Yes, no, wait: Sport comes off the bench to boost Voice vote

How progressive is middle Australia at the moment?

The question has been vexing members of Anthony Albanese’s government as they weigh the risk of losing the referendum on the Voice to Parliament. Why would a nation which supported marriage equality in 2017, evicted the Liberal party from metropolitan Australia at last year’s federal election and has painted the continent Labor-red at the state government level, even contemplate saying No to the Voice?

Illustration: Simon LetchCredit:

Although the private polling for the Yes campaign is more encouraging than this week’s shock result from Resolve, published in this masthead, there is now an entrenched anxiety within government ranks about the state-level numbers.

The referendum requires a double majority to succeed – a majority of voters across the nation, and a majority of states. Queensland is now assumed as lost, with Western Australia doubtful. This leaves Tasmania as the potential swing state. Each has a complicated relationship with its Indigenous past and present, and unique political demographics – whiter and older than the nation at large – which could set them apart from voters in NSW, Victoria and South Australia.

These calculations will inevitably change as the Yes campaign ramps up. But the question still stands, because even the most optimistic reading of the polls shows a gap between support for the Voice at the moment and the majority that voted for marriage equality in 2017. That gap is effectively the difference between how middle Australia views minorities within its own community, and class, and those inevitably outside it.

Noel Pearson touched on this point in his ABC Boyer lecture last October: “Unlike same-sex marriage there is not the requisite empathy of love to break through the prejudice, contempt and yes, violence, of the past. Australians simply do not have Aboriginal people within their circles of family and friendship with whom they can share fellow feeling.”

First a note of caution about the polls, and a reminder about the context of the marriage equality survey. While Resolve had the Yes vote shrinking by 5 percentage points to 53 per cent in May compared to a month ago, the Essential Media poll published in The Guardian had the Yes vote slipping by a single point – within the margin of error – to 59 per cent.

One of them is surely an outlier, and there is no shame in that. Rogue polls are an occupational hazard for the industry, and there have been amusing examples from the past to provide caution for all sides now.

The Gallup Poll, for example, had William McMahon’s coalition government on course for re-election in October 1972, while my old paper The Australian splashed across its front page in August 1995 a Newspoll showing Paul Keating’s Labor government was “neck and neck with the Coalition for the first time since John Howard became Opposition leader in January”. No harm was done in the end. The respective polls accurately predicted the primary votes for the major parties in December 1972 and March 1996. The rogue poll you don’t want is the one before the real vote.

A fall in support for the Voice includes pivotal shifts against the Voice in big states such as Queensland.

The vote for marriage equality in 2017 differs from the referendum on the Voice in one crucial respect – it was a voluntary postal ballot, conducted by the Australian Bureau of Statistics. One in five Australians on the electoral roll did not return their survey.

This pushed the Yes vote into landslide territory as the ballots were measured across a narrower base - 61.6 per cent for Yes versus 38.4 per cent for No. If we add back those who did not vote, or had spoiled their ballot paper, the Yes vote was 48.8 per cent, No 30.5 per cent and non response 20.7 per cent. These figures have, in fact, been closer to the public and private polling which include a third column of undecided voters.

What worries the government is the recent narrowing of the gap between committed Yes and No voters, which reflects a greater shift from the undecided to the No column than from Yes to No.

The wobble in the Yes vote comes despite the formidable institutional power behind the referendum. All four footy codes are now on side after Rugby Australia and the Australian Football League this week joined Football Australia and the National Rugby League in confirming their support for the Voice. Each code had membership bases, and the undivided attention of Australian households, which political parties would kill for.

On the party political side, the Voice enjoys significantly advantages denied to the republican cause going into the 1999 referendum. The Albanese government is united on the Voice, notwithstanding the rising levels of fear within its ranks. Peter Dutton’s opposition is split, while the sole Liberal state government in Tasmania is supporting the Yes case. In 1999, John Howard’s coalition government was divided between republicans and monarchists, while the rift within Kim Beazley’s Labor opposition was between republican models.

The No camp has also pointedly sidelined the opposition leader in recent weeks and left the carriage of the argument to shadow minister for Indigenous Australians, Senator Jacinta Price. Whether Dutton made the call himself, or was persuaded to, it is noteworthy that he has taken a much lower profile since his recent visit to Alice Springs. The No vote appears to have solidified in the absence of his hectoring.

The Yes camp argues, with some justification, that the real campaign starts once the legislation for the referendum passes. Labor people can quickly talk themselves out of their present urge to despair by reminding themselves that the various footy calendars contain inflection points that should assist their cause.

This weekend’s AFL Indigenous round will provide a taste of the wider Yes campaign. The Women’s World Cup soccer in July, and the AFL and NRL finals in September have the potential to create a halo effect over a referendum expected in October or November.

But there is a paradox in the role of the footy codes now when compared to the marriage equality debate in 2017. Rugby league and particularly rugby union was divided at the player level, as the ABC documentary on former Wallaby Israel Folau highlighted this week.

There is an old Australian myth about sport as an agent of social cohesion, operating in the rarefied public space above politics. But the mirror sport holds up to the community can’t conceal the tension on the playing fields, or in the grandstands.

The cultural splits within rugby league and union in 2017 were arguably more acute than in the wider community at the time. To turn the Pearson formula on its head, the push for marriage equality resonated more in the suburbs than it did in the masculine sheds of league and union.

The Voice, by contrast, might find the four football codes more unified internally than the population at large for the opposite reason. Indigenous Australians are more likely to seen as equals within a footy club than in the team’s supporter base.

The Yes camp knows that it can’t rely on sport to make the case for it. But it is a measure of the gap between middle Australia and Indigenous Australia that the Yes camp is using sport to appeal to our shared sense of humanity when we can’t do it for ourselves through a shared lived experience.

George Megalogenis is a journalist, political commentator and author.

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