Successful No vote against the Indigenous voice to parliament would be a victory for democracy

Anthony Albanese at the Garma Festival in August. Picture: Getty Images

If Australians vote No in the voice referendum it will constitute the most magnificent, heartfelt, courageous and supremely democratic act of independence and national pride in our modern political history. Voting No in the 2023 referendum is exactly the same as voting Yes was in the 1967 referendum. It’s a vote for a common and universal vision of humanity in which all Australians enjoy exactly the same civic status, regardless of their race or background.

This is because never before has so much institutional power – big government, big corporations, universities, taxpayer-funded lobby and advocacy groups of all descriptions – been so determined to force its corporate will on an unwilling electorate and to make sure if possible that the electorate doesn’t get to hear all sides of the argument.

There is no sense at all that the voice is a grassroots movement. It’s an ideological attempt by the activist class to grab power and re-engineer elements of our civic identity and governance structures in accord with the dismal, and almost universally failing, ideological obsessions of our moment.

As this column has observed before, all over the West, but nowhere else in the world, identity politics is tearing societies apart, deepening existing conflicts and creating new conflicts. Identity politics undermines and denies the magnificence and transcendence of human nature by trying to trap human beings in allegedly essentialist identities, and forever divide them on the basis of those identities.

For the longest time, Australia had the reputation of being a fair-minded, sceptical, no-nonsense, hard-to-boss-around kind of society. Our natural response to overbearing authority was scepticism and humour.

Senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price and Nyunggai Warren Mundine.

The Yes campaign, after years of relentless government-funded activism, is now about to spend something like $35m to $50m or more bashing Australians over the head to make them vote Yes. If in the face of this Australians actually vote No, there will be a kind of magnificence in their independence, their defiance and in their mastery of democracy.

If we do vote No, we then have to work hard to explain to ourselves, and secondly to the world, what it means. A good No vote is motivated by love of Aboriginal Australians and of the Australian nation. It certainly doesn’t mean we’re a racist nation. On any measurable standard, and on the basis of all common sense, Australia is one of the least racist nations on earth or in human history.

Racism is a human evil, like greed, anger, hatred. I suspect, as with most evil instincts, everyone could be prone to it. So it’s right to educate against it and even, as we’ve done in Australia, to outlaw its institutional manifestations.

But if you focus entirely on racism, which is often imaginary, or tell people they’ve been racist when they plainly haven’t, you not only confuse moral categories and moral reasoning, you poison the very nature of human interactions.

Nothing could be more ridiculous than infants at school being divided on racial lines, some instructed in how to recite welcome to country ceremonies while others learn to apologise for their racial identity.

This is pure, 24-carat insanity. One of the greatest gifts of childhood is innocence. Friendships formed incidentally across racial lines, without consciousness of race at all, are precious, just the sort of thing that cannot happen if we “re-racialise society”, as Peter Dutton correctly suggests the voice will do.

If the nation does vote No, I don’t think the Albanese government could possibly accuse its own electorate of being racist or even of being simple-minded dunderheads. Those who occupy the institutional high ground in Australia, who have overwhelmingly supported the Yes case and denied the legitimacy of virtually all arguments for No, would have to find a way to say they were wrong, that the No case was at least reasonable. If, on the other hand, we tell ourselves and the world that we are irredeemably racist, they will take us at our word, to everyone’s immense damage.

Oddly enough, the idea that Australia is an unusually racist society has never had less credence in Southeast Asia or the South Pacific because so many people there have relatives or friends who have become Australians and prospered. But woke propaganda, especi­ally identity politics propaganda, never makes any concessions to empirical evidence.

There are so many dangers in this referendum. One is that voters in the No camp will believe, with some justice, the system has been rigged against them. The funding disparity between the Yes and No camps is so great it makes the case all the stronger that the government should have provided funding for both sides, as in previous referendums.

Similarly, the Australian Electoral Commission should find a way to ban ticks and crosses as valid votes, or to accept that if a tick means Yes then a cross means No. If there is legal advice to the contrary they should publish the legal advice.

Unless the margin is razor-thin, such considerations won’t determine the outcome. But the existing ruling means there are two ways to vote Yes, write Yes or put a tick in the box, and only one way to vote No, by writing No.

It would be much better if the rules were absolutely clear and rigid, and there was no space for discretion among those who count the votes. That the opposition opposes the tick versus cross discrimination ought, in itself, be enough to get the AEC to find a way out of this double standard.

Similarly, surely there is no one on God’s green earth who thinks the ABC has been fair or balanced in its treatment of the voice debate. I’d love to get a simple breakdown of pro-Yes versus pro-No panellists on Q+A. Perfectly moderate No advocacy is routinely censored on Facebook. This is deeply undemocratic.

The cheat notes for Yes campaigners, revealed in The Australian on Monday, suggest a cynical and dishonest operation. Canvassers are advised to identify a villain. And this villain can be Australian miners, even though mining companies are donating millions and millions of dollars to the Yes case. And if voters are impertinent enough to ask for detail on how the voice will work, they are to be “redirected” to another topic.

Will all these Yes canvassers really be volunteers or will there be paid canvassers, professionally trained, just another expression of money politics?

As a nation we owe a huge debt to four people. Jacinta Price and Warren Mundine are the bravest Australians alive. They have endured insane and relentless abuse, and no big institution is celebrating them or offering them rosy futures, whereas the ABC, universities, governments etc routinely hail any Yes campaigner as a combination of John F. Kennedy and Mother Teresa.

The Opposition Leader and David Littleproud have also done the nation a profound service. If they hadn’t been willing to commit to the principled opposition to inserting racial categories into constitutional civic status, powerful institutions would have rolled over the whole society and we might not have had any proper debate on the issue at all.

That’s the way the progressive elite in Western societies increasingly likes it, of course. It’s not the way of democracy.

The Great Voice Debate: Noel Pearson live

Indigenous leader Noel Pearson. Picture: Glenn Hampson

Hosted by editor-in-chief Michelle Gunn, hear Vote Yes campaigner and Indigenous leader Noel Pearson, in person at The Mint, 10 Macquarie St, Sydney.

Tuesday, September 5, 2023. Canapes and drinks served from 6pm. Tickets are available at no charge only for The Australian’s subscribers. For The Australian subscribers, register your interest via email at [e-mail]

COMING SOON: The No side puts its case LIVE