The devil in the details: Inside the Yes campaign’s defeat

As recently as March, Anthony Albanese was assuring his colleagues they could defy the weight of history and pull off a historic referendum victory without bipartisan support.

The Voice was a virtuous cause: a call from Indigenous Australians for constitutional recognition and a greater say in the political process. He argued it would be embraced by the nation even if it were spurned by the Coalition.

The prime minister argued that Opposition Leader Peter Dutton risked making himself irrelevant if he opposed the Voice, and that in an age in which politics was much less tribal and people were less wedded to political parties, the Yes campaign could and would succeed without the Coalition.

A crestfallen Anthony Albanese addressed the nation on Saturday night, taking responsibility for the loss and insisting reconciliation was not dead.Credit: Alex Ellinghausen

It was a fatal misjudgment.

Australians rejected the Voice in every state and territory except the ACT. Nationally, more than 60 per of Australians voted to oppose it.

The emphatic verdict left Yes supporters shell-shocked. It shattered Indigenous leaders who had campaigned for years for a constitutionally enshrined Voice but were ultimately unwilling to compromise on its scope and power.

When a crestfallen prime minister addressed the nation on Saturday night, he took responsibility for the loss and insisted reconciliation was not dead.

“The truth is that no referendum has succeeded in this country without bipartisan support. None,” he said.

His critics will now ask why he was prepared to acknowledge this truism in the smouldering ruins of defeat, but not heed it from the outset.

This piece, compiled in the raw aftermath of arguably the most bruising referendum in the country’s history, cannot hope to be a definitive account of the choices that set this campaign on a long nosedive to failure. There were also lies and misinformation, ignited at the fringes of the No side, which No’s chief advocates did little to extinguish and, at times, fanned.

A crucial question is whether the Coalition’s full support, or, more plausibly, a larger cohort of Coalition MPs and a less hostile stance by Dutton, was too easily surrendered by Labor, or if it was denied by Dutton chiefly to damage Albanese.

In pushing on with the vote, the government ignored the advice of a Gillard-era expert panel that included Voice leaders Noel Pearson and Megan Davis, and specifically recommended: “The referendum should only proceed when it is likely to be supported by all major political parties, and a majority of state governments.”

Critiquing Albanese’s decision-making, key Liberal Voice supporter Julian Leeser said Labor felt it was riding high in the polls against a weakened opposition, assuming it would be easy to secure a referendum win.

“That overconfidence affected all of the decisions that were made in relation to the process,” Leeser told ABC TV’s Insiders program on Sunday morning, criticising the government for spurning a co-design process and abandoning the creation of local and regional voices before pushing ahead with the national model.

It was a view put more forcefully on Saturday evening by NSW Liberal senator Andrew Bragg, one of the Coalition’s early champions of the Voice.

“If the referendum is lost, the government is responsible,” he said as polls closed. “Labor refused to compromise and to run a coherent and collaborative process. The centre ground needed to win a public vote was almost non-existent.”

Critics of the Coalition will push for history to remember Dutton as a wrecker who, from the outset, had no intention of offering support for the referendum and instead played a long game aimed at inflicting as much damage on Labor and Albanese as possible.

Dutton’s decision in early April, before the parliamentary inquiry into the proposal was under way and within days of a historic loss in the Aston byelection, to lock his party room behind a No vote arguably sealed the referendum’s fate. The more conservative Nationals announced a hard No five months earlier, which wedged Dutton.

Health Minister Mark Butler said hope of bipartisanship dissipated with Dutton’s decision.

“A significant change of tack was put in place by Peter Dutton at the end of March and the beginning of April after those two very big election defeats for the Liberal Party, first at a state level in NSW and then the Aston byelection. And then I think it became very difficult for us to win a referendum against really all historical precedent,” he told Sky News on Sunday.

Multiple senior Yes sources say the prime minister and key Indigenous leaders never expected Dutton’s full backing. But the opposition’s ferocity and speed took Labor and Yes campaigners by surprise.

Many point to a speech Dutton gave in the parliament in May as the moment it became clear the Liberal leader would set out to destroy the Voice.

