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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
I don’t read his articles, but happened to see this idiotic Tweet from Phillip Adams:
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“LNP announces a piano with only white keys”
It’s unlike Adams to plunder other people’s jokes; he’s usually too busy dropping names and humble brag skyting.
Funny you should mention Phillip Adams. In his column in the magazine section of the latest Weekend Australian (14-15 October), he mentions that his wife is indigenous. Reading that almost caused me to fall off my chair. He writes: “This was the experience of my Aboriginal wife, Dr. Patrice Newell AM”, when referring presumably to “a policy to ‘breed out the blackness’ and in due course babies were taken from their [sic] arms of their grieving mothers”.
Her Wikipedia entry gives no indication of this, summarising what can only be described as a privileged life, although a Guardian article (surprise?) of July 2022 (https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2022/jul/08/i-now-farm-with-my-ancestors-watching-ags-struggle-with-reconciliation) reveals gross capitalisation of her discovery that she had been adopted out shortly after birth. Phillip overlooks that, by marrying her, he was helping “breed out” the blackness” (unless he perchance eventually finds Aboriginal ancestors in his own lineage), although that can be somewhat reversed by labelling anyone with even a smidgin of Aboriginal ancestry as being “indigenous” (which, with the passage of sufficient time, should entitle every Australian to label themselves as such).
It’s a shame that someone of Adams’ supposed intellect fails to see the idiotic divisiveness of The Voice, by which his wife, but not he, would have been entitled to representation. Next thing, he’ll be wanting her to benefit from Treaty . . .
I replied to that Adams article on Saturday.
Adams: “This was the experience of my Aboriginal wife, Dr Patrice Newell AM.”
Me: “Well, I for one, and I expect most readers here, join together in saying “Well done, Patrice, you’ve done rather brilliantly for yourself, as have so many of your fortunate peers, despite all that disadvantage you never knew you had. Hats off.””
It wasn’t published.
I’ve never been able to take Philip Adams seriously. He’s always come across as a tedious old lefty blowhard telling stories about himself. He’s part of the whole MSM problem and, as noted above by my learned colleague, a humble-braggart. It would be phoolish to listen to anything Adams has to say.
End of.
Phillip Adams, a humble man, with much to be humble about.
I, too, was tempted, for about 5 minutes, to write a letter in response to the Adams article, but then saw the obvious futility. But I’ve just had a great flash of insight: while our forebears have long been accused of trying to “breed out the blackness”, we now have fully turned around, and are “breeding it back in”, calling anyone with a smidgin of Aboriginal ancestry a blackfella. How much more inclusive can a society become? Given sufficient time, and restricting immigration, all Australians will become First Nations people — and would have had two voices to parliament, if only the referendum got up.
I read that Adams’ wife was born in St Joseph’s Women’s Refuge in Adelaide, adopted as a baby and later learnt her birth mother was Indigenous.
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I know you cannot determine an Aborigine by skin colour or facial features, but I doubt she learnt her birth mother was indigenous by looking in a mirror, and I’m unaware of any mention of it when a newsreader at SBS, presenter of Midweek or co-anchor of Channel Nine’s Today Show, and I’m pretty sure no-one who saw her on those shows picked up that she was an Aborigine.
There may be (disputed) evidence of human habitation in parts of Australia dating to 60-70,000 years B.P. but the earliest human remains we have uncovered (Mungo Man) date to around 45,000 B.P. This was discovered in the 1970s and before that the supposition was that modern humans arrived around 20-25,000 B.P. These discoveries of early man do not add up to evidence for the claimed 60,000 or 65,000 years of continuous habitation. If the “out of Africa” hypothesis of human origins is accepted, then these very early Australian dates are out of agreement with all other dated evidence along the supposed migration routes.
Each of these discoveries is taken to “prove” some unbroken culture which is held to be a good thing. However, when large scale genotyping of aboriginal Australians, New Guineans, island Southeast Asians and Indians was undertaken, it found ancient associations between these groups with divergence times estimated at about 36,000 years ago. Further there is evidence of substantial gene flow between the Indian population and Australia well before European contact, estimated to have occurred during the Holocene about 4,200 years ago. This is also approximately when changes in tool technology, food processing, and the dingo appear in the Australian archaeological record, suggesting that these may be related to the migration from India.
There is nothing intrinsically worthy of an Aboriginal population cut off from the rest of the world for millennia. We don’t need to keep this assumption of an unbroken and unchanged culture stretching back to the earliest humans in Australia to validate concerns for the welfare of any group in modern Australia.
As for claims of ancient “nations” or “civilisation”, these are just ridiculous.
