Voice defeat will undermine Australia’s standing on world stage: Dodson

Labor senator and Indigenous elder Pat Dodson says Australia will have no integrity to criticise China over its human rights record if the Voice referendum fails, warning the country needs to have “clean hands” on the international stage.

In his first interview since taking medical leave in April to fight a serious illness, Dodson said winning the referendum would be difficult but he believed Australians were “better than those who are currently running the No case”.

Pat Dodson says the time away from politics has taught him about what’s important.Credit: Rhett Wyman

He also said elevating the recognition of Indigenous Australians in the Constitution over the creation of the Voice – as some Yes campaigners have suggested – is the wrong approach.

Support for the Voice in most public polls has dropped significantly since Dodson went on leave. The Resolve poll conducted for this masthead this month showed support has fallen below 50 per cent on the Yes or No question for the first time.

Thousands of Australians will rally at more than 25 locations across the country on Sunday, as the Yes side tries to reset the campaign after months of political debates in Canberra.

Australians will vote later this year on the referendum to enshrine in the Constitution a Voice to parliament, which will make representations to parliament and the government on issues that impact Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.

Dodson, who is known as the Father of Reconciliation, said his time away from Canberra had made him reflect on the consequences for Australia’s international standing if the Voice is defeated.

“The nation stands to lose if this fails,” said Dodson. “It’s not just the first peoples: our nation, in the eyes of the international community, will lose.

“Our integrity with our neighbours will certainly be undermined – that’s the Pacific. We will give ammunition to our enemies in other places, or people that are opposed to us internationally.

“We will go through a process of wondering why a simple matter could not be achieved in such a sophisticated nation as ours.”

Asked whether Australia could continue to criticise China over its treatment of Uighurs and Tibetans, Dodson said: “We’d have no integrity, absolutely no integrity.”

Dodson, who is Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s special envoy for the implementation of the Uluru Statement from the Heart, said Australia wasn’t coming to the international stage with “entirely clean hands” and its colonial past “can be exploited by our competitors and by those who want to demean our integrity”.

“Under this Labor government, we’re showing we are engaging with the Pacific, we’re not frightened by the atrocities that are going on in Ukraine,” Dodson said.

“We’ve got to go to the international forum with substance, not just with intellectual ideas and strategies, as a people of substance – and that’s what will happen with a Yes vote.

“Because people will say: ‘You as a modern democracy have faced your legacies, your worst fears, and you’ve worked your way through it, and you’ve stood the challenge’.”

There has been a growing divide within the Yes movement over whether to talk more about constitutional recognition and less about the Voice. Leading Voice architect Noel Pearson this month said there was an urgent need to elevate the goal of recognising Indigenous Australians in the Constitution above the creation of the Voice advisory body.

Dodson said recognition and the Voice were equally important.

“I think you’ve got to link both matters. I don’t think selling people half a chocolate is the thing to do,” he said.

“This is about the recognition, and giving people the capacity to make representations that are advisory to our parliament and executive.”

Campaigners for the Yes side have been trying, since the legislation setting up the referendum passed parliament earlier this month, to remind voters that the Voice came out of the bottom-up process of the Uluru Dialogues.

Dodson said getting the debate out of Canberra and into communities would be difficult and it would take strong advocacy from a number of organisations and individuals.

If the Voice is defeated, Dodson said “I don’t think I’ll despair,” but it would be a “great day of reckoning for Australians”.

“I do think Australians are better than those that are currently running the No case,” he said.

“I think they’re the rump of the worst. Unfortunately, they are very loud and they are very intrusive.”

The Yes campaign will hold a series of rallies on Sunday, including in Sydney’s Prince Alfred Park and the Victorian Trades Hall, from 11am to 2pm.

Yes23 director Dean Parkin said the campaign would ramp up now that the parliamentary process in Canberra was over.

Asked about the trajectory of the public polls, Parkin said the legislative process in setting up the referendum was always going to be a “necessary but tricky period”.

“The dominant conversation was people arguing in Canberra about this. That’s not something that attracts people into the conversation, that’s not something that engages people in a very positive way,” he said.

Dean Parkin says a lot of Australians still don’t know what the referendum is about.Credit: Alex Ellinghausen

“It’s not going to go away completely, but some of that noise is not as prominent and allows us to have these events, it allows us to sign up more volunteers to the campaign.”

Parkin said his side always knew the debate was going to be contested and it would be difficult to win the referendum.

“There are a lot of people out there who haven’t heard about this,” he said.

“But we do see it [the next period] as an opportunity because when you actually give the information and you do reach out to those people who have been previously disengaged, there’s actually a lot of goodwill.”

Parkin said that the referendum was about both recognition and the Voice, “so that is absolutely at the centre of what we are campaigning on”.

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