In remarks that unnerved even some in his own party room, Dutton ferociously denounced the Voice as something that would “re-racialise” the country and make Indigenous Australians “more equal” than non-Indigenous Australians.

“Dutton has cemented race hate into the body politic in a way we did not foresee last year but that now is very clear. He has killed any hope of reconciliation, ably assisted by Senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price and Nyunggai Warren Mundine,” Indigenous academic Marcia Langton wrote in The Saturday Paper in an article published on referendum day.

Alive to the political threat, the Yes campaign and Labor contemplated changes to both the referendum timing and the inclusion of “executive government” in the amendment, a key sticking point for many Liberals who feared potential High Court challenges.

But while Albanese’s chief of staff, Tim Gartrell, and Labor head office chief Paul Erickson were involved in the campaign and its hundreds of phone hook-ups, political calculations were not always central to the big calls.

This is key to understanding the Yes side. No decisions were taken without the authority of the key Indigenous leadership, including Pearson, Langton, Davis and Dean Parkin, who often made collective decisions in phone hook-ups and meetings separate from non-Indigenous members of the campaign.

These leaders formed the ballast of the government’s 21-member referendum advisory group charged with finalising the amendment and advising the cabinet on referendum strategy.

“Megan almost had veto power on some issues,” says one source unwilling to go on the record due to the current sensitivities.

Davis, Pearson and Langton were contacted to contribute to this story. After the referendum defeat on Saturday, Indigenous Voice campaigners said they would embark on a week of silence to mourn.

Davis declined to comment last week.

Many of the distraught Aboriginal leaders could not bear to watch the results at campaign events. Pearson spent Saturday night at home with his family, as did prominent Yes campaigner Rachel Perkins.

Cultural authority and Indigenous political fault lines sometimes indecipherable for white allies were paramount within the Yes camp.

Yes leaders believed they unearthed Dutton’s true motivations during a February meeting of the referendum working group. Before the Canberra meeting, Dutton had been attacking Labor for the lack of detail about the Voice, without explicitly stating his opposition.

In the meeting, Indigenous barrister Tony McEvoy was authorised by the Indigenous leadership to put an offer to Dutton: if the Yes leaders and Labor agreed to adopt all the specifications of a proposed advisory body outlined in the 2021 Langton-Calma report, would he agree to support it? Dutton equivocated.

The report posed a 24-member model for the Voice, with Indigenous representatives drawn from all states and territories chosen by their communities and serving fixed terms. It answered questions Dutton was asking about how the body would function.

Yes leaders lobbied Dutton hard. Parkin met him. Pearson, who held dozens of meetings with Coalition MPs, spoke to the Liberal leader several times. Pearson believed Dutton’s preference was to delay the referendum until next term.

While no Liberal MP believes Dutton would have ever backed the Voice in the form that was put to the Australian public (constitutionally enshrined, and able to lobby ministers), some MPs including Leeser thought a free vote was up for grabs.

Critics of the Coalition will push for history to remember Opposition Leader Peter Dutton, pictured with Senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price on referendum night, as a wrecker.Credit: Dan Peled

Dutton could have allowed MPs to campaign for a position in line with their conscience, as occurred in the 1999 republic referendum.

Labor could have split off a bloc of Coalition Yes supporters if they’d given some ground, many Liberal MPs believe. But Labor’s unwillingness to compromise on the amendment caused goodwill to evaporate among moderate Coalition MPs on the fence about supporting the Voice.

“I think it’s quite clear the decision to have the Voice to executive was where it all started to come undone,” Liberal backbencher Keith Wolahan, a barrister, says.

Legal experts, including a number of former High Court justices and lower court jurists, lined up to reassure the public the amendment was legally sound.

But a small rump of conservative legal figures, among them former High Court judge Ian Callinan, warned the scope would delay and disrupt government and foreshadowed decades of litigation. Such views were dismissed as alarmist by Yes supporters but carried significant weight in Coalition and conservative circles.

The first and only opportunity many legal experts and other stakeholders had to provide formal public comment on the draft amendment was in April 2023 – nine months on from its initial release by Albanese – when the government set up a parliamentary committee process after introducing the constitutional alteration bill with its preferred set of words into the House.

