Indigenous voice to parliament: Rapper Adam Briggs’s Yes vote video lures the young
A video by rapper and comedian Adam Briggs cuts through the noise for young people, as the Yes and No camps fight for views on TikTok | WATCH
A short video posted to social media by rapper and Yes supporter Adam Briggs, and shared in countless group chats over the past 24 hours, appears to have struck a chord with young people on the issue of the voice.
In the humorous clip directed by Nash Edgerton, Briggs sits at a pub with two female friends who talk about the “big complicated mess” of the voice, which they hear “could divide the nation”.
“Have you Googled it?” Briggs asks, before he hands the phone to one of the women who reads out a definition of the voice as “a body … who may make representations to the parliament and the executive government”.
“Well I’d vote Yes to that,” they say.
Briggs says he has been overwhelmed by the response to the video, which has broken through the competing TikTok and Instagram content from the Yes and No sides.
“It’s going nuts. A lot of people have been re-posting me, saying ‘Thank you, these are the convos we’ve been having for the last two weeks’,” he said.
Briggs wanted to keep true to the voices of comedy-duo Jenna Owen and Victoria Zerbs, who feature in the video.
“I want to talk to their generation. I think that’s why that’s resonated. It’s not political and preachy and academic, it’s out of the mud and clouds of bureaucracy and into places where we live. The convos people are having at home, in the loungeroom, in the pub,” he said.
“We’re just trying to clear out the confusion and un-complicate the message … I really wanted to debunk the comments section (of my social media posts).”
On TikTok, the official Yes and No campaigns have battled for influence. While more young people will vote Yes in the referendum, based on current polling, Fair Australia’s TikTok account has vastly more engagement than Yes23, with 1.9 million likes compared to the Yes campaigns 801,000.
Uluru Youth Dialogue co-chair Bridget Cama said it was a huge concern for the Yes camp that the TikTok algorithm was leading young people to Fair Australia’s content, saying it contained “so many lies and a lot of scaremongering”.
She, and the Uluru Dialogue, fight the “misinformation” by responding to the messages in Fair Australia’s videos on TikTok.
“(Lately) we have been stitching videos and taking on misinformation head on, which previously we didn’t spend a lot of time doing.
She said there had been an increase in positive engagement with Yes23’s TikTok over the past week or so.
Freya Leach’s TikToks on the No vote have more than a million views. A video explaining why she will vote No in the referendum has 776.3k views, and another clip with No campaigner Jacinta Nampijinpa Price has 241.4k views.
Ms Leach, who was the Liberal candidate for Balmain, says while the Yes campaign was “overconfident” that young people would “just be progressive and vote Yes”, they were actually thinking long and hard about the voice.
“The level of critical thinking that young people have has been underestimated … The number of young people voting No is much higher than anyone would have anticipated.”
She said her viewers strongly resonated with the idea that “all Australians should be treated equally”, and those the videos that performed best.
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