Rita Panahi: Win for No campaign will be a proud moment for Australia
If the No vote prevails it will be a rejection of race politics and a triumph of a genuine grassroots campaign against the powerful, wealthy elite.
Rita Panahi
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Your vote in Saturday’s referendum is likely to be the most important vote you’ll ever cast. The outcome of the race-based referendum is far more consequential than any state or federal election and of greater import than the republican referendum held some 24 years ago.
To enshrine racial privilege into our founding document would be a monumental mistake; a massive step backwards with far-reaching consequences.
If the No vote prevails it would be a proud moment for Australia.
An unequivocal rejection of race politics and attempts to divide us by ethnicity.
It would be a rejection of victimhood culture and the bigotry of low expectations.
And, it would be a triumph of a genuine grassroots campaign against the powerful, wealthy elite.
The latest poll shows the Voice faltering further. The YouGov poll has No on 56 per cent, Yes on 38 per cent, with six per cent undecided. Among Coalition voters the gap between the No and Yes votes is a whopping 55 points with only one in five Liberal/National voters planning to back the Voice. For Labor voters the gap is only 13 points with 53 per cent backing Albanese’s referendum.
Far more interesting is that Australians are more likely to vote No if they have read the Uluru Statement from the Heart, according to YouGov.
This backs up polling by RedBridge that showed when exposed to the arguments of the Yes and No camps, the No vote increased further, with one in four people who were leaning towards supporting the referendum switching their vote to No.
So much for Ray Martin’s asinine “dinosaurs and d**kheads” commentary; the evidence suggests those who have done their homework are more likely to vote No.
It’s not surprising that citizens who have taken the time to read the Uluru statement are more likely to vote No than those who haven’t.
The PM’s claims that the document is “a generous, gracious and optimistic invitation to all Australians”, is spurious to say the least.
As Australia’s greatest historian Geoffrey Blainey wrote, it’s a “vulnerable document” that “condemns Australian people for misdeeds that never happened.”
“The Uluru statement is militant. It offers no sentence of respect or gratitude to the Australian people.”
You don’t even have to read the full statement to see how militant and divisive it is with its calls for a treaty, aka makarrata, on the first page.
And thankfully, despite much of the media’s efforts to confuse and obfuscate, there is plenty of vision of Voice architects explaining how it is the first step to treaty and designed to empower representatives to negotiate from a position of strength.
Though polls show that the Voice will be defeated comprehensively, it’s important not to be complacent.
The Yes camp is not only cashed up like no other political campaign has ever been in this country, but it’s also indulging in dirty tactics including misleading information about crosses and ticks, and deliberately copying the colours of the AEC for their election posters.
The AEC has admonished the campaign but the damage is done.
Yes has the backing of the corporate world, sporting bodies, celebrities, majority of the media and has a war chest of around $100m. Yet despite all these advantages they are failing because their proposal is abhorrent in principle and dangerous if put into practice.
The notion that we need a constitutionally enshrined Voice for Indigenous people to be heard is absurd.
We have dozens of such advisory bodies already, at both state and federal level, giving advice on policy development, including the Coalition of Peaks which represent more than 80 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander community-controlled peak and member organisations. The National Indigenous Australians Agency alone has more than 1300 employees and a multi-billion dollar budget.
The emotional blackmail being employed by Yes is built on half-truths and lies.
The Australian people want better outcomes for the Indigenous community, but further empowering the destructive activist class, entrenching an ATSIC-on-steroids body in the Constitution, is not how we get there.
This referendum has been enormously divisive and one could argue damaging.
But we should seize the opportunity to pursue real, meaningful change starting with a thorough investigation into the billions squandered every year.
The first step is to bring a measure of accountability to the existing bodies that have delivered such poor outcomes.
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