Indigenous voice to parliament: Open letter to Undecided of Good Heart and Head
In this excruciating referendum you’re the people I like most. You’re not nasty, dim or condescending. You understand the awful situation of Indigenous people. But you haven’t been told what the voice is.
Dear Undecided of Good Heart and Head,
In this excruciating referendum you’re the people I like most. You’re not nasty, dim or condescending. And there’s a lot of that stuff going around on both sides. You really do understand the awful situation of Indigenous people. You’re bright enough to analyse the arguments. You’re open to the voice but just can’t get there because you haven’t been told what it is, or you think the words are slapdash, or you worry about who’s going to run the thing. Or something else.
At the moment you’re clustering somewhere on the edge of Undecided and Probably Not. You’re complex, clever, considered and charitable, which is why I call you the Undecided of Good Heart and Head. In this referendum, your vote really matters.
As you know, I’m pretty despondent about the Indigenous voice right now. I think we’re all agreed that on current polling it’s sunk. I’m clinically depressed, some of you not so much, but we all have our worries about what a defeated referendum would mean for Australia.
There are only two ways the voice can come from behind. One is that the huge, expensive media campaign will push it over the line. The ads certainly are smooth and as jingoistic as a Qantas commercial, so perhaps that’s enough, but people are pretty cynical about that sort of thing.
The other hope is that this army of young doorknockers will turn the tide, as in the same-sex marriage debate. I’m dubious. Same-sex marriage was a clear and very personal issue, and this just isn’t. Besides, you lot probably would be pretty irritated by some adolescent turning up to lecture you on something you already know about.
From what I know, it now all comes down to “segmentation”. It sounds a bit biological, but it’s about slicing the referendum electorate into different bits, and working out what might persuade each portion.
At the moment it’s really a problem only for our Yes mates, because if the figures don’t move the No side can sit on its hands whistling Waltzing Matilda. The PR geniuses advising the Yes team have come up with three segments: the Yeses, the Noes and the Undecideds. Who’d a thunk it? Basically, they plan to grab the “soft Noes” and all the Undecideds. As it says in The Castle, they’re dreamin’.
I know I bang on about the republic a lot, but in my experience there’s no such thing as a “soft No”. Once a person actually jumps off the wagon, they won’t climb back. I don’t think we got a single monarchist in 1999.
Undecideds are more complicated, but not in a good way. There are a lot who are just terminally confused. They’ll mostly vote No because “when in doubt, vote No”. They’re not stupid, just perplexed constitutional worriers, sticking with the tried and true. No brochures or commercials will convince them.
Then there are the Lazy Undecideds. We saw them in droves in 1999. They don’t give a stuff and they’re not interested in finding out. They’ll push past the people offering how-to-vote cards and vote No because they don’t like being pestered, particularly on a Saturday.
Then there are you guys with your good brains and decent feelings. You’re one of the few groups that realistically might move to Yes and, frankly, one of the groups actually worth having. You’re undecided precisely because you do think and worry.
Something one of you said chilled me to the bone. This person lamented that they desperately wanted to vote for the voice, but no one had given them an excuse. They weren’t sure of the shape, the people or the powers. As a Yes geek, that’s my problem, not theirs.
I know you’re very irritated by Marcia Langton implying you are racist idiots and everybody else on the Yes side saying you are “misinformed”, which sounds like you should go to a re-education camp.
I’ve talked about you to senior Yes figures and government politicians. They all dismiss you as people who were always going to vote No – the dregs of the referendum, hardline conservative Noes who want to hide behind a facade of reasonableness.
Problem is, they’re hopelessly wrong. I keep telling them that – particularly from a moderately “progressive” point of view – you’re the best there is. Lots of you are lifelong Labor branch members who turn up to help at every election. Others are moderate conservatives who provide the backbone of numerous charities.
For me, it’s unsurprising. Many of you come from the old Catholic social justice tradition that morally impels us to accept the humanity of every person and to treat them with human dignity. But others are Protestants, Jews, Muslims, Buddhists and spotted dalmatians. They all work on the basis of securing the common good. It may sound a bit basic, but I think it’s time to apply that concept to the voice.
So here are the reasons people like you – and me – should vote Yes, and why people like you should get off the fence.
First of all, the voice is not at heart a political or constitutional question. It’s about morals and ethics, just like euthanasia and refugees. You don’t start with grammatical doubts or operational quibbles. You begin with the moral imperative. To misquote, Mary MacKillop, when in doubt, do something.
So, we have to understand the challenges and doubts with the voice within the basic moral equation. Every time there is a problem, our job is to understand and try to solve it. We shouldn’t play ideological poker and throw in our hand in the face of any difficulty. Above all, we should not use challenges to stop us having to make a hard decision.
The second thing is that you guys understand the limits of words (some of you taught them professionally for years). Words are no match for meaning. Constitutional words are important, but they can take you only so far. The real question is always going to be the fundamental direction.
