Elections are often a dialogue between hope and fear. Emotion is hard currency in politics. Both the yes and the no Indigenous voice campaigns are deploying emotion in an effort to persuade undecided voters before the referendum on 14 October.
The yes campaign (according to a report in the Australian at the end of last month) is directing its operatives to communicate with voters using the “four Vs framework” – value, villain, victory and vision. On Tuesday, we gained fresh insight into the tactics of the no campaign. The insight wasn’t pretty.
Nine Newspapers reported first that a campaigner for the leading no activist group Advance allegedly instructed volunteers “not to identify themselves upfront as no campaigners … but instead to raise reports of financial compensation to Indigenous Australians if the voice referendum were to succeed”.
The campaigner apparently told campaigners the objective was to make voters suspicious about the voice and its backers while the yes campaign was busy (or perhaps bogged down) citing academic arguments and “documents such as the Uluru statement”.
Anthony Albanese summarised this reported activity during parliamentary debate later on Tuesday. His summary was pithy. “Pretend to care, impersonate a concerned Australian, do anything you can to sow fear and doubt and whatever you do avoid the facts and also, unbelievably, don’t even identify that you are from the no campaign.”
Fair Australia and Advance were contacted for comment. In a response to Nine, a spokesperson defended the reported tactics as standard practice and said volunteers were asked to identify themselves as representing Fair Australia.
The campaigner also (reportedly) borrowed a quote from Drew Westen (author of the book The Political Brain). Westen had contended that when reason and emotion collide, “emotion always wins”.
I say contended, because the Westen truism begs some basic questions. If emotion “always” wins – which emotion wins in the context of the voice referendum? Positive or negative? Then there’s the binary framing. It’s true – human emotion sometimes collides with reason. More often, though, emotion and reason are in dialogue with one another. Most of us are rational actors, and rational actors tether and filter our feelings with facts and context.
In any case, there’s a lot on the line with this referendum.
Will Australians vote yes or no to a constitutionally enshrined advisory body – the listening mechanism that the original inhabitants of the continent have asked for in order to emerge from two post-colonial centuries of silencing?
Will Australia continue to walk forward with a shared national project of reconciliation, or will we vote to set that cause back for a generation?
High stakes – as the pundit’s cliche goes. But there’s more on the line than these very important propositions.
This referendum is also a health check on Australian democracy.
In case this latter observation requires some unpacking, let’s be clear.
There are people at large in professional politics – in Australia, around the world – who seek to divide the citizens of democracies as a matter of core strategy.
Rancorous, cancerous, polarisation – the kind of polarisation that corrodes a culture of shared facts and shared emotions – white ants the foundations of great democracies. Look at the United States. Then ask yourself – do you want to crash down that same cliff here?
Lying during campaigns isn’t a new phenomenon. Push polling isn’t new. Neither is circulating shit sheets. We’ve endured some rough election cycles in this country where outright lies have been peddled for partisan ends.
But the stakes of weaponised lying become exponentially higher the further great democracies drift in the direction of rancorous polarisation. The lesson of recent history is democracy is precious, and it is always more vulnerable than it looks.
There is nothing to fear from a fair and rigorous contest of ideas.
Australians will have different views on the merits of the voice to parliament and they are entitled to them.
But best those views be informed by the evidence rather than by no campaign phone bankers instructed to smile so they “sound enthusiastic and passionate when talking over the phone”. If people are to vote no in October (and polls suggest that’s more likely than not) – best be on the merits of the proposition rather than on something else entirely.
Some of official phone call scripts for the no campaign now in the public domain characterise the voice as a platform “for radical activists to attack our values and institutions” and claim without evidence the advisory body will “mean separate laws, separate economies and separate leaders”.
The scripts also reference the potential end of Australia Day, and calls for compensation and reparations for Indigenous people.
The looming referendum is about none of these things.
Social media experts have been pointing out for months that there is a concerted effort to create a Trump-like ecosystem for Australia’s voice referendum; that the core tactics of the no campaign are heavily influenced by the political strategy of the Christian right in the United States. While Tuesday’s specific insight into the backroom tactics of the no campaign was fascinating – much of the flood-the-zone-with-shit egregiousness is playing out entirely in plain sight.
Having made the call to sink the constitutionally enshrined voice by declining to lend the proposition bipartisan support, Peter Dutton is now demanding that Albanese “withdraw his voice referendum so that we can avoid an outcome which sets back reconciliation and divides the nation”. You’d laugh at the audacity if this was in any way funny.
Dutton is courting conflict and division as its own strategy.
Dutton is an experienced enough politician to understand that louder the general contention about the voice gets, the more Australians will switch off. When people are switched off, they are more susceptible to mischief and misinformation.
The more Dutton drives a partisan truck into Albanese on the voice, and the more the prime minister is forced to defend his position, the more Dutton establishes a platform of equivalence with his opponent – a status boost that has eluded him since taking the Liberal leadership.
It’s politics. But it’s not leadership.
