Australia has overwhelmingly voted not to recognise Indigenous people in the constitution, and the nation has changed forever.
Plenty will be said in the coming days about the campaign and how it all went down, much of it by non-Indigenous people who already have power, influence and access to the media to prosecute their arguments. In that way, the country will be much the same as it was last week: a place where the voices of First Nations people are drowned out, talked over and misrepresented in a national conversation that is forever about us, without us.
It will take us months and years to grasp the full impact. But it is already blindingly clear that the result has been deeply hurtful for First Nations people, regardless of how we voted.
We entered this campaign with apprehension; it felt risky to put faith in the Australian people, most of whom have never met an Aboriginal person and who mostly remain unaware of our history and cultures. My adult child, standing in a long line to vote on Saturday, was overwhelmed with sadness. “Why are all these people deciding whether we belong or not?” they asked. Other friends and family were taking it in turns to accompany elders to and from voting booths, making sure they were not left alone in the queue. Mob have been checking in on each other in texts, phone calls, group chats, Facebook: the love and solidarity on such a challenging day has been uplifting.
When bipartisanship, which had long been a feature of the push for Indigenous constitutional recognition, died in November last year even before the question was settled, the debate went downhill fast. It was neither respectful nor informed. It was vitriolic, mean-spirited, full of misinformation, driven by racism, petty grievances and conspiracy theories based on fear and ignorance. The referendum became by proxy a vote on Indigenous peoples’ right to exist in our own land – and our fellow Australians voted to reject us.
Imagine – just try – how that feels today.
This is the result yes campaigners did not want to imagine as they frantically criss-crossed the country in the final weeks, trying to stave off the inevitable, running on hope and conviction.
Their campaign stats were quite something: more than 70,000 volunteers knocked on 320,000 doors and made more than a million phone calls. In the final week, they made an average of 30,000 calls a night. Noel Pearson calculated he had spoken at 129 forums since July. This week, he crossed three time zones in 24 hours. Thomas Mayo has been on the road for 260 days this year alone. Nobody could question their faith in the cause.
The yes campaign director, Dean Parkin, said it was the biggest volunteer army in Australian history – the “creation of a base” of support for Indigenous people. That volunteer army must not disband, he said. Keep supporting First Nations people. Keep showing up. Tackle racism when and where you see it. Keep being an ally. We will need you more than ever.
On the ABC on Friday, the former Indigenous affairs minister and Yamatji man Ken Wyatt urged no voters to also stay involved, saying that turning down the voice because they didn’t think it would be effective should be accompanied by a commitment to do more in support of Aboriginal people. If they cared that much, he argued, they should do something about it.
Learning the nation’s history would be a good first step.
The big winners of this campaign are racism and misinformation. Before his term expired, the race commissioner Chin Tan called racism a “tentacled monster that feels impossible to slay, and its venomous nature seems to have only mutated in recent times”.
Tan said his greatest fears were realised and the debate was allowed to “degenerate into one about race”.
Australia urgently needs a national anti-racism framework and bipartisan response to racism, Tan said.
“We cannot afford to delay. This monster has no place in our society. It not only harms First Nations peoples, whose continued collective suffering should be enough of an impetus to inspire change. But for far too many Australians across a multitude of backgrounds, racial discrimination remains a daily occurrence.”
For First Nations journalists, the campaign has been gruelling. We have been unavoidably exposed on a daily basis to some of the worst depictions of our people. We have received threats and racist hate each time we hit publish on a story. We have worried about fairly representing the wide views of our communities, while trying to call out lies and misinformation when they arose. This was like a game of whack-a-mole: no sooner had we debunked one myth than another took its place. We spent a lot of time contemplating what might come from a no vote, and none of it felt good. We lived with a sense of dread for weeks, if not months. But here we all are, and somehow, we must find a way to move forward as a nation.
Anthony Albanese was fond of saying, during the campaign, “If not now, then when?” On Saturday night he got an answer: never. There won’t be another referendum any time soon to recognise Indigenous people in the nation’s birth certificate. And it was voted down by the people who were never given an honest alternative plan. No ideas, no vision, no explanation of how the status quo is going to materially improve Aboriginal lives.
The question now is: “If not this, then what?” What is the future of the rest of the Uluru statement, particularly treaty-making and truth-telling, which Albanese has said his government is committed to “in full”?
Truth-telling will be the key to leading us to healing and understanding. We need to tell, and listen to, the truth of our nation’s history now the referendum is behind us. It is still there, a festering wrong still to be righted. Until we face it, it will be impossible to convince Australians that we deserve a voice to parliament or anything else – as the author Melissa Lucashenko put it, “white Australia doesn’t want to give blackfellas anything, even when it’s nothing”.
This denial, this history of forgetting, is the problem Australia still has to overcome.
Sunday is a day of reflection. So let’s reflect on the commitment by all of the First Nations advocates in our history who have given their entire lives to the betterment of their people. Some campaigners will be feeling heartbroken today, in despair over a result they fought so hard to avert. I pay my respects to them all. They have given it everything. We wish for your sake the result had been different, that you could rest knowing that you had made things better for your children, so that they wouldn’t have to struggle and go without like you did. We could not ask for more.
But also know that we will not let this drag us down. Like every other time we have been kicked to the curb by the colony, we will get up, we will show up and we will fight on.
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