Campbell: What most Australians care about more than Voice

With less than three weeks away from the Voice referendum, the latest RedBridge poll makes it clear it’s not a priority for most Australians, writes James Campbell.

From the way we’ve been talking about it more or less non-stop since election night last year, it would be easy to think the Voice is something about which Australians give a toss.

But as the latest RedBridge poll makes clear, most of us really couldn’t care less.

Earlier this month the pollster gave people a menu and asked them to pick five issues they think the Albanese Federal Labor Government should be focusing on at the moment.

The winner, surprise, surprise was cost-of-living which 49 per cent of the population ranked No. 1, 20 per cent ranked as No. 2 and 11 per cent put third.

The next most pressing issue was housing affordability which 73 per cent of respondents put somewhere in their top five.

In descending order the issues picked after that were the economy and jobs, health funding, wages, climate change, transitioning to renewable energy, national security, and roads and infrastructure funding.

The latest RedBridge poll makes it clear the Albanese government should be focusing more on the cost-of-living. Picture: NCA NewsWire/Nicki Connolly

Only two per cent of people had the Voice as their top priority and another two each had it as their second or third while four per cent each rated it either four or five.

All up, with rounding, only 15 per cent of people thought it should be one of the government’s top five priorities, whereas 31 per cent had roads and infrastructure somewhere in there.

If I were writing this for The Guardian I suppose I would pause at this point to ask what it says about our country that more people care about the traffic than care about the conditions in which some of the fellow Australians live.

But it’s not really a surprise is it?

Not only were Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders just 3.8 per cent of the population at the time of the last census, there’s a misplaced perception they live in faraway parts of regional Australia which are alien to the suburbs where the overwhelming majority of Australians live.

In other words, expecting people to rank this as a high priority for their government was to expect them to put other people’s interests ahead of their own.

Yet here we are, less than three weeks away from a vote that, if the polls are right, is going to leave the country feeling pretty crook about it itself.

Reading these results it is hard not to wonder why Albo decided to put the Voice at the centre of his victory speech on election night last year.

Perhaps his assumption was that while Australians might not care much about Indigenous affairs, what was being proposed was so modest they could be persuaded to vote for it anyway.

The alternative, that he mistook the media’s interest in Aboriginal Australia for the public’s, doesn’t bear thinking about.

Albo’s bet, if that’s what it was, seems to have been that this was a modest proposal which the public could be brought to accept, just as they accepted the 1967 referendum which gave the Commonwealth the power to make laws for Aboriginal people and to count them in the census.

A Sydney rally in support of the No campaign ahead of the Voice referendum. Only 15 per cent of people thought an Indigenous Voice to Parliament should be one of the government’s top five priorities.

But the circumstances surrounding the 1967 vote were very different.

Not only was that proposal supported by both sides of politics, it took place in a very different atmosphere.

I don’t mean that Australians in 1967 were more alive to the importance of Indigenous issues than the people who answered RedBridge’s poll earlier this month.

If anything I’d be prepared to bet they were even less exercised by them than voters are today.

The difference is that in 1967 Australians were able to go to a football game, catch an aeroplane or watch the ABC without being invited to acknowledge the traditional owners of the land on which they stood and to pay their respects to their elders, past, present and emerging.

Joe McGinness, Charles Perkins and others campaigning at the University of Queensland in 1967 for the changing of Australian constitution.

For a giggle Channel 10 – not that Channel 10 existed – did not rename Melbourne Naarn during the weather report in NAIDOC week in 1967.

Indeed NAIDOC week was still NAIDOC Day in 1967.

In other words the 1967 referendum did not happen at a time when many Australians, especially older ones, were fearful the legitimacy of the whole post-1788 project was being undermined.

Most commentators assume, and I admit at times I have done so myself, that it was the decision of the Opposition Leader Peter Dutton to oppose the Voice that has cooked it.

Thinking about it, I’m not so sure. As poll after poll shows support for the Voice shrinking I think it probable it was always going to struggle to pass in a world in which so many institutions are happy to pump out the message that 96 per cent of us are permanent guests on someone else’s land, no matter if you were born here and in many cases have no right to live anywhere else.

If there’s any comfort for the Government in the RedBridge poll it’s that because so few people care about it, there won’t be too many people bothered whether or not it goes down.

Originally published as Campbell: What most Australians care about more than Voice