“The committee process was a last-chance saloon. That’s when the government could have pivoted and tweaked the wording and brought a whole bunch of Liberals across [to Yes],” Bragg said.

“The government wouldn’t compromise on anything. The wording they wanted was the wording they got.”

One member of the referendum working group says they resisted altering the wording of the draft despite calls from constitutional conservatives to narrow the scope.

“The changes were a suggestion because of the political risk. But we just said no,” the working group member says.

“We asked for this referendum and the government facilitated the process. The loss of this referendum falls fairly and squarely on us as Aboriginal campaigners.”

Marcus Stewart, Indigenous leader

Frank Brennan, a longtime Indigenous rights advocate whose calls for compromise greatly irritated the Yes campaigners, says by April the words were set in concrete.

“It was always crazy to think that you could amend the Australian Constitution without a bipartisan process in place, without a fleshed-out model of a Voice for voters to understand what they were being asked to vote for, and with a confidential process conducted with a government-handpicked group of advisers,” Brennan says.

Asked if a change to the wording could have changed the result, Indigenous leader Marcus Stewart says the Australian people made their views clear.

“The Australian people voted on 92 words that they didn’t understand, that were very niche and bespoke and that they didn’t believe would have a practical outcome. If they believed it would have, we would have had a Yes vote,” Stewart says.

“We asked for this referendum and the government facilitated the process. The loss of this referendum falls fairly and squarely on us as Aboriginal campaigners.”

Each of the flare-ups, over executive government, the parliamentary committee process, and the Coalition’s relentless demands for detail, were proxy battles for bipartisanship that chipped away at the wells of goodwill, however shallow, on both sides to find common ground.

Dutton’s decision to promote first-term Aboriginal senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price to the Indigenous Australians portfolio, which positioned the Coalition at the apex of the No campaign, sharpened the attack.

“Jacinta was always going to be star of the show. She will go down in the annals of history as the first-term MP who took on the PM and won.”

Barnaby Joyce, former Nationals leader

Many Australians believed the Indigenous community was split on the Voice, even according to Yes23’s own research. A significant number of voters did not realise Price was a politician, instead mistaking the first-term senator for an organic voice emanating from the grassroots.

“Jacinta was always going to be star of the show. She will go down in the annals of history as the first-term MP took on the PM and won,” veteran Nationals MP Barnaby Joyce says.

The handling of the Yes campaign has also been under scrutiny for months, with questions raised about the effectiveness of its messaging, the advertising spend, the high number of spokespeople and the broad array of arguments to vote Yes.

Research by academics Andrea Carson, Max Gromping and Simon Jackman, released in September, found the Yes campaign had 33 different messages, whereas No stuck to its “if you don’t know, vote no” message delivered by its two main campaign figureheads, Price and Mundine.

The decision not to release more detail about the proposal also damaged the campaign, and proved a sticking point for voters in all the polls.

Splits in the Yes group were damaging, too.

While voters didn’t know that Davis and Pat Anderson’s Uluru Dialogue group was separate from the official Yes23 campaign, which was fronted by Parkin, Thomas Mayo and in the final months, Pearson, there were tensions between the two groups because the official Yes campaign had been able to amass a large war chest.

Yes23 would regularly promise that it was about to begin campaigning in earnest.

The reality was different. The first ad debuted in April, mentioned only constitutional recognition and not the Voice, and was poorly received.

By July, the Uluru Dialogue had appealed directly to the ALP’s Erickson to play a more direct role in the campaign.

As counting wound down on Saturday evening, Price was asked about the future of the generation of Indigenous leaders like Pearson and Langton who had worked for years towards a Voice to parliament.

Was it time for them to leave the stage and pass the torch to the next generation?

“I think it’s time for a new era in Indigenous policy, in the Indigenous narrative. We have to step away from grievance,” Price said.

It was a harsh end to a brutal evening in which the hopes of tens of thousands of Indigenous Australians had been dashed.

In Parkin, Mayo, Perkins and others, a new generation of Indigenous leaders has been forged during this campaign who will inherit the mantle from Pearson and Langton.

Their public advocacy will likely be characterised by a bitter feud with Price, a lone-wolf Indigenous leader who is trying to extinguish white guilt and make Australians comfortable with our settler history.

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