The Yes campaign must abandon its ‘make history’ shtick or risk being on the wrong side of it

Elizabeth? They held the launch for the Yes campaign in Elizabeth? That would be Elizabeth the noble but failed experiment, right? Elizabeth, Australia’s most extensive experiment in a UK-style “new town”, isolated from the capital, initially centred around an austere plaza with uplifting modernist sculptures that’s now a shopping mall? That Elizabeth? The one that over the years, cynically undermined by Liberal and Labor governments, became a welfare town — with many fine low-income people, but also a fair few predators and degenerates who turned sections of the place into a sump, showing the capacity for bold experiments to achieve the opposite of what they intended? That Elizabeth? The one named after the queen? (The poor old Guardian journalists covering it didn’t seem to have a clue as to the significance of where they were.)

Well, one can see the angle, but still. I presume it was thought, if it was thought at all, that the potshots the right might take at this failed and undermined monument to planning wouldn’t matter because no-one would be listening. And they would probably be right. Most people have long since switched off.

The Elizabeth launch was part of the Yes campaign’s, and the government’s, “pivot to the suburbs”, and from the reports the mood seemed positive but it also looked like all the same palaver. Noel and Marcia in the mix, the great and the good assembled, the Yes campaign fused with the government itself, in a way that no-one involved with these entities seems to think anyone out there has a problem with. The same speech from Albo with the chance to make history rhetoric, and a repurposing of South Australian Yes campaign coordinator Jakirah Telfer’s opening reference to the red kangaroo, and its anatomical inability to move in reverse. Said Albo: “We rise to the moment. Like the kangaroo and the emu on our coat of arms. They never go backwards — they just go forwards.”

That extra twist, and once again, the question: ham-fisted, or too clever by half? Can I point out that 1) if the kangaroo and emu do go forward, they will bump heads and the shield will fall over, and 2) as far as rising goes, the emu is a flightless bird. But sure, yes, the symbol of the Federation whose consecrating act was the exclusion of the original inhabitants is something that can unite us all as a positive example or something. 

True, there was a fair bit of the more practical stuff in there, improvement of outcomes and closing the gap, but it was wrapped in the oracular notion of national destiny etc. I guess it’s hard to see how it couldn’t be, but that’s the problem of having this total identification of the state and one side of the contest. It blunts the capacity to make the most effective political argument for the Yes case, and puts it in the service of state self-aggrandisement. 

Since the statecraft purpose of the Voice is to present ourselves to the world as a settler nation redefining itself through an act of dialectical synthesis, the Yes campaign is loaded with a purpose that may not be in its best interests. Quite possibly, many in the government now wish they had handled it differently, as a No vote will be an international disaster for this country. 

First as myth, then tragedy?

The way it looks at the moment, the Voice is going the same way as Brexit. The cause of the knowledge class progressives — which includes the First Nations’ leadership — spruiked with an arrogant confidence in the obvious superiority of its case, of its appeal to reason and enlightenment, is failing in every possible fashion. Its circular focus on “making history” — make history by making history — leaves people cold, if they haven’t already bought into the idea and are Yes voters.

Beneath that, the notion that the central meaning of this continent-nation-state is the evolving mutual definition of settlers and colonised First Nations is something most simply do not agree with. Though few Anglo-Celtics in the suburbs have a strong sense of national destiny or purpose in the way that Tony Abbott or the Institute of Public Affairs would like them to have, they do have a sense of basic legitimacy about their own lives, and such historical connections as they can summon. It’s thin compared to other countries: a bit of Anzac, mostly family history, and the sense that one’s ancestors made something that wasn’t here before, which we carry into the future. 

For those descended from the 1948 migrant waves, and more recent arrivals, the story is even more at variance with the one the Yes camp wants to tell. Some polling suggests that a greater number of non-Anglos will vote Yes — especially knowledge-class non-Anglos — an expression of non-white solidarity. But at the same time, the basic migrant story, the undercurrent of post-1948 lives, runs against the notion that the non-Indigenous presence on this continent is not resolved. That is because, quite simply, migrants resolve their presence here, or anywhere, by making their lives from scratch, even if that is now two or three generations back. The migrant, by migrating, claims the right to make a life wherever they have landed, without apology or deference. 

