians vote yes in October. The Liberal leader is a legislator in a parliament that will resolve the structure of the advisory body. Resolving the detail would, however, involve turning up for work; it would involve Dutton resolving to become something more interesting than a pastiche of wreckers past. At the moment Dutton is preoccupied with headlining the Tony Abbott Hits and Memories Tour; like Taylor Swift’s Eras, with fewer sequins and friendship bands.
Finally, there is Dutton’s disdain for a “Canberra voice” – a pejorative hurled by a person who has been (wait for it) holed up in Canberra since 2001, entirely confident he has a right to speak, be heard and to shape the national policy debate. If representative bodies based in the national capital are a swamp that must be drained, perhaps we should cancel the parliament?
Just because this behaviour is transparent doesn’t mean it won’t be effective. As I noted a minute ago, the yes campaign needs to be able to connect with people in order to persuade them and clamour is its own strategy. Flooding the zone with shit (as Steve Bannon would have it) is a means of obscuring nuance and truth.
I suspect direct contact with voters will matter over the next six weeks because the latest Digital News Report from Oxford University and the Reuters Institute tells us the proportion of people who say they avoid the news, often or sometimes, remains close to all-time highs. A lot of people are turned off by constant negativity. The 2023 research also suggests there has been an uptick in people sharing information through closed networks “where people can have private or semiprivate conversations with trusted friends in a less toxic atmosphere”.
Now we’ve entered the realm of forced choice, the questions ahead are obvious.
Are enough people in the right parts of the country open to persuasion if the yes campaign can deploy a large enough ground game – meaning door knocking and phone banking – to cut through the racially charged sludge on social media, the conspiracy theories and the thickets of straw men?
Will people be angry that compulsory voting forces them to make a choice about something that feels less pressing than their own, entirely legitimate, compounding stresses? Or can Australians find the mindfulness in tough times, the requisite stillness, to listen, reflect and consider?
