So we are going all out then. Between an absolutely minimal Voice offering with the best chance of success in a hard-to-win referendum, and a more expansive and contentious Voice approved by plebiscite and then legislated, we are going for the expansive and contentious version. God bless us and God help us in equal measure.
This week the chances of the referendum getting up went from “difficult” to “faaaaaark”, with Opposition Leader Peter Dutton committing the party and the shadow ministry to the No case. The only thing holding one back from saying that a win is now impossible is that it is polling so well everywhere, except Queensland. Crucially it is running 60-40 in favour in Western Australia, and even better in Tasmania.
Could the Voice referendum prove the exception to the rule — that only one-half of one substantive referendum proposal has ever won in Australia? One half of one. Forget the “eight out of 44” figure. Four were purely administrative (Senate elections in 1906; casual vacancies, territories voting in referendums and judges’ retirement ages in 1977). Two were unfinished federation business (federal takeover of state debts, 1910 and 1928).
The seventh was the 1967 bill on laws regarding Indigenous peoples, which may well have been momentous in impact but was administrative in form, a matter of federal and state powers, and counting Aboriginal peoples in the census. Its 90.77% Yes vote wasn’t all due to some outburst of social justice on this continent (though there was some of that) — transferring powers from state to federal was something that any average racialist Australian (as many would have been) could agree with.
The one-half of one? That was the 1946 social services referendum, which gave the federal government expanded powers and responsibilities for social service provision. But this was a consolation prize for the failed 1944 referendum, a far more comprehensive proposal that would have given the federal government capacity to build a complete social democratic and welfare state.
That’s it. That’s all. Which is pretty much as the federation founders intended. Constitution has to be a largely one-way, asymmetrical process. The simple “double majority” design has ensured that we stay constituted in a certain fashion.
An exceptional referendum?
But that may well be why the Voice referendum has a perverse and exceptional chance of winning. Because on this continent, what we have constituted on was obviously the creation of an entirely new order, and without that wilful blindness to the contrary facts of the matter, nothing could have been constituted.
So the Voice referendum is essentially aimed at the join, the wound, in the constitution — the constituting bit that can never be wholly drawn up inside it.
That might be what gets it through, what rewards the audacity of the current proposal — some sense that we are not merely adjusting the nation, but, in a fairly minimal way, reconstituting it with this relatively small measure. That would be the reason for the current high levels of support, even if such a reason can’t be vocalised by many.
But jeez, it’s going to be tough. Tough, and potentially tragic. The Voice was a proposal initially developed on the right side of politics, conforming to power-as-constituted — a right to lobby the legislative, the structure of it thus granting legitimacy to the constituted colonial structure, constitutionally defining First Nations peoples as petitioning supplicants. It has now been recently given some real grunt by the inclusion of right of access to the executive, ministers and public servants.
That new capacity is clearly interstitial, existing in the spaces between the separated powers. If, as a body, it has a right to yell at a minister that, for example, First Nations child removal is in large parts a sinister racket, a hideous farce of underfunding, neoliberal privatisation and residual racialism, its actual power might be in getting any halfway decent person to recognise that immediate things have to be done, and to thus execute those actions.
But that very interstitial power — formal in structure, informal in action, drawing on rhetorical and charismatic resources to achieve its effects — is not merely for the reactionary right but for genuine constitutional liberal-conservatives. Those who have delivered the latest Voice version have created something no actual constitutional liberal-conservative can really support, unless they are agreeing to de-constitute themselves as a movement with a set of beliefs.
The “strong”, “executive” Voice proposal has not only handed that section of the right something they can use to reconstitute, redefine and rebuild themselves — it has created something they must prioritise and respond to as the price of still being a political formation. I don’t agree with their worldview about individuals, freedoms and powers. But as one has some political beliefs that one would fight for, one can recognise them in others.
That this would occur has been insufficiently recognised, because for years now the Voice has been sold in a “post-political”, instrumental-totalitarian fashion, with opposition to it rendered as nothing other than a pathology to be worked around. That process has not softened the right. But it has softened many on the side of the Yes case (though not those at the centre, I would warrant, unless they are seriously mediocre thinkers and organisers).
Hence the childish, sentimental and abject language the Yes case is now throwing at Dutton et al — all the “broken the nation’s heart”, “spitting in our faces” nonsense. The Yes case has allowed the No case to deconstitute and regress itself, leaving it incapable of a direct political response. It’s a cheap thrill, which doesn’t last, and it leaves the Yes case even less prepared for the fight it has on its hands.
Crash through or car crash
We are heading towards either the most audacious political victory in the history of the world’s only continental nation-state, or a loss that is absurd and yields no clear oppositionality. That loss would of course be a failure to win a clear majority of voters — around the 60-65% of the same-sex marriage plebiscite, what one might call the simple progressive majority of Australia. That vote would then be undermined by a No in Queensland, and two more in the three states that have less than 10% of the country’s population between them.
That result, the most statistically and historically likely, would not only leave us with a wasted decade of political-constitutional work, the wreck of a whole project, the defeat of one section of a whole generation of First Nations leadership, but it would also leave First Nations peoples, the left, progressives and others with nothing clear and simple to define themselves against for the next period of struggle.
If won, the Australian people would have established that they are not against reconstituting this nation in respect of the fundamental and mass injustice that occurred as the condition of its founding. But if lost, it would be better to lose totally, to have the Australian people say that, as a majority, they agree with this historically oppressive and racist constitution of their national being.
That would then offer the First Nations movement something to reunify in opposition against — the beast would have made itself visible in a majority No vote. The “victory by majority, loss by state” vote will be a non-defining muddle that will create a vacuum of political determination lasting years. That, as I said, is what we may be heading towards, unless the Yes case — in politics, purpose and organisation — brings a AAA game that has not yet manifested itself.
Might the Albanese government — given a significant overall majority and a loss by states — simply legislate a Voice, and use the energy of opposition to further damn the right while establishing itself as decisive and audacious? It is not impossible. But of course, it would be exactly what is not wanted, a body without grunt, even of the persuasive type, that can be excised at the stroke of a pen — which is of course far more than by gun or whip, how the constituting dispossession was done in the first place.
Well, whatever it is, we’re doing it. And all the people who have argued for it, better be prepared to go to boot camps, wear the T-shirts and knock on the doors, for many weekends, because that’s how it will be won or lost — presuming that is that the Yes case has the capacity to organise this most basic expression of the politics. However this started, the Voice, with this continent’s demographics, will be won or lost by white people. Whatever it is, was, or will be again, we are going all out.
