Michael Yabsley: Government failed its Indigenous partners in Voice referendum
Indigenous leaders should not blame themselves for the Voice referendum. It was the Government’s failure, writes Michael Yabsley.
Opinion
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The Voice referendum will go down as a virtuous but naïve idea, obliterated by the predictable repeat of 122 years of Australian political and constitutional reality.
Both the referendum proposal and the political decisions that launched it into the abyss should have been changed before it all went south.
If the half-baked, evasive answers since referendum night are anything to go by, unvarnished truth telling by the key political players is unlikely.
The cruel truth is that political players who matter most have ‘moved on’. Continued footage of a train wreck is all downside for those who are responsible and even more so for those who are to blame.
For indigenous Australians it is the worst of all worlds, emotionally and materially.
David Cameron, former conservative British PM, was asked at a private event in Sydney about Brexit. His answer: “In politics, a simple lie will always beat a complicated truth.”
The No case was by no means a simple lie but the Yes case was certainly a very complicated truth.
There should be no escaping blame. The blame game invokes the age-old line: “Victory has a thousand parents and defeat is an orphan.” This was no ordinary defeat. It is victory with few parents and a defeat that is certainly no orphan.
The referendum was a partnership between the Government and the indigenous community.
As with most partnerships, they are not as equal as the term suggests. The division of power, ownership, responsibility and ultimately blame can be blurred and ambiguous.
Partnerships, whether corporate, political or personal are mainly, asymmetrical, despite a lot of lip service to the contrary.
It’s not as romantic or as tidy as when the prime minister told us in announcing the passing of the referendum enabling legislation in June, “Parliaments pass laws, but it is people that make history.” If only.
Any partnership that includes a democratically-elected, stable, financially-endowed national government, the dominant, senior partner can only be the government.
No amount of goodwill, lip service or feel-good power-sharing moments can change that fact. The rest is for the cameras.
An asymmetrical power structure requires asymmetrical apportioning of both blame and responsibility.
That’s why the Australian indigenous community should be kind to itself.
The indigenous community is no more to blame for this fiasco than the business community would be to blame for a failed economic reform, advanced by a peak business organisation to the government.
The senior partner in this referendum debacle, the Government, was ultimately in control.
That is why the magnanimous comments by Marcus Stewart from Victoria’s First Peoples’ Assembly are wrong when he says; “We asked for this referendum and the government facilitated the process. The loss of this referendum falls fairly and squarely on us as Aboriginal campaigners.”
Indigenous Australians were led up the garden path, some willingly even wantonly, others naively, and many not at all – a grievance shared by many non-indigenous Australians.
The referendum was dead in the water once bipartisan support went out the window.
From the time the Coalition bailed from supporting the referendum, the Government should have been in overdrive to save the day, with a reworked proposal based on constitutional recognition.
That could have seen a win of 1967 referendum proportions. There were compelling reasons and enough time to do it.
Federal Parliament is frequently consumed by doing deals to prove the maxim ‘politics is the art of the possible’. Why were these skills not brought to the referendum table?
The Government held all the levers in fixing the referendum proposal.
They soldiered on, linking constitutional recognition with the Voice, sinking both.
It looked like a death wish.
Constitutional recognition has been a totemic reform in New Zealand, Canada and the United States. While no substitute for reconciliation and closing the gap, constitutional recognition could have been a good and unifying start. A moment of national unity and celebration was within reach.
Alternatively, until August 30, when the Prime Minister announced October 14 as Referendum Day, the option remained to jettison the referendum altogether. We now know, only after the referendum failed, that there were high level discussions about cancelling the referendum.
Instead, indigenous Australians have been given cause to claim racism and rejection.
Rather than 50 per cent of something worthwhile, Australia has got 100 per cent of nothing, apart from a truckload of resentment and division. No wonder claims of ‘collateral damage’ and ‘pawns in a game’ are in circulation around parts of the Aboriginal community.
Those feelings should not be compounded by the failure of the senior partner in the referendum deal — the Government — to take the blame, not just the responsibility.
Nor should the junior partner in the deal — the indigenous leaders — take the rap for what was ultimately the failure of the non-Indigenous at the highest level to manage the political process.
Spectacularly, the baby has been thrown out with the bathwater all because the Government would not fix a flawed offering.
Michael Yabsley was a minister in the NSW Greiner Governmen and Federal Treasurer of the Liberal Party.
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