Neither is there any evidence those here in 1788 were descended from the first humans to arrive. So much called history is fiction.
Great article Mr Rubinstein.
there’s lotsa evidence that people proliferated across Sahul around 50-40 KYA. They changed fire regimes and vegetation, exterminating most of the megafauna by eliminating their browse. they persisted thru the LGM and rapid global warming thereafter. there’s clear evidence that new genes and culture and the dingo arrived in the holocene and mixed with the old. same thing with macassan trepangers introducing genes and culture before Europeans did the same. Then there were afghan camel drivers and chinese goldminers …
Instead of denigrating any particular contribution maybe you could take pride in the rich cultural history underpinning our one and only nation born in 1901 and built by many contributions since. Especially our WWII refugee recruits.
Recently, new immigrants have had an increasingly negative impact because both sides of politics have been using them in a Ponzi scheme to produce false economic growth.
Our recently great nation is disintegrating cos o racial, ethnic, religious and political bs from all colours and creeds.
http://www.sciencepublishinggroup.com/journal/paperinfo?journalid=231&doi=10.11648/j.eeb.20200504.17
Lots of thanks for that observation Jack and at last we possibly have an explanation for the wretched “hindoos” who plague us with spam telephone calls, spurious emails, and other con jobs for that helps to explain why our indigenous brethren have been conning us all along for it’s hereditary.
It would be interesting to compare infanticide rates and status of women between New Guinea and Australian cultures. I have long wondered if those two factors prevented natural evolution in aboriginal peoples. Killing babies was at higher rates then the British had ever seen and women were pretty much slaves.
@sirtony
>”There may be (disputed) evidence of human habitation in parts of Australia dating to 60-70,000 years B.P. …” [part quote from your comment]
Yes. This is a very interesting discussion for a geoscientist as it impinges upon hard dating evidence.
I agree with your descriptive term “disputed”. One of the most irritating aspects of this ongoing long-time squabble over dating is that the various peer-reviewed papers purporting to detail evidence constantly go missing (tempting to say gone walkabout) – deliberately hidden from public view actually. I think of this as yo-yo evidence.
So your summary here is welcome.
William D. Rubinstein gets it right!
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“….. barring another referendum to repeal it….”
He gets a lot of things right. I’m a great admirer of his work, which is properly academic, being committed to the pursuit of truth, without fear or favour, backed by excellent research.
Thank you, Quadrant, once again.
Having spent years living and working in the then Territory of Papua New Guinea, which is almost within easy walking distance from our Torres Strait islands, themselves very close to mainland Australia, it has always fascinated me how our mainland Aboriginal people remained so relatively primitive. Even with virtually unavoidable contact with much more advanced Papuans and Indonesians, and our own Torres Strait Islanders, they seem to have borrowed or learnt nothing in the way of cultivation even in relatively benign east coast Australian agricultural territory.
Obviously, unless things have changed in the last 50-odd years, there are pockets of extremely persistent primitive peoples still extant in PNG, eg the Kukukuku people and some others in the highlands, but like our TSIs, the coastal peoples were relatively sophisticated.
As the author says, “There is nothing intrinsically worthy of an Aboriginal population cut off from the rest of the world for millennia”. In fact, it is very likely that our post-Whitlam and Coombs stupidly sentimental “romancing of the primitive” (thanks, William J. Lines) that has exacerbated the tragic failure of so many of our rural Aboriginal people to adapt to the reality of the modern world to which they are forced to live whether they like it or not.
Constant reference by our pathetic leadership to contradictory terms like “Aboriginal culture” reaching back to pre-historic times is shameful.
As Jared Diamond wrote in “Guns, Germs and Steel”, our continent simply didn’t have the right plants for cultivation en masse (OK, some tiny yams will grow densely), or any animals amenable to domestication, virtually committing the earlier human invaders to eternal nomadic hunter-gathering. Having wheels would have been pointless (although not now, where practising “traditional culture” would be impossible without 4WD vehicles, aircraft and outboard engines). Even Bruce Pascoe’s favorite grasses produce seeds that are tiny compared with wheat and rice (OK, so modern varieties have been selected out over a long time, but there’s no such evidence of such happening to, say, Kangaroo Grass, Themeda australis, anywhere over its geographical range).
Bananas and sweet potatoes could have been cultivated here, but Torres Strait appeared well before they were introduced to PNG. They did establish in the TS islands, though, with sedentary culture. Didn’t spread to our mainland where, as Peter Sutton explained, “increase ceremonies” were preferable to the physical work and sedentism needed to maintain and protect them.
