All is not lost for the Indigenous voice to parliament … yet

Illustration: Johannes Leak

The Indigenous voice referendum is not yet lost.

Anthony Albanese remains valiantly optimistic. Anything is winnable. But for this to be realised, Labor no longer needs to convince only the undecided.

With the retreat in support for constitutional change since the beginning of the year, the Yes campaign also needs No voters to change their minds.

This now stands as the greater and unexpected challenge. It is a hurdle that voice proponents had not foreseen for this critical point of the campaign. It has become an even steeper vault with the debate this week being reduced to the ignoble theatre of race politics.

The Yes campaign now promises the great pivot is coming.

The strategy is based on a switch of messaging from an informational campaign to higher-level aspirational appeal. This will be simplified to a narrative that seeks to define the voice as equality of opportunity for Indigenous Australians. But it begins this final phase having bled support over the past six months.

The informational campaign has largely failed and the original foundations upon which Albanese’s petition for generosity and decency rests have been eroded.

Support for the voice has been in retreat since February when the Yes vote enjoyed 60 per cent approval. It is now below 40 per cent.

Albanese has been out-campaigned, having failed to assess the effectiveness of the No campaign’s central message and its ability to generate doubt and cynicism.

Since Peter Dutton announced his decision to formally oppose the referendum in March, the Coalition has run interference almost every day.

The Yes campaign’s failure of strategy and the government’s inability to respond has left both floundering and captive to events.

The pro-voice camp has struggled to translate initial collective goodwill into a clear and comprehensible choice. At the same time, it has been frustrated by allegedly underhanded tactics by the No camp and what it claims has been a misinformation campaign.

However, beyond the government’s decision to withhold detail, there have been questions of competency in the ability to explain the function and scope of the voice. As a consequence, some voters now also may not believe there isn’t more to the agenda beyond the voice. This is a vulnerability not denied by the Yes campaign, which suffers from a lack of a cut-through message.

Yes123 campaign director Dean Parkin, writing in The ­Australian, says: “The conversation more broadly has occasionally taken detours, which evidently have not been helpful to a Yes campaign that is working to explain a constitutional change to 18 million Australians.”

For the voice to now succeed, this dynamic must now fundamentally shift. Both sides of the ­debate enter the final phase ­accusing the other of division and deceit. As long as this continues, the No case will benefit.

Yet Labor sees opportunity among those Australians who have so far been unwilling to engage – with estimates that this could be as high as 30 per cent.

But two things need to be considered before a higher-level ­narrative can succeed. The disengaged and the soft No voters still have to be convinced beyond the moral argument that the voice will make a fundamental difference to Indigenous lives and won’t have negative consequences for the administration of government.