“The story of the referendum matters and history matters.” So said Indigenous professor of law Megan Davis. It’s a terrible shame, then, that Davis and others interviewed by this newspaper last week have, a year on, still ignored why Australians voted against the voice.
History matters when it is accurately told. That is what John Roskam has done in his report Why Australians Voted to Be Equal, to be published on Friday.
The report sets out the results of the most comprehensive polls of Australians after last year’s constitutional ballot.
The Australians Speak survey, commissioned by the Institute of Public Affairs and Advance Australia, the two groups that spearheaded the No side, asked 3526 Australians a week after the referendum why they voted against the proposal to alter the federal Constitution to create a permanent Indigenous-only body.
The real story of the 2023 referendum is brimming not with emotion but data.
When asked to nominate any of eight reasons that best explained their decision to vote No, 70 per cent of Australians surveyed said the voice would divide Australia. Sixty-six per cent said there was not enough detail. Sixty per cent of Australians surveyed said the voice would make Australians unequal.
Last October’s referendum was a defining moment for the country. The vote against the voice was a rejection by a large swath of the country of identity politics, and an embrace of that fundamental civic value of equality over separatism.
Roskam notes that while there were more than 50 published polls before the referendum asking Australians how they might vote, only three comprehensive polls since the vote have asked Australians why they voted the way they did.
Analysis deliberately bereft of data is just waft. That’s what most Yes campaigners have offered since the referendum. Evidence would get in the way of them blaming the result on racism and ignorance, or on other equally spurious grounds – for example, claiming that Labor MPs and unions didn’t do enough to help, that infighting killed the voice and, even less credulously, that the voice failed because of insufficient money and time.
Are they serious? More than $50m was spent by the Yes campaign – a lot of it swiped from shareholders – to try to convince Australians. Hard data wouldn’t allow them to blame the loss on Peter Dutton either.
Their responses tell their own story, not one about the referendum result.
The publication of Roskam’s report and the Australians Speak survey by polling company Insightfully lays bare the real reason the voice failed.
While the poll shows that 60 per cent of Australians still support Indigenous recognition in the Constitution, entrenching inequality in the Constitution was a bridge too far.
Roskam is correct to conclude “the outcome of the voice referendum was the most decisive result of any significant political contest in Australian history”.
His analysis reveals that the thumping defeat of the 2023 referendum proposal surpassed defeats of earlier important referendum proposals – from conscription in 1916 (52 per cent against) to banning the Communist Party in 1951 (51 per cent against) to the republic referendum in 1999 (55 per cent against). Nor has any federal election contest since Federation attracted a 60 per cent voting bloc of Australians akin to the No vote last year.
While some previous referendum proposals attracted a higher No vote, as Roskam details, none of them had to counter a tidal wave of support from high-profile political, media, business, religious, education and arts elites as the Yes case did for the voice.
That made the No vote in favour of equality even more telling – even if it wasn’t surprising to Roskam. “The ‘seductive idea’ – that everyone is equal – is the foundation of the modern world and of liberal democracy,” he writes. “It is also an idea at the heart of Christianity. In his Epistle to the Galatians, Paul writes, ‘There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.’ ”
Under Roskam’s leadership, the IPA prosecuted the case for equality when the voice concept was first raised in 2015. The IPA’s message in its Race Has No Place research program was clear: “Changing the Constitution by dividing Australians according to race or ethnic background makes us all unequal.”
As Roskam writes in his soon-to-be-published report, “Nearly 10 years later (equality) was the reason a majority of Australians voted No.”
Those foolish enough to quip that “Roskam would say that, wouldn’t he” must deal with overwhelming evidence. As Roskam says, the Australians Speak data is confirmed in two other surveys done in the weeks after the October 14 referendum last year.
In a poll of 4200 people by the ANU Centre for Social Research and Methods immediately after the referendum vote, 66.1 per cent of respondents said dividing the country was a “very important” factor in deciding how they voted. ANU’s Australian Constitutional Referendum Study concluded: “The data suggests that Australians voted no because they didn’t want division and remain sceptical of rights for some Australians that are not held by others.”
The poll commissioned by The Australian Population Research Institute in December last year of 3001 respondents found 53 per cent of people who voted No chose this reason: “We are one country, and no legal or political body should be defined on the basis of race or ethnicity.”
Roskam is right that before the October 14 ballot, “supporters of the voice never came to terms with the key argument against the voice which was its creation would overturn the principle of equality of citizenship and so would divide Australians”.
The senior fellow at the IPA told me this week that voice advocates refused to engage with real constitutional conservatives like him because they had no satisfactory response to concerns that “the voice created ‘separate Aboriginal rights’ and so divided Australians and overturned equality of citizenship”.
Some simply ignored it. Roskam points to law professors Davis and George Williams, who made no mention of equality in their 200-page book Everything You Need to Know About The Uluru Statement From the Heart.
Others advanced woefully unconvincing arguments. The constitutional expert group – chaired by Labor Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus and comprising six professors of law, a former High Court judge and Noel Pearson – claimed “the voice does not confer ‘rights’ much less ‘special rights’ on Indigenous people”.
You didn’t need a law degree to understand that a proposal to cement into the Constitution a body for Indigenous people only was a fundamental breach of the civic value that everyone have equal rights.
To their credit, says Roskam, former prime minister Malcolm Turnbull, former High Court chief justice Murray Gleeson and Father Frank Brennan had a serious crack at answering the voice’s fundamental flaw of infringing equality.
Turnbull said he would vote Yes despite his misgivings that the voice was inconsistent with his “republican and egalitarian principles” that all offices in a constitutional democracy should be open to every Australian.
Brennan was the most intellectually honest. Roskam says the Jesuit priest and law professor acknowledged the “concept of the voice does positively discriminate in favour of Indigenous Australians, that it does provide Indigenous Australians with special rights, and it does provide those special rights to Indigenous Australians by virtue of their group identity. For Brennan the voice is a measure necessary to address the disadvantage experienced by Indigenous Australians.”
Still, the resounding belief among grassroots Australians in unity and equality was a wake-up call to the vast number of religious leaders who supported the Yes side. With the Australians Speak poll revealing that 74 per cent of religious voters rejected the voice, “it’s clear,” writes Roskam, “that those religious organisations did not speak for their members”.
The Australians Speak data also buries the fallacy that bipartisan support would have ensured the voice won.
More than one-third of Labor voters – 37 per cent – rejected the voice. Eighty-two per cent of all respondents said Coalition opposition to the voice “made no difference” to how they voted on October 14. Similarly, 70 per cent said Labor’s support for the voice “made no difference”. As Roskam points out, some referendums (in 1937, 1967 and 1977) have failed with bipartisan support and one passed (in 1946) without bipartisanship. In any case, plenty of premiers openly supported the voice, along with other state and federal Liberal MPs.
As Roskam writes: “Yes advocates should not have been ‘shell-shocked’ by the power of words such as ‘equal’ and ‘equality’.”
Many of them, after all, had worked on the same-sex marriage postal survey in 2017 where the theme of “marriage equality” convinced 62 per cent of Australians to vote Yes. A similar number of Australians voted in favour of equal rights under the Constitution for Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians.
“To some it might have appeared that those who argued for ‘equality’ in 2017 were arguing against ‘equality’ in 2023.”
The Australians Speak poll contains other nuggets about the nation. Go read it.
The final word goes to Roskam: “At a time when social cohesion is under unprecedented strain and our way of life under assault, we chose unity over division. The referendum result should give Australians the confidence to speak freely about issues that for too long have been deemed off-limits.”
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