How the political snobs helped ruin the Voice to Parliament’s Yes vote | David Penberthy

The Voice result proves if you tell people they’re not smart enough to understand an idea, they will reject it. It doesn’t matter how good the idea is, writes David Penberthy.

The last thing the world needs is another column about the Voice, and rest assured that this isn’t one, but it has at its starting point my experience of voting at the referendum last Saturday. The column is about elitism.

Voting normally makes me feel good about my country. I can never understand how anyone in Australia could regard it as an imposition. You think about how many countries have historically denied people the vote, how many countries hold elections that are fraudulent, or hold elections where the losing side refuses to accept the result and civil disorder ensues. None of this happens in Australia. We should thank our lucky stars that in the lottery of life we were born here or had the privilege to emigrate here.

Voting last Saturday was a less pleasant experience as my trip to my local polling booth featured encounters with a couple of people who represented the worst of both the No and Yes sides.

The first was a No campaigner who was haranguing us all as we arrived at the gate. She was shouting slogans about “the Voice of division”, warning us that the country would be split down the middle, saying there were plenty of Aboriginal MPs so why do they need a Voice anyway. “Don’t be fooled!” she was shouting. “You’re all being fooled!” The woman was so agitated that police were called to the booth later in the day to tell her to calm down.

Once I made my way past her and joined the queue, an older woman wearing a Yes T-shirt engaged me in conversation about it all.

She said it pained her that Australians were so stupid that they would believe any of what that woman or the No campaign were saying. She said there should be some kind of basic test, like an IQ or civics test, where people had to prove themselves intellectually capable of making an informed opinion before they were allowed to vote. “Something has to be done about it!” she said.

Last I heard this woman is in talks with Ten with a view to joining the panel on The Project, the political chat show that is challenging the Mackerras Pendulum with the patented Waleed Aly Cretin Map of Australia as a means of explaining political trends.

As obnoxious as the No campaigner was, the Yes woman annoyed me more because as a Yes voter myself I felt she was the human embodiment of the key failure of the Yes campaign, in that it often felt like it regarded anyone who wasn’t on board as a halfwit who deserved contempt, if not disenfranchisement.

To that end, last Saturday’s result was merely the latest demonstration in politics that if you tell people they’re not smart enough to understand an idea, they will reject that idea as a matter of principle because you have insulted them. It doesn’t matter how good the idea is. If you tell people they’re stupid if they oppose it, or even simply ask for more detail about it, you are effectively campaigning for the other side.

As Waleed Aly’s comments demonstrate, there is a casual and frequently-put theory in progressive politics now that you don’t fail to win because you haven’t made your case, but because your opponents are dumb.

Waleed Aly on The Project.

This was the residing takeout in the UK from Brexit, with all those cashed-up Londoners who love flitting back and forth to the Continent for work and weekends with Michelin-starred meals, regarding the Brexit-supporting public as uninformed provincial hicks.

It was a key reason the entitled Hillary Clinton got smashed by Donald Trump, declaring his supporters “deplorables” in the lead-up to polling day, a statement that probably did as much to drive the Republican vote as anything Trump ever said.

During my brief stint in Canberra in the late 1990s, I saw first-hand how counter-productive the tactics of the so-called intelligentsia can be in countering ideas that are contestable and even repellent.

I don’t think there is a single thing Pauline Hanson has said with which I would ever agree. But when Hanson shot to fame at the 1996 election after being disendorsed by the Liberals over racist comments but still won the seat of Oxley, the more PC members of the press gallery spent the next three years deriding her as a know-nothing fish and chip shop owner, a Queensland hick, picking on her voice and even appearance.

The treatment was condescending and sustained and had the net effect of seeing Hanson back bigger than ever at the 1998 election with the newly-formed One Nation party, winning 11 Lower House seats in Queensland at the state election the following year, this mass vote being driven by voters repulsed by this snob pile-on.

Peter Malinauskas made some important comments during the referendum about the lack of respect in the campaign. He noted what should have been obvious, namely that telling people they’re dumb and racist for opposing an idea, or having questions about an idea, was a poor way to win hearts and minds. Australia’s conservatives must be thrilled that Malinauskas’ sage advice was so studiously ignored.

We spoke this week to a whole stack of voters on the radio in the northern suburbs where No beat Yes by a factor of three to one. One bloke in Pooraka who voted at Paddy’s Market – where almost 4000 No votes and fewer than 1000 Yes votes were cast – said he hadn’t heard from anyone as to why he should have voted Yes.

His comments show how a lack of engagement, fuelled by a disbelief that people could not realise the righteousness of it all, was again a lethal combination in guaranteeing progressive failure.

A grassroots problem-solving exercise for Indigenous people became a feel-good exercise for rich white people, its demise fuelled by derision towards anyone who dared think differently.