For a prime minister presiding over his first Australia Day in the top job, for a Labor leader who has sunk political capital into securing the next chapter of reconciliation with First Nations peoples, the call to action needed to be clear.
Suited up on the shores of Lake Burley Griffin in Canberra on a sparkling summer day, having handed out the annual gongs and welcomed new citizens to their adopted homeland, Anthony Albanese posed a simple question about the voice to parliament.
“If not now, when? If not now, when will this change occur? If not the people of Australia this year, who will make this change that will improve our country, improve our national unity?”
This prime ministerial cadence samples one of the mantras of the civil rights movement – if not us, then who? These five words form the enduring question of progressivism posed by leaders from John F Kennedy to Barack Obama: can we locate our better angels? Can we rise?
The pitch needed to be simple, because Albanese lacks the silver tongue of a Kennedy or Obama, and because the appeal wasn’t being made in a vacuum. In a referendum campaign sense, Australia Day was the obvious springboard to next steps. But the day is both totemic and bitterly contested.
Totemic because 26 January is the day of dispossession. The day when sovereignty was never ceded. The day that reminds Indigenous peoples British colonists exiled them in their own lands, then spent generations compounding the harm. Contested, because it is a day where a deep well of intergenerational trauma intersects with a hot-takes complex addicted to spectacle and indifferent to suffering.
It has become the noisiest day of the year, and away from the manicured Canberra lakefront and the workshopped locutions of aspirational politicians, voices were raised.
For several years the focal point of protests has been changing the date. Polling data suggests this campaign is gaining some ground. Every year, Australians become a little more equivocal about whether Invasion Day is the right day for an inclusive national celebration. The centre of gravity is shifting.
Objections to the date persist, but this year, opposition to the voice bubbled to the fore. “Fuck your voice,” read one prominent sign, ferried through Canberra to the Aboriginal tent embassy. “No to the voice – manufactured constitutional consent”, read several others outside the old parliament house.
Nioka Coe-Craigie, who said her parents had helped found the tent embassy, claimed constitutional recognition would “silence our voices”. She said her community would not recognise a government-backed Indigenous body. “When they stand over there with them, they lose the right to speak on behalf of our people,” Coe-Craigie said, gesturing toward parliament.
The summer break has furnished an opportune lull for Peter Dutton to foment opposition to the proposal. Festooned in a Socratic cloak, feigning everyman curiosity, the Liberal leader has waved his 15 questions. This is a prelude to saying no to the voice if Dutton judges the Liberal party base will break rather than bend to the epic reasonableness of consulting Indigenous people on policy that affects them. Remnants of the right are itching to weaponise the voice as the Wokerati handing black Australia a veto power.
Dutton signalled late on Thursday that he would be “happy to attend a future meeting” of the government’s voice referendum working group, following Albanese’s public invitation to be constructive the day before.
But critics at Invasion Day rallies aren’t worried the voice is overreach. They are worried it means nothing. Whose voice is this voice? Will this thing have any power? What will it change? What will it cost us? Can it detonate the racist foundations of colonial Australia?
Indigenous people have been patient for a couple of centuries while white Australia refused to reflect, refused to listen, refused to atone, refused to engage, and asserted its inalienable right to create exclusionary institutions either indifferent or hostile to justice for First Nations people. Patience for earnest incrementalism isn’t infinite.
For the record, the voice isn’t a top-down proposal. It emerged from Indigenous peoples in a statement from the heart.
But for some, this change isn’t enough. “Why would we accept our political role in this country as an advisory body?” a young woman named Leah said. “For us to accept a role as a consultative body, not decision-makers. Those are crumbs, what’s on the table being offered to us now ... We don’t want a seat at their table.”
Despite strong criticism on the stage in the nation’s capital, opposition to the voice was less enthusiastic in the crowd. Applause was noticeably quieter to those remarks than others.
Back from the loud-hailers, in the throng, the voice was considered an advance. Numerous non-Indigenous people said they believed the advisory body would be a step forward, and that they would support it. “There’s no power unless you get in that door [of parliament],” said one woman, Nell.
But some also said they would reconsider their views after hearing the criticisms of Indigenous speakers. Amy, a young woman attending the rally with friends, said she previously thought supporting the voice was “a no-brainer” and hadn’t understood why some Indigenous people opposed it.
“Hearing it today was eye-opening. It’s not a no-brainer for me any more,” she said. Nell said she understood why some Indigenous speakers saw the voice as “tokenism”, but believed it would have benefits.
It is possible Invasion Day 2023 will be remembered the high water mark of “fuck your voice”. It’s possible the scepticism on display won’t influence the many Australians who like the sound of a voice but haven’t a clue what it is.
While we can’t know the future, the scenes at Thursday’s rallies expose the perennial problem for Labor.
Critics on the right will chide the government for going too far, while critics on the left want them to go further. With only a simple yes or no vote available in the referendum, the government is entirely alive to the possibility of being sandwiched and outflanked on both edges.