Read today:
“I learned only recently from a Henry Reynolds lecture that Mabo got Australia the Sydney Olympics. The vital African block was deadset against Sydney until Gough Whitlam did a tour there explaining what Mabo meant. Do you think we’ll ever win a vote like that in any sphere again?”
Given Henry’s talent for extrapolating with extreme prejudice, this reeks of tall story. Chuck in Whitlam AND African IOC delegates voting through principle ahead of plunder and I’m calling bull twang.
I wonder if the Africa bloc ever worries about what Australia might think of it? Given the MO of the IOC, one would not be surprised to learn that the passage of brown paper bags beneath tables might be far more influential . . .
If, and I stress if, Reynolds’ story holds any water, what’s the bet an African tick for Mabo was a paid endorsement.
Yep – that African tick would fit right in with all the local parasites.
They have often overlooked the crucial fact that the population at large may have vastly more total knowledge—in the mundane sense—than the elites, even if that knowledge is scattered in individually unimpressive fragments among vast numbers of people.” ― Thomas Sowell, Intellectuals
While ‘Aboriginals’ have been on the continent for maybe sixty five thoudand gears of PREhistory ‘First Nations peoples’ have only been here for about six months, the term ‘First Nations’ being conjured up in a deluge of MSM usage when propaganda for The Voice began in earnest. This has to be deliberate and, I believe, is linked to one of the prime initial objectives of The Voice. I refer to the FOI request for details of correspondence between its initiators and then PM’s office wherein they said there was no point of The Voice if there was no treaty with Aboriginals. The objection being blocked by replacing ‘Aboriginals’ with ‘First Nations people’ is that the government could not make a treaty with its own citizens but could with representatives of other nations.
The other objective of The Voice in the FOI request was said to be establishing a system of land rent to compensate Aboriginals for their land having been stolen. Both ‘rent’ and ‘stolen land’ imply recognition of ownership of the land of the continent which coincides with the disappearance over the last few years of that proud proclamation by Aboriginal elders past that Aboriginals did ‘not own the land’ but were ‘of the land’. Elders present and emerging have quietly ditched that quaint notion and replaced it with statements to the contrary, that they owned the land and it has been stolen from them.
Jack, what you speak about is part of an integrated effort by activists from Canada, New Zealand and Australia liaising with each other on common policies and strategies (aided and abetted by a compliant UN) to take control of their respective countries (with their modern geographical boundaries) through some form of minority government, at the expense of what we know as democracy.
I wasn’t aware of the activist coordination but not surprised. Just as multiculturalism originated in Canada, as a mechanism to pacify Quebec based separatists, so too it seemed to me did ‘First Nations’. Perhaps the term had some legitimacy there in referring to indigenous political structures in tribes around the Great Lakes such as the Iroquois Nation and federstions etc but it was quite local and soecific.
I do suspect that the treaty with The Voice activists would then be used to claim Australia recognised them as national leaders and those people would leverage that in places such as the UN to seek external legal sanction against Australia for its historical genocide. However this is more extrapolation rather than the interpolation referred to in my main paragrsph.
If you are interested, Jack, it’s worthwhile getting a copy of this book – Indigenous Peoples’ Rights in Australia, Canada & New Zealand. Edited by Paul Havermann, 1999. Oxford University Press. It sets out the whole program and well known Australian contributors are in it. I found it a while ago in a secondhand bookshop and many such bookshops can get it in if it is not in stock. It is redolent with such ideas as:
– Indigenous have the inalienable right to confer or withhold consent for non-indigenous use of the country, in view of their sovereign autonomy as First Peoples as yet undiminished by colonisation.
– settler land use will be allowed if consent is socially constructed rather than taken for granted. This presents a conundrum: if consent has to be sought and granted, how can the indigenous exercise their collective and inherent rights to self-determination as a distinct people, within the framework of the settler society?
So you can see where the Voice was coming from, as well as the more strident position of the activists who shout “War” and adopt other extreme positions. As others have pointed out, the activists needed the Voice to get the ball rolling to obtain a separate identity which then enables them to pursue their dubious undemocratic goals. It was more than the “vibe.”
My conclusions also. First Nations sounds more impressive than first peoples but it also entrenches a separate nation into the lexicon, or at least a case for one.
It’s ahistorical. A stark nonsense confection. Refuse to give it oxygen. Refute it on every occasion.
‘In place of the traditional history has come the celebration of the Aborigines for their “world’s oldest continuing civilisation”.’
The (indirect) evidence uncovered in the bed of Lake George by Gurdip Singh of the ANU, indicates that the earliest Aborigines may have arrived at 110,000 BP. All of the ancestors of every individual alive had to be somewhere in the world at that time.
