No vote will help end one of the sorriest sagas in living memory | Caleb Bond

Come Sunday Australia will be told it’s racist but the opposite will have been proven true, writes Caleb Bond.

Come Sunday, we will witness a cacophony of Australian denigration.

We’ll be told we’re racist – that we have rejected the plight of Indigenous people.

But, when the Voice to parliament referendum ultimately fails, the opposite will be true.

It will be a rejection of racial division and an acknowledgment that a voice – another bureaucratic body like all the ones that have come before it – would simply be a continuation of the abject failure of Indigenous affairs policy.

A No vote will be something to celebrate. And it will help end one of the sorriest sagas in living memory, an unnecessary opening of division that has, sadly, set back the cause of reconciliation.

None of this needed to happen.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese with the Yes campaign at Uluru. Picture: Martin Ollman

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese could have run a referendum on constitutional recognition alone, which would have won in a landslide, and separately legislated a Voice.

He would have been a hero. It would have been his Gough Whitlam and Vincent Lingiari moment.

Instead, he has scuppered both the Voice – which he has now committed to not legislating should the referendum fail – and constitutional recognition.

The branding of No voters as racist and stupid by Marcia Langton, as “dinosaurs and dickheads” by Ray Martin, the vitriol of people such as Noel Pearson – it has all created division that shouldn’t exist.

It was never an either-or proposition – that you either support the Voice or hate Indigenous people – but that is how, in large part, it was presented.

The sheer mass of Indigenous people who are themselves opposed to the Voice is clear proof of that.

Polling this week by Resolve Strategic found 41 per cent of Indigenous people opposed the Voice.

Focaldata found the federal electorate of Lingiari, which has an Indigenous population of about 40 per cent, is strongly in the No camp at 63-37.

It will be interesting to see how the Yes campaign spins that result should it come to pass at the ballot box.

It’s hardly surprising given people in remote communities have seen a cavalcade of promises made and never delivered for decades.

What good is a Voice if no one actually listens?

If you can’t convince even two-thirds of the people who supposedly asked for this Voice to vote for it, then how can you expect anyone else to do so?

Imagine if the $400m spent on this referendum had instead been spent on practical help on the ground.

But, then again, we spend billions of dollars every year on Indigenous affairs and have little to show for it – and not for a lack of a Voice, it’s just that no one takes any notice.

As much as I will celebrate the referendum’s defeat, it will be a sad moment.

Sad because all this time, money, effort and energy spent on a dud referendum could have been spent practically on disadvantage and squalor.

But, just as with the equally divisive Australia Day debate, we are far more interested in symbolism than real action.