In February 2023, when polling showed majority support for a Yes vote had begun to wane, Noel Pearson foreshadowed the national tragedy that would follow if the voice to parliament proposal was defeated at referendum.
“I will fall silent,” he told ABC’s 7.30. “That will be the end of it.”
As with fellow voice campaigner Marcia Langton and her threat to stop holding welcome to country ceremonies if the Yes vote did not carry, Pearson belatedly discovered most Australians were unfazed at the prospect of his sermonising ceasing abruptly.
That he has decided reticence is not for him is unsurprising.
Nor should we expect that Pearson has used the last year and a half to consider the possibility that Australians rightly rejected a constitutionally entrenched and race-based lobby group presented to them in the guise of a generous offer.
Pearson has not just dwelled on its defeat: he has brooded. Having broken his silence last weekend, he wants vindication.
His ego demands posterity reflect there has been a reckoning. He proclaims the Coalition’s opposition to the voice bought it short-term political gain but ultimately ensured its electoral demise this month.
“Had [former opposition leader Peter Dutton] supported the referendum he would have had the best chance of transforming himself into a supportable prime minister on May 3,” says Pearson.
“Along with the blackfellas, Dutton is the biggest victim of the failure of the voice.”
To quote Manuel, the bewildered Spanish waiter from Fawlty Towers: Que?
Although Pearson concedes that Dutton initially “was serious about seeing if he could thread a path forward,” he portrays him as a weak leader who capitulated to reactionary forces.
“In the end the Nationals, led by the one Country Liberal Party member of the Coalition, [Senator] Jacinta Nampijinpa Price, made the decision for him,” he said.
Nowhere does Pearson acknowledge Dutton was acting according to principle.
The Liberals supported constitutional recognition of Indigenous Australians. But the party would never condone enshrining activist privilege in the constitution. To do so would mean relinquishing the long-held belief in the equality of the individual.
As veteran political commentator Michelle Grattan noted at the time, Dutton’s stand put him at “high risk”, for it came just days after the release of a Newspoll that revealed a majority of people in a majority of states backed the voice.
Dutton knew his leadership would not survive if the vibe prevailed.
He also had to manage dissenters within his own party and prevent an all-out rupture of the Coalition.
Meanwhile a calculating Anthony Albanese refused outright the Opposition’s attempts to negotiate a compromise model.
The significance of the Prime Minister’s doing so is lost on Pearson. He rightly castigates him for refusing to take ownership of the voice’s failure. But he does not see (or chooses not to see) that Albanese’s championing of the voice was opportunistic.
This was never about bringing Australians together. It was about tearing the Coalition apart.
As Janet Albrechtsen observed on Tuesday, Dutton’s election defeat had nothing to do with his stance on the voice.
Instead of the courage, leadership, and resilience he demonstrated during the referendum, he showed political timidity and a lack of vision. He deserved defeat. But he did not deserve Pearson’s “Welcome to hell” sneer.
As one who argued against the voice, I guess I fall into Pearson’s arbitrary category of commentators who enthusiastically “got to kick the poor blackfellas in the ribs again”. I expected better from a wordsmith.
“What I didn’t expect was the degree to which the voice would be the subject of relentless scorn,” he laments.
Relentless scorn? I can give a few examples of that. When Dutton announced the Liberals would oppose the voice, Pearson went full ad hominem.
Dutton, he claimed, “doesn’t mind chucking Indigenous Australians and the future of the country under the bus so he can preserve his miserable political hide”. It was a “Judas betrayal”.
Likewise, Nationals leader David Littleproud was a “man of little pride” and “like a kindergarten kid,” said Pearson in November 2022 when the party announced it would not support the voice.
Price, then with the Nationals, was caught up in a “tragic redneck celebrity vortex,” said Pearson. The party’s strategy was “to find a blackfella to punch down on other blackfellas”. The “bullets” were “fashioned” by conservative think tanks, but it was “a black hand pulling the trigger,” he said of Price.
But by April 2023, Pearson was declaring the Yes campaign would be a positive one, irrespective of the “negativity” of No campaigners.
“I think the important thing is, when they go low, we’re gonna go high. We’re gonna meet hate with love,” he said. The love routine lasted just a few weeks.
Writing in this masthead in May 2023, Pearson expanded his personal attacks. “The boomer readership of this paper is of course antipathetic to [constitutional] recognition,” he said. “They are mostly obscurant and borderline casual racists in their views.”
And now, having vilified en masse those who did not share his vision, he cites those same people as a cause of his hurt and angst. Enough with the babe in the woods act.
His animus towards Price is unabated.
“Darling of white Australia, feted as an incomparable communicator and, absurdly, future potential leader,” he writes with ill-disguised jealousy.
He cannot concede that refusing to pass on the baton will result in it being wrenched from one’s hand.
As for Dutton, he will be remembered as one who headed off a constitutional precursor to separatism. Ultimately, he was resoundingly defeated in his attempt to return the Coalition to government.
Nonetheless, he accepted without complaint the Australian people’s decision, and his concession speech was gracious.
You could learn from that, Noel Pearson.
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