But the Aborigines had a hunter-gatherer ‘stone-age’ economy, There was native copper sticking out of the ground, but they did not utilise it in any way. They could have collected it and fashioned it into pots, pans and other containers, but had no beasts of burden to load them onto, in order to shift them from place to place; over what were at times huge distances. But to their credit, they took what resources they had, and made the most of them to the absolute limit.
They missed out on the copper-bronze-iron age sequence of Eurasia and Africa, had no tools capable of working stone, and did not learn even the art of building mud-brick dwellings. To talk of Aboriginal ‘civilisation’ is to render the word meaningless. Civilisation would date on that basis from the times of Australopithecus and Paranthropus, or even as far back as the great apes.
“Civilisation” comes from the Latin “civitas”, meaning “city”. Where there are no cities, there is by definition no civilisation, although there might be cultures. Australian aborigines had no cities, therefore they did not have a civilisation. Wait a minute though! — I almost forgot! They did have one city, somewhere along the Murray, the erstwhile existence of which has only recently been ascertained. Nothing remains of it, but it was known, I believe, as “Pascoe-Pascoe”.
Jack
I, too, had heard of the ‘Custodians’ of the land – this was claimed by Aboriginal elders back years ago. The description made complete sense – most tribes moved about. So how do we prove to the Government that the term ‘Owner’ is wrong in history and from a legal aspect? Who is the voice of the 60% to cut through to Government. The Voice was an ambit claim, we saw it for what it was.
At least one-third of Australians will never ‘own’ land, but either struggle to find somewhere to live, by renting or paying a mortgage for 100 square metres or less. These people work their lives through simply to put a head down on the planet – too many homeless. Native ‘title’ is already a form of reparation.
Considering that so many Indigenous elders use strong ‘anti-white ‘ terms, why are we ‘respecting the elders’ etc. Look up https://www.indigenous.gov.au/contact-us/welcome_acknowledgement-country and you will find every instance of welcoming and acknowledging taken care of.
We should immediately scrap any respect for ‘elders – pass, present and emerging’. Those that voiced a Yes cannot be respected, because wanted a divided Australia. Yes, I read the ‘Heart’ and between the lines. I do not respect their sense of entitlement and their ‘heart’ of division. It’s all me… me … me …
When will they accept that history was not on their side. I quote the words of Rachel Perkins (instagram 14_10) speaking to ‘newcomers’ who show … ‘a long-refused grace and gratitude’. What the Voice proponents need is what they say they want from us. In psychology terms, this is known as ‘projection’. Put onto others what you need yourself.
Who will give us back the real truth-telling, Custodian not Owner …
The Australian ACCEPTED a comment containing this nonsense:
“Anthony Dillon should not be disheartened by the success of the No vote.
Keep plugging away Anthony. Your dad would be proud of you”.
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Meanwhile 2 comments of mine are PENDING after 3+days.
I suspect those running Murdoch media have decided that there is more money in quietly joining the woke flow than in resisting it. The Australian now won’t even print my comments confined to quotes from it’s own articles critical of Aboriginal culture.
They would not print my direct quotes from the Bible.
Since his election AA has rammed all things aboriginal down our throats, to the exclusion of virtually all else. The rest of us didn’t matter and we noticed.
Peta Credlin revealed in the “other” non public version of the Uluṟu yadda yadda gained under FOI, that a proportion of Australia’s GDP should be payable to aborigines. ‘Pay he rent’ was on the table too. Hip pocket nerve stuff. Hearing that, must have stirred even the most indifferent Aussie voter into action, thank god.
In the end, it was Australians love for Australia than defeated the Voice.
“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.”
Noel Pearson stated during his Press Club address that the Voice would be needed forever, even after ‘the gap has closed’, to provide a valuable Aboriginal perspective on our governance in general (or words to that effect).
I so want to see Noel Pearson audited.
Yep, me too.
The magnitude of the “No” victory is a triumph not only of genuine racism-free Australianness, but of basic honesty. It is to be hoped that it will have an enduring effect in giving ordinary Australians confidence that they are capable of shaking the cultural dominance of jack-booted (or jack-and-jill booted) Leftism, and above all of Orwellian Leftist lies — that is, lies which everyone recognises as lies, but feels cowered into pretending are truths.
It is not only true but obviously true that, as Professor Rubinstein states, “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.” Yet I would like to be taken beyond this fact to illumination as to why it is a fact. For instance, given that simply piling up rocks would have helped provide shelter for aborigines against uncomfortable winds, and thus would have enhance the protective effect of branches-and-bark gunyahs if the latter were constructed up against such piles, why do we nowhere find such utilitarian rock-piles anywhere in our Continent? Have other stone-age cultures which survived into the modern era, such as the Kalahari Bushmen, similarly declined over eons to utilise resources available to them in easy and obvious ways to make their lives a little easier, and if so why was it so? Lies are constricting; truth can be ever-expanding.
