Indigenous voice to parliament Yes camp olive branch calls for post-vote healing

The Yes campaign boss says the time will come when the nation has to move on from the voice referendum.

Yes campaign director Dean Perkin meets Blessing Bolea, 7, at a campaign facility in Cairns on Wednesday. Picture: Brian Cassey

Yes23 director Dean Parkin has extended an olive branch to Indigenous leaders of the No camp, saying they will need to work together regardless of the outcome of the voice referendum.

Mr Parkin, a Quandamooka man from North Stradbroke Island off Brisbane, spoke out during another bruising week on the hustings, marked by fresh clashes between the two sides’ leading lights.

With a fortnight to go until polling day, the No campaign has surged ahead in all published opinion polls and is increasingly confident the voice is doomed.

Yes campaign director Dean Parkin rallies volunteers in Cairns. Picture: Brian Cassey

But Mr Parkin, 42, revealed that Yes23 was set to deploy more than 40,000 volunteers on targeted canvassing and to staff polling booths, while ramping up an already formidable advertising spend.

Key No advocate, Jacinta Nampijinpa Price, also 42, accepted that her team could not compete with the cash and resources of the affirmative campaign.

The Weekend Australian travelled with both figures this week as they blitzed the country.

Reflecting on the personal needle between the rival groups, Mr Parkin said the Indigenous leadership would have to pull together to help design the voice should the referendum question pass or to “heal” if it were defeated.

“We will all have to find a way to come out of it and to try to find our place of common ground and a place of unity,” he said, campaigning in far north Queensland.

“After the fight, we’ll have to do that in the event of a yes vote and we’ll have to do that in the event of a no vote … because, you know, the country will need some healing.”

On the road in centralwest NSW, Senator Price complained that her personal phone number had been maliciously leaked online, exposing her to a torrent of abuse.

Another prominent No campaigner, Nyunggai Warren Mundine, described the Uluru Statement from the Heart as a declaration “of war on modern Australia”, drawing a sharp response from one of the treatise‘s framers, Megan Davis. She attacked Mr Mundine for using inflammatory and repugnant language at the National Press Club on Tuesday.

NT senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price on the hustings in the NSW Central West this week. Picture: Chris Pavlich

Senator Price, in turn, renewed a feud with Yes23’s heaviest hitter, the reformer and thinker Noel Pearson, calling for a royal commission into the government funding of his organisations to advance Indigenous living standards and education.

The irony, Mr Parkin said, was that criticism of the voice being a project of the “elites” had come from a sitting Nationals parliamentarian in the case of Senator Price, and an unsuccessful Liberal candidate with Mr Mundine.

“It’s quite a conceptual trick … the No camp is led by a current Canberra-based politician and an aspiring politician,” he said. “The Yes camp is led by community-based people.”

Mr Parkin warned there would be no “soft landing” if the referendum failed, no plan-B to legislate the voice outside the Constitution.

Anthony Albanese had ruled out persisting with the voice if voters rejected it on October 14 and the Prime Minister should be taken at his word, the Yes23 boss said.

“People need to be very clear that there’s a very, very clear choice here. There is no soft landing off the back of that,“ Mr Parkin said.

“On the 15th of October … it will be very important that our first steps after the vote will be one of reconciliation, one of healing and one of reconciliation.”