The Voice: the brains behind the Yes campaigns

While the media have been snaffling up soundbites from the various No camps for an Indigenous Voice to Parliament, the brains behind the Yes campaigns have been getting on with it.

Key figures in the push for a Yes vote are spread across several groups with overlapping membership and goals: From the Heart, the Uluru Dialogue and the Australians for Indigenous Constitutional Recognition, as well as the First Nations Referendum Working Group advising the government on the mechanics of the referendum.

These groups are made up of a diverse coalition of academics and activists, many of whom have been battle-hardened by years of fighting for Indigenous recognition in the constitution. They’re complemented by several hard-headed and savvy political operatives, some with much more conservative backgrounds than you might expect.

Here’s a snapshot of some of them:

First Nations Referendum Working Group

Professor Marcia Langton: the academic and longtime activist co-wrote the Indigenous Voice co-design process final report with Tom Calma. She first came to prominence in 1976 as the co-founder of the Black Women’s Action Group and has since written several books and countless articles. Langton has been difficult to categorise — over the years she has sparred with News Corp’s Andrew Bolt and Eualeyai/Kamillaroi academic Larissa Behrendt with equal ferocity.

Further, she surprised many with her — as The Monthly put it back in 2011 — “immediate support for the Howard government’s intervention in [Northern] Territory communities, announced just ahead of the federal election in 2007”.

She says most Indigenous people she’s consulted favour the model she and Calma propose, and has criticised what she calls a “relentless scare campaign” waged by opponents of the Voice. 

Professor Tom Calma is an elder of the Kungarakan people and member of the Iwaidja people. Before his time working with Langton on the senior advisory group of the Indigenous Voice to government convened by Ken Wyatt, Calma was a senior diplomat in India and Vietnam during the latter half of the 1990s.

In 2003, he served as senior adviser on Indigenous affairs to Philip Ruddock, then minister for immigration, multicultural and Indigenous affairs, before spending five years as Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander social justice commissioner at the Australian Human Rights Commission from 2004 to 2010. He has held leadership roles across a variety of health and social policy agencies and in 2014 became the first Indigenous man to be appointed chancellor of a Australian university when he took on that role at Canberra University.

The Uluru Dialogue

Professor Megan Davis: the Cobble Cobble woman was key in developing the Uluru Statement from the Heart, designing and leading 12 “dialogues” across Australia in 2017 that informed the statement. She was also a member of the working group that negotiated the final wording of the proposed constitutional amendment with the government, with Langton and Calma.

Davis has been one of the faces of the Yes campaign, doing media across the country insisting the government of the day would not be able to “shut the Voice up” and that the Voice represents structural change in a way that moves such as the push to change Australia Day don’t. She co-chairs the Uluru Dialogue with Pat Anderson.

Pat Anderson is an Alyawarre woman and Uluru Dialogues co-chair. She was also chair of the Lowitja Institute and, with Davis, consulted hundreds of Indigenous people to deliver the Uluru Statement from the Heart in 2017. She, Davis and Salvation Army national reconciliation action plan coordinator and Cobble Cobble woman Lucy Davis chair “Start a yarn” sessions, online meetings which allow Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians to ask questions about the mechanics, meaning and history of the Voice.

“The Voice is about getting grassroots Voices amplified and feeding into Canberra, representing the views and Voices of their communities,” she told the parliamentary committee on the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice referendum last month. “The really important message from the dialogues was that there is no Voice that exists now that represents who we are and what we want.”

From the Heart

Dean Parkin is the Yes Campaign Alliance director, and is from the Quandamooka peoples of Minjerribah (aka North Stradbroke Island) in Queensland. Formerly an investment analyst at Tanarra Capital, and a member of the Business Council of Australia’s Indigenous engagement taskforce, he worked on the Uluru Statement from the Heart and subsequently became director of From the Heart, an “education project” aimed at keeping the Voice on the agenda after its initial rejection by the Coalition. In an example of the overlaps between these groups, From the Heart operates under the auspices of Noel Pearson’s think tank the Cape York Institute.

Parkin was in the news when the Yes campaign launched its first ad last month, a 30-second spot steering clear of the specific Voice debate and focusing on constitutional recognition.

“This campaign, right from the Uluru Statement from the Heart, has always said that this is about both — it’s about recognition, but it’s about that recognition having to be meaningful,” he said at the time. “That’s why Indigenous people have said it’s got to be through the Voice.”

Australians for Indigenous Constitutional Recognition

Noel Pearson: a fixture in public debate around Indigenous issues in Australia for several decades, the Cape York leader, writer and academic was one of the key architects of the Uluru Statement from the Heart and is on the board of Australians for Indigenous Constitutional Recognition (AICR).

When the Liberal Party finally settled on its No position on the Indigenous Voice referendum earlier this year, Pearson said it was a “Judas betrayal of our country” and called Opposition Leader Peter Dutton “an undertaker preparing the grave to bury Uluru”. It is not the first time he has been disappointed by the Liberals. When then-prime minister Malcolm Turnbull rejected the initial 2017 proposal for an Indigenous Voice to Parliament — thus, according to Pearson, reneging on a commitment made before he became PM — Pearson wrote a long essay in The Monthly called “Betrayal“.

Mark Textor: yep, seriously! One way or another, AICR has a significant get in Textor who, as part of Crosby Textor (now known as C|T Group), has been one of the most influential pollsters and strategists in hard-right conservative politics for the past two decades. Further, AICR has former Kevin Rudd press secretary Lachlan Harris. Harris came to public notice when he was forced to apologise to Brendan Nelson when he and another Rudd staffer joined the crowd that turned their back on the then-opposition leader during his response to Rudd’s apology to the Stolen Generations in 2008. The AICR board also features longtime John Howard adviser Tony Nutt.

Nothing says “we’re not messing about” than the engagement of some hard-headed political messaging experts from both sides of the aisle.

Thomas Mayo: a Kaurareg Aboriginal and Kalkalgal, Erubamle Torres Strait Islander man, Mayo is a union official with the Maritime Union of Australia. He is chair of the Northern Territory Indigenous Labor Network, advises the Diversity Council of Australia, and is an executive member of the Northern Territory Trades and Labour Council.

Mayo has written six books, including Finding Our Heart, subtitled “A Story about the Uluru Statement for Young Australians”, and with journalist Kerry O’Brien The Voice to Parliament Handbook: All The Detail You Need. Further, he’s had articles and essays advocating for the Voice published in Guardian Australia, Griffith Review, the Nine papers and right here in Crikey.