Even Peasants Can Recognise a Bill of Goods

There were many reasons for the success of No and failure of Yes despite the latter’s powerful supporters, near unlimited budget, corporate endorsements, free travel on Qantas planes and the media’s mainstream megaphone being solidly behind the Voice. The reasons will be debated for years, but some factors are already clear.

The Albanese government joined together the cast-iron straightjacket of a Constitutional Amendment with an ad hoc Voice institution that may have had no relevance 30 years from now but would be there, barring another referendum to repeal it, for eternity. Having made this central mistake, the government then failed to explain even the most basic facts of how the Voice would work in practice — for example, if its office-holders would be elected or appointed, and what limitations (if any) on what it could propose.  In its advertising, the Voice campaign claimed all the miseries of the Aborigines would be cured if Australia voted “Yes”, seemingly oblivious that billions of dollars are spent and vast state and federal bureaucracies exist to administer that expenditure.

There seems to be no doubt that Anthony Albanese and his ministers made probably the greatest error of judgement in recent Australian history. Australian voters aren’t stupid and didn’t buy these implausible “explanations”. Additionally, many  were critical of the government for being obsessed with the Voice at a time when rental housing is almost impossible to find and the cost of living rapidly rising. They resent the government’s failure to address those issues affecting them, and object to big business — outfits such as Qantas, BHP and Wesfarmers — pouring millions of dollars into promoting the Voice.

Beyond all of these reasonable, rational considerations leading to a majority of the population voting No, are several more basic explanations.  These have received little attention in the media, although many people who write their views on msn.com and other popular websites, some largely uncensored, make this clear. These people are afraid of Australian history being censored, distorted, and rewritten, both to eliminate the achievements of post-1788 European convicts and settlers and, just as important, to mendaciously exaggerate and distort the alleged achievements of the Aborigines.

Australian history, in any meaningful sense, began on January 18, 1788, when Captain Arthur Phillip and the First Fleet arrived at Botany Bay. The millennia before this are simply blank pages, unknown and almost entirely unknowable because the indigenous inhabitants had not developed a way of recording any event whatever; if today’s archaeologists and anthropologists claim that an event (say, a great flood or a significant warming or cooling) it is by means developed by Western civilization in very recent times, and subject to extremely wide limits of accuracy and dating.  Until a generation ago, “Australian history” entailed, almost exclusively, facts and debates about what occurred to the white, mainly Anglo-Celtic convicts and settlers of Australia and their descendants, all since 1788. 

Some of this history was tragic: for example, the use of New South Wales as a penal colony; the struggle for workingmen’s rights; the terrible losses in the World Wars.  And some of it was highly positive, even heroic: the creation of a successful, functioning democracy in this remote corner of the world; the early suffrage for women; the wartime leadership of such generals as Monash and such politicians as Hughes, Curtin, and Evatt.  Today, and especially on the Left, there is a considerable danger that the story of white Australia may not merely be written out of history in a literal sense  but its players denounced as usurpers who stole an entire continent from its rightful owners and whose story revolves around endemic racism and the “genocide” of the native population. 

In place of the traditional history has come the celebration of the Aborigines for their “world’s oldest continuing civilisation“. Along with this bit of Orwellian mendacity has also come the characterisation of Aboriginal society, which in reality consisted of small wandering tribes, as “First Nations”, and the ubiquitous “Acknowledgment of Traditional Owners” recited on behalf of all attendees at public meetings throughout the land, in which “respects’ are paid to Aboriginal “elders past, present and emerging”.  A greater distortion of the historical record is difficult to imagine.  The period prior to 1788 consisted of 65,000 years of barbarism and savagery among nomadic hunter-gatherers whose populations had to be limited because there was no way of feeding excess mouths, which were automatically eliminated. In all those years of sole habitation, the Aborigines never built a single permanent structure of any kind, never invented the wheel or produced a wheeled vehicle, and Australia is the only continent whose indigenous inhabitants never devised a written language.  There is no reason to suppose that if, somehow, neither Europeans nor anyone else had ever settled here, this would have changed: today’s Aborigines would surely have lived as their ancestors did in 1787. This total reversal of our perceptions of the nature of Australian history has been a notable achievement of the Australian Left, which, like the Left around the world, has substituted Race War for Class War in its efforts to undermine Western civilisation.

Although (thankfully) they may not be “learned” in the conventional sense, many of the millions of Australians who voted “No” on October 14 perceive and understand this perfectly well, and are aware that left-wing urban elites wish to marginalise, minimise and eliminate their history and achievements.  Paradoxically, it is precisely because we live in a genuine political democracy that this attempt has failed so decisively.  The Founding Fathers of Australia built better than they knew: they not only devised a means of successfully governing Australia, but also a means of saving it.

William D. Rubinstein held chairs of history at Deakin University and the University of Wales.  He is a frequent contributor to Quadrant