Is the “Indigenous Voice” referendum dead? It’s far too soon to get our hopes up, but the racist proposed Constitutional amendment is certainly gasping for breath, right now. Its biggest problem is that it’s suffering the same issue as the 1999 Republic referendum: the more the Australian people learn about it, the further from it they run.
The campaign for an Indigenous voice to be entrenched in the Constitution is now in deep trouble. The latest Resolve polling shows the Yes vote has dropped from 64 per cent late last year, to 58 per cent earlier this year, to just 53 per cent now.
The raw figures are 39 per cent opposition to the voice, 18 per cent undecided and just 44 per cent support. What’s more, according to the pollsters, some states are shifting from Yes to No.
Australian referenda require a “super majority” to pass: that is, not just a majority of voters overall, but a majority of voters in a majority of states. In other words, a majority of voters in four states, as well as a majority of voters in Australia in total.
Australia’s system is rightly designed to set a high bar for Constitutional change. So high, that only eight of the 44 referenda held in Australia have ever passed.
The numbers aren’t looking good for the “Voice” — and they’re only getting worse.
This tends to confirm last month’s Morgan poll, showing a seven percentage point drop in the Yes vote to 46 per cent; and a nine percentage point rise in the No vote to 39 per cent. In two states, Queensland (46-41) and in South Australia (50-39), the No vote was actually in front. Only in Victoria, said Morgan, was there still majority support for Yes. As well, the Essential poll has Yes down six points to 59 and No up six points to 41 since February. This polling is remarkably similar to polling on becoming a republic, five months out from the 1999 referendum, which ultimately went down in every state and 55-45 nationally.
Australians are especially sick of being told to shoulder collective guilt for things that happened before they were even born.
As well, especially among the overseas born, voters are starting to ask why this generation of Australians – who have never been responsible for mistreating Indigenous people – should have to make it up to current generations of Indigenous people.
The biggest problem for the “Yes” campaign, though, is that when push comes to ballot-box shove, they can’t coast by on the fairy-floss guff they’ve been feeding us. As a result, support is “a mile wide but an inch deep”. It’s all very well to blither trite, feel-good fluff, but when it comes to the Constitution, voters want hard answers.
No campaigners say voter concerns that the voice may be divisive and that there’s not enough detail are being intensified once people are clear that the voice involves changing the Constitution – which, unlike legislative change, is permanent […]
This will get only worse as more questions emerge that voice proponents can’t (or won’t) answer. And while just about everyone would be happy to see Indigenous people formally recognised in the Constitution as the First Australians, it’s far from clear that a super-majority of voters are prepared to give the government what amounts to a blank cheque for a change that’s so much more than that.
Ultimately, Australians are finally getting a chance to say in the privacy of the ballot box what the left has furiously denied them the chance to say in public.
If there’s any upside here, a referendum at least gives every Australian a say on what has happened by stealth until now. And anyone who doesn’t like where things are headed – from the permanent flying of the Aboriginal flag coequally with the national flag, to the now routine Indigenous welcomes – notwithstanding all the moral pressure that will be brought to bear, in the privacy of the ballot box they will at last have a chance to vote No.
The Australian
If, as is seeming more and more likely, the referendum is consigned to the dustbin of history, the left will screech and stamp their feet, just as they did in 1999. Which ultimately only serves to confirm middle Australia’s suspicions.
Bellowing “racist!” at decent, ordinary Australians will no more be a vote-winner than sneering “Deplorables” at millions of Americans was.