So the more one tries to assert the story that legitimates the Voice as a moral absolute — you must be interested in this, this must be significant to you — the more it starts to piss people off. 

What it was all for, whatever it was

What many people are getting from the relentless state push of the Yes case is the idea that the meanings they have made of their lives don’t count, that their struggles and achievements are second tier. It is turning mainstream indifference to First Nations self-determination into an active hostility towards it. This is all the doing of the Yes case. Much of the uptake of the No case’s more lurid falsehoods has been as a sort of manifest content, of this latent dissatisfaction, a way of giving accusatory voice to a complaint which, were it expressed directly, would sound simply pathetic: why are the blacks getting all the attention, again? Don’t I count? What about me?

Thus, what is emerging is something approaching a tragedy, a modest demand that will fall short because it has summoned an opposition that would not otherwise exist had it been done differently. For most people in said suburbs — the country and the north might be another matter — the claim to legitimacy of their own lives does not, any more, require a narrative of supremacy to give it meaning. Most people accept that a bloody, annihilatory event began in 1788, and continued for decades after. But they don’t accept that the current inequality is simply a continuation of that, or that there is an obligation to see it that way. There is a moral obligation to care about the grievous disadvantage of people you share a continent with, and that is what many people respond to. They want things to be better. But many don’t accept there is anything to be reconciled.

The greater divide

By insisting on such, the Yes leadership and progressives in general have lost the lead. They have not only insisted on a specific formula for a new Australia as the only possible moral arrangement, they have asserted a more general morality about how politics should be done — the idea that it is good to be curious, inquisitive, to like new knowledge, other cultures etc. This is the knowledge class/progressive v mainstream division in its strongest form.

The knowledge class cannot see the habits and values that make their life — curiosity, willingness to change, reflection on received truths etc — as only one way of living, among others. “If you don’t know, it’s OK to vote No” is a perfectly legitimate conservative judgment to make. There’s no point attacking that general principle when you’re trying to explode its specific argument: by establishing that there’s nothing to fear from this particular initiative. The disdain for political caution — in which every sense of disquiet is constructed as irrational fear — is simply progressives using the Voice campaign to buttress their own preference for the new over the old, the future plan over the messy present etc, to the detriment of actually persuading people and winning the damn thing. 

From and to the suburbs

What’s to be done then? If the Yes campaign is really going “to the suburbs” then it better bloody mean it. It better admit that the level of knowledge, of First Nations peoples, of history, is very low, and accept that there is no moral requirement on someone to be interested in things they’re not interested in. Anyone motivated by the “make history” thing is surely already got; now it’s just scaring people off. 

The full pivot to the ’burbs means abandoning all that history stuff altogether, and going almost wholly with the instrumental case for the Voice: that the assembly will help find better solutions to the problems experienced by First Nations peoples in health, housing, education etc. Galling as it might be to many, an exclusive focus on the minimal, advisory, supplicant and mildly ameliorative role of the Voice may convince enough undecideds and waverers that it is both practical and no threat, and to give it a go. That may be a most unmacropusian step backwards,  but it is also a reculer pour mieux sauter. 

Roo the day

There is something very endearingly stupid about the Albo government launching the campaign for this audacious progressive Australian initiative from the middle of one of the most failed audacious progressive initiatives of modern times, a few years after the national Australian company it was built around pulled out. But really there’s no time for this klutz act anymore.

Make the case for a Voice in such a way that people can vote for something to improve First Nations peoples’ lives, without feeling they have to put their own in question. If that seems to be rewarding complacency, small-mindedness and limited conceptions of the nation by pandering to such, get over it. The Yes case needs to decide whether it is trying to win people’s vote or change who they are. The whole campaign needs to turn on its central core to kick back hard and yes, yes, it’s those damn kangaroos again…

Is the Yes campaign botching things? Do you have much hope that the Voice will be voted up? Let us know your thoughts by writing to letters@crikey.com.au. Please include your full name to be considered for publication. We reserve the right to edit for length and clarity.