Voice to Parliament: How the No campaign unleashed secret weapon Jacinta Price
At the start of the year the No campaign was in trouble but then the tide started to turn due to a number of factors but none more crucial than Jacinta Nampijinpa Price.
Opinion
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At the start of the year, the No campaign’s leaders knew they were in trouble.
Not only did polling have the Yes vote massively ahead (in one case on 70 per cent) but the Voice’s opponents knew they could expect no institutional support from corporate Australia – and could expect to be outspent by five to one.
In September, the Voice’s opponents had been shaken by the Uluru Dialogue’s History is Calling ad, in which a series of grown-ups told children the story of the Voice.
“That first ad really rocked us. It was a cracker. We thought they were setting up a narrative,” a senior No campaigner said.
Over summer, Fair Australia spent up big on research to find out how it could turn its campaign around.
The group’s polling found several things that the campaign was later able to support.
In its first benchmark poll, Fair Australia divided its test subjects into two groups.
The first group was asked if they supported the Voice, the second if they supported changing the constitution to support the Voice.
There was a stark difference between the two groups, with some demographics 7 per cent less likely to support the Voice when it was tied to constitutional change.
In Queensland, the difference was enough to push Yes below 50 per cent.
The second thing the polling found was that Australians’ two biggest concerns about the Voice were that many of them admitted they didn’t know anything about it; while those who knew about it were apprehensive about a lack of detail.
But despite research suggesting that a focus on these two fronts would be the easiest way to convince people to vote No, the decision was made in February not to build the campaign around them.
“We assumed the government would unveil the detail and the awareness of the Voice would increase,” the No campaigner said.
Instead, the campaign would be built around a theme that had come further down the list of voter concerns – that it would be divisive.
Research had also revealed the No case needed to counter assumptions by voters that there was overwhelming support for the Voice among Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders. It was clear therefore that the face of the No campaign needed to be an Indigenous Australian.
The obvious candidate was the first-term Northern Territory senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price. But there was a problem.
Research showed that while people who knew about her responded well, there wasn’t enough awareness of her and her experience of violence growing up in Alice Springs to make her the front for the campaign. In order to get voters to listen to her, they had to know who she was.
Fair Australia ran an ad almost five minutes long that introduced viewers to Price and her Scottish husband Collin. Although near its end Price announced she would be voting No, it was easy to miss that it was an ad about the Voice.
A senior Yes23 campaigner later said that the ad had confused voters.
“We showed it to people and some actually thought it was ours,” a senior Yes23 campaigner said.
Liberal campaign officials were also perplexed by the ad’s lack of overt anti-Voice message and questioned Fair Australia about it.
All of them were missing the point.
“The call to action of the ad was not to encourage people to vote No, it was about driving awareness of Jacinta and the issue,” a No campaigner said.
And it worked.
Polls taken in February, before the ad, and in May – after it had been running for about six weeks – showed between four and five million more Australians knew who Price was.
The campaign had pushed the ad hard among its data-modelling target audience – women aged 35 to 54 living in suburban and outer-suburban areas of WA, Queensland, SA and Tasmania.
In May, the No campaign was given a boost when the Warren Mundine-led Recognise a Better Way effectively rolled itself into the Fair Australia campaign, which was renamed Australians for Unity.
But both No and Yes campaigners say the turning point for the campaign was Opposition Leader Peter Dutton’s decision in April to oppose the Voice to Parliament.
The fact that one side of politics was now opposing it played into the Australians for Unity message about divisiveness.
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