Steve Price: Typical Turnbull backflips on referendum support
Malcolm Turnbull and his wife Lucy this week took to the streets in Sydney wearing ‘Yes’ t-shirts and handing out fliers, despite arguing a referendum wasn’t “desirable” six years ago.
Opinion
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Prime Minister Anthony Albanese would have likely choked on his breakfast in Adelaide this Wednesday when former PM Malcolm Turnbull turned up in Potts Point in Sydney.
Malcolm was with wife Lucy, both were wearing Yes referendum t-shirts.
Of course.
Standing next to the El Alamein fountain – which marks the boundary between grotty Kings Cross and gentrified Potts Point – Turnbull tried to explain his reasons for a Yes vote.
Given the government under his Prime Ministership back in 2017 not only didn’t hold a Voice referendum but actively argued the Voice wasn’t “desirable” or “capable of winning a referendum” it was a tortured explanation.
The 2017 decision was against demands from the Uluru Statement from the Heart agitators and his awkward backflip this week was typical Turnbull.
He said a lot had happened in six years, when in reality the opposite is being argued — that nothing has got any better since then.
Turning up in his Yes shirt a few hours before the PM’s big announcement that the referendum on the Voice to Parliament will be on October 14 was also typical of “look at me” Turnbull.
Malcolm would be much more familiar with the eye-wateringly expensive real estate at the Potts Point end of the Kings Cross strip, lined with expensive restaurants, than the other end.
The divide in the Cross is starkly symbolic of the divide Albanese says will be fixed with the Voice referendum. The divide between privileged Australians and those on the wrong side of the tracks.
On the Kings Cross side of that fountain – I lived there for a year – is the grimy, dangerous seedy strip joints and two-dollar shops.
Darlinghurst Rd turns into Macleay St at the fountain with Australia’s first heroin injecting room at the Cross end. The area has a history of violence, drug use and prostitution and is a magnet for the homeless and disadvantaged.
The footpath is littered with rough sleepers and there is an obvious and sad presence of Indigenous Australians. A Sydney version of The Gap.
Coincidently, geography also played an important symbolic role with the choice of suburban South Australia for the big Yes launch rally on Wednesday.
South Australia, under progressive leaders like former Premier Don Dunstan, was the first jurisdiction in Australia to grant Aboriginal land rights and to change laws in relation to the legislation of homosexuality.
SA Premier Peter Malinauskas, who pointed this out, was the stand-out speaker by a long way on Wednesday. He used the lectern to spruik the progressive nature of his state in a bid to drag more South Australians across the line to vote Yes.
Surprisingly – or maybe not - he forgot to mention his state was also the first in Australia to appoint an indigenous Governor in Sir Doug Nicholls.
The former VFL Fitzroy star was also the first Aboriginal Australian to be knighted in 1972.
You would think that such a trailblazing Yorta-Yorta man like Doug Nicholls would be the poster boy of the Yes campaign and held up in lights.
I can only presume it didn’t suit the modern Indigenous activists in charge of the Voice campaign to recognise someone occupying South Australia’s Government House as he was appointed by British Royalty.
Choosing the northern Adelaide suburb of Elizabeth for the launch was another very strange choice of location. You wonder whether those in charge of the Yes campaign really thought this through.
Elizabeth is named after the late Queen Elizabeth II, a relative of one of those evil colonising British invaders.
The suburb was established in 1955 on an industrial estate of 3000 acres chosen by a Liberal Premier Thomas Playford.
His Government through its Housing Trust built affordable homes for thousands of migrants.
The Queen herself visited in 1960 and Elizabeth the suburb mainly housed migrants from the UK who became known as the ten-pound Poms.
Ironically those non-indigenous migrants arrived by boats- sound familiar- to work in factories making Holdens.
As a very young child I lived in Elizabeth for a year in 1957 or ’58 and I was in good company. Elizabeth was the home to legendary music stars Jimmy Barnes, John Swan, Doc Neeson and Glen Shorrock – all children of British migrants.
The 400-strong audience in Elizabeth this week for the stage-managed launch of the date ignored this history, instead turning the event over to politicians, activists and a front row of elite agitators.
People like Sarah Hanson-Young, Noel Pearson, Penny Wong and Meaghan Davis were all front and centre.
Looking more like a Labor Party campaign launch the Yes organisers made the massive mistake of politicising the event which will likely turn more people off the Yes side than on.
You wonder how many disadvantaged indigenous people living in a creek bed in the Todd River or in poverty in a remote outback camp would feel like giving this mob a standing ovation.
All Wednesday did with its unfortunate Turnbull intervention and elitist back slapping Yes launch was likely to cause many Australians in the undecided camp to vote No.
Letting Jimmy Barnes belt out working-class man would have been a better tactic and likely to get more attention.
We will find out in six weeks.
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