Eloquent my friend. Excellent post.
Colin Though I agree with your overall argument and your other examples, criticising a group for not inventing the wheel is a tad unfair. A wheel isn’t just a circle. It has no effect until it is built with a certain strength to bear a load and is attached to an axle extending through and somehow fixed to the centre of the “wheel” while allowing either free rotation or transfer of a driving force, and a second similar wheel at the opposite end of the axle. Then there’s the need for motive power including human muscle power and how to transfer it to the axle/wheels structure. Thus the real invention was a highly complex wheel/axle combination, made as we know by some early genius in Mesopotamia “only” about 4000 years ago and therefore missed by everyone globally for most of the aboriginal occupancy of Australia.
I’d guess, Alasdair, that it was a good thing the Aborigines didn’t come up with a workable wheel, Not having any domesticable animals (kangaroos would be useless), they would have harnessed up their customary beasts of burden — their womenfolk. The women already did all the heavy carrying, so that this innovation would only have ground them down further, and faster.
Just a follow-up in the celebrity world — many people might not know that Ray Martin is also indigenous, having discovered an Aboriginal ancestor many generations back. He could have sat on The Voice!
I would bet that was his little dream having found one out of 62 ancestors with a bit of blek.
And I’m happy to report that instead of Uncle Ray Martin, Oz has now sat right on the voice.
The decision to combine two separate proposals into a single referendum question was strategically disastrous for the Yes campaign. At a deeper level it stole from all voters the chance to vote differently on the two matters.
It is possible that a vote on recognition in the Preamble as a separate question would have passed, this time. In such a scenario, widely different voting patterns between the two separated questions would have allowed a clear perception about the genuine non-racism that surely exists in Australia today following 2++++ generations of incremental acceptance of the hand of friendship by all groups to each other in our great country. This is not new.
It is rarely asserted of late that the Constitution is a document for 100% of Australians, not just a portion of the community of 3%. The moral responsibility of all citizens in a referendum is unarguably to make a risk assessment of the costs and benefits of a proposed change to the Constitution for the entire citizenry. That is what occurred last Saturday. To meet their responsibility, all eligible voters have a right to be given adequate information about the proposal, not to be told to do the research themselves and in a manner that in itself will have put the majority of voters offside and suspicious. The denial of the relevance and dire import of the discussion points behind the “one page” Uluru Statement from the Heart was surely another on the nose moment acting against the Yes campaign.
In the end, the thoughtful voter, “educated” or not, wealthy or not, was forced to vote No to the single question on offer if he or she had even the slightest reservation about the unknown unknowns that could result. Many of them may not have read Harry Gibbs’ or Ian Callinen’s concerns about the non-utopian possibility of judicial activism, but, as one friend said to me, you don’t need to have read a lot to know that common sense suggests the proposal will fail in practical reality. The idea that the “uneducated” wouldn’t know (and are somehow racist, to boot) is surely one of the most disgusting implications about one’s fellow citizens that has ever been made in our democracy.
The tactics of the Yes campaign reaped a proper reward. The proposal deserved, on any consideration, to be crushed. A triumph for democracy, the secret ballot and, ultimately compassionate, common sense.
“The natural condition of mankind, according to Hobbes, is a state of war in which life is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short” because individuals are in a “war of all against all”. In such a state, Hobbes contends that individuals have a “natural right” to do whatever they believe is necessary to preserve their lives.
Finn, Stephen. United States Military Academy. doi:https://iep.utm.edu/hobmeth/#SH3b
Hobbes’ theory of ‘Man in a State of Nature’, seems to be eerily prescient given that he wrote those words well before 1788. The words, “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short” describe exactly what the people on the first fleet discovered. Of course, he describes a model of a society before that society realises the benefits of an organised existence, and in the macrocosm of the Great Southern Land, the last continent to be discovered by any country worth its fleet, was found a perfect example for Darwin to take the findings of Hobbes along with him to study these new-found Black People of that land. In that Great Southern Land existed a perfect model of ‘man in a state of nature’, and the evidence of how badly they existed for what we now estimate as something in the order of 60K years. Life for the inhabitants of what was to become
Australia was, indeed, ‘solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short’ and it continues so up to the present day, regardless of the multitude of efforts by all and sundry to change their fortunes.They are cursed by their past condition and alien to their present condition.