There are constant fights over words (remember the Reformation and insurance policies). As you always remind me, constitutional lawyers like me think they own every word in the dictionary. But when you’re arguing about every syllable of “executive government”, isn’t it time to take a mild chance on something sublime rather than drown it because it may not be perfect?
Remember what I’ve always said about lawyers and compromise? They’ll advise war one day and free love the next. The current Constitution is almost bursting with compromise. If we took every haggle out of it, there’d be nothing left. Same here. If Craven said three months ago something would be fatal and says now we can live with it, that’s not a lie or a contradiction, even for a lawyer. It just means he has had a chance to think about it, put it in legal proportion and weigh the noun against the outcome.
For rusted-on pragmatists in a good cause, constitutional drafting is not a religion. It’s a means to an end. Good enough is good enough.
I get it that people of Heart and Head worry about who will run the voice. After all, some of the campaign personnel have not been that reassuring on the Yes side, and Indigenous Yes supporters inevitably will be the future operatives of the voice.
None of us likes being screamed at by Langton or dismissed as racists by Linda Burney but, to be honest, aren’t we big enough to cut them a bit of tolerant slack? They both look back on pretty challenging lives and they must be terrified of losing. I think we can tolerate a bit of hysterics.
You also have to admit there are a lot of dedicated Indigenous people working tirelessly and humbly on the Yes side. For every grandstanding Indigenous academic, there is an Indigenous nurse humbly painting Yes placards. And to take the controversial example of a Yes leader, Noel Pearson may be volatile but he’s still the best speaker in the country and passionately believes in what he says (even when he’s wrong). But behind the oratory are decades of confronting service in education and social cohesion. I’m looking forward to speaking on the same platform with him in Brisbane on September 29.
The point is, who runs the voice is like the words. They won’t be perfect – who is? – but that’s no reason to give up the whole moral project. On average, they will be averagely good, which is good enough.
The question for you, Good Heads and Hearts, is whether the peopling of the voice will be so God-awful that we should cash in our social justice hand. That’d be a very big decision.
I get that you want to know what the voice will look like, and you don’t want a dud passed off as gold standard. Neither do I, loudly. But honestly, hasn’t enough detail been dragged from the Prime Minister over the campaign?
It’ll be composed of Indigenous people, drawn from local regions, appointed or elected for set terms and rolled over, without a bureaucracy, purely advisory, just a committee, have designated priorities and will be unable to make representations on matters that are none of its business, such as submarines and sex.
It’s not exactly an architect’s drawing but it gives us a pretty fair idea. Are we really going to pull the plug on Indigenous hope over salaries and board numbers? Better to just hold Anthony Albanese to his promises.
The last thing is just for you compassionate and clever hesitants. It’s a hard point to make in public. The No side is ruthlessly dismissive and the Yes brokers are just plain mawkish. But what happens if this referendum flops? Where are we then? This is not the pathetic argument about what other nations will think of us. Who cares? The real questions are how would we feel about ourselves, and how would Indigenous people feel about us?
The No botherers say we can’t think about this in deciding a referendum, but they’re wrong. It might have been a good reason not to have a referendum at all, but it’s too late for that (sorry). Now we’re in the middle of the thing, so it’s fair enough to think of moral outcomes as much as anything else. Me, I’d feel dirty. Whatever the real reasons behind a No vote, I’d feel we’d rejected our Indigenous brothers and sisters. I’d feel we’d failed in something big for little reasons. I’d feel we were a little country.
I shudder at what Indigenous Australians would think of us. I got a fair idea when a very dignified Aboriginal friend cried in front of me, not for herself but for her children. Whatever way you look at it, this will be as ugly as sin.
I think if I were an Indigenous person, I’d feel utterly rejected. It’d be like a six-year-old being turned away from a birthday party when they had an invitation. The message would be that we don’t want you, we don’t like you, we don’t need you.
If I were Indigenous, I just wouldn’t know where to go. Frankly, the voice is a proposal so pathetically understated that I’m amazed most Indigenous people are settling for it. After all, I helped design it as something so modest that no reasonable non-Indigenous Australian could reject it. More fool me.
What I’m saying is that for people of goodwill and intellect, like you, who are worried or unsure about the referendum, this horror of sorrow is something we really need to think about. It’s one thing to ditch a referendum that no one really cares about, or is hopelessly unsound, but do we want to utterly crush a whole people because the drafting is not quite up to our version of scratch?
It all goes back to the start. For decent, clever people (like you, and questionably me) with no taste for propaganda or politics on either side, recognition and the voice are really moral questions, not legal or political ones. When you look at it like that, we’re being asked to make a huge ethical decision on October 14.
Of all Australians, you guys have the biggest chance of getting it right in the right way. Good luck – you’ll need it.
Yours in nervous affection,
Greg
Greg Craven is a constitutional lawyer and former vice-chancellor of the Australian Catholic University.
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