Corporate, tech giants need to lower their voices

Senator Jacinta Price has been silenced by Facebook’s decision to throw its algorithmic might behind the ‘cancelling campaign’. Picture: Chris Pavlich

“Hi all,” began a recent email to employees of a prominent professional services firm. “The nation is about to embark on a once-in-a-generation opportunity to finally secure First Nations people’s rightful place in the Constitution. As a firm, we have a role to play. We shouldn’t underestimate the power and influence of our collective voice.”

It was the prelude to an invitation to a 90-minute “training session” held in the company’s time to educate its staff on the Uluru Statement from the Heart.

It would be cruel to name the firm, which is merely going with the corporate herd. It hardly matters to it that we have not yet seen the referendum question, or any stronger arguments for voting “yes” than Linda Burney’s contention that “it is the right thing to do”. The no case, meanwhile, has been largely unreported.

Yet in the competitive world of corporate virtue, such niceties hardly matter. The voice is a chance to paint a tender smile on faceless corporations and accumulate social capital. Vivek Ramaswamy, a former corporate executive and conscientious objector, exposed the scam in his 2021 book, Woke Capitalism. “Here’s how it works,” he wrote. “Pretend like you care about something other than profit and power, precisely to gain more of both.”

Wiser heads in the yes camp are troubled by the maladroit zeal with which corporate Australia has jumped on board. The history of failed moral causes shows that when corporates band together in a woke cartel it usually backfires.

A debate that began as a grand gesture of national unity is rapidly becoming an ugly, divisive affair. A survey by Compass Polling last week found support for an Indigenous voice to parliament slid from 65 per cent at the beginning of September to 60 per cent last week. Opinion is hardening along partisan lines. Liberal voters oppose the voice by 55 per cent to 45 per cent while 75 per cent of Labor voters are in favour. It is little wonder a third of voters say their biggest concern is that the referendum will be divisive, up from 18 per cent in January.

Some in the yes camp believe division is best contained by starving the no campaign of oxygen. The Canberra Times reports what it calls “a growing view” that the commonwealth should not fund the no case, as it would customarily do. “The prospect of a divisive referendum, potentially descending into racist rhetoric, is worrying yes campaigners,” it reported last month. “There are strategic, as well as moral, reasons for opposing funding.”

Greens leader Adam Bandt told the paper Labor must “avoid creating further division” during the referendum. “The Australian government shouldn’t fund racism,” he said. “The marriage equality plebiscite drove division in our community and I don’t want to see the same mistakes repeated as we come together to seek First Nations justice.”

Facebook has thrown its algorithmic might behind the cancelling campaign. Senator Jacinta Price and academic Anthony Dillon are two Aboriginal voices censored by Facebook, as I wrote in this column last week. Big Tech appears intent on silencing the no case as effectively as it shut down the no case for lockdowns, the no case for vaccine mandates and the no case for Joe Biden at the 2020 presidential election.

The Prime Minister still has time to stop the referendum splitting the nation, but he needs to act quickly and decisively. He should quietly tell corporate boards and chief executives to pipe down. Less privileged voters don’t take kindly to being hustled at the ballot box by woke capitalists who look down at them as racist.

The tech giants are interfering in a referendum Australians alone should decide. They are behaving in a manner hostile to our democracy and insulting our intelligence. The Prime Minister must intervene if he wants to keep the referendum free of foreign influence. He will have the weight of public opinion behind him. Four in five in the Compass survey objected to Big Tech taking sides. He must pick up the phone to the tech giants and tell them if they want to operate in Australia, they must respect our democracy.

Albanese, we know, wants us to vote yes. Which gives him the opportunity to establish himself as a statesman by defending the rights of Australians with whom he profoundly disagrees.

He must commit to equal and adequate funding for the no and yes cases. The precedent for this is the $7m granted by the Howard government to each of the yes and no cases in the 1999 republic referendum. Equal public funding in the voice referendum will go some way toward redressing the imbalance created by the commitment of corporate millions to one side of the argument.

Albanese cannot allow his judgment to be skewed by partisanship as it was in 2013 when, as local government minister, he was responsible for planning a referendum to recognise local government in the Constitution. He granted $10m to the yes case to run an education campaign and $10m more to the Local Government Association, which was in favour of constitutional recognition. The no case received a measly $500,000. He would be wise not to pre-load the voice to parliament debate in such a crude and obvious fashion.

The ball is in the Prime Minister’s court as he ponders how best to pass the enabling legislation needed to hold a referendum. He can reach out to the Coalition, which is likely to demand funding for the no case as a condition of its support. Or he can accede to the demands of Adam Bandt that there should be no public funding for the no case and that a voice should be a precursor for a treaty.

This is our chance to make history, or so we’re being told. Let’s hope it doesn’t go down as the moment when we surrendered the integrity of our democracy to the noisy elites.

Nick Cater is executive director of the Menzies Research Centre.