After the referendum, shaming won’t work if most think of Indigenous peoples as remote and ‘other’

It’s safe to say the right was never going to take a week’s vow of silence after the referendum loss. It was out of the gate, crowing about a culture war win, calling for another commission into child sexual abuse in Indigenous communities, and an audit of spending. It was getting its culture war on.

Well, much good may it do it — which is none at all. If the right really thinks it can build a US-style culture war on this result, it is even stupider than a bunch of people who’ve lost power in every state except the comedy one, despite having News Corpse backing.

The great truth of the No result was not some rally against the PC tide; it was simply an extension of widespread indifference to its claims from either side.

Sure there were some people who voted No because they were sick to the back teeth of talk of colonialism, genocide and dispossession, of the notion of Indigenous culture as an authorised one replacing Anglo culture etc. But they were in the minority, as was shown by the virtual absence of a grassroots No campaign.

No-one took this up as a cause to reaffirm an argument for Anglo or European culture and arrival. They simply, by and large, believed the case had not been made for a constitutionally embedded special assembly, based on widely varying degrees of knowledge of the actual proposal. 

They came out, voted, ensured that it would not happen, and returned to their lives. They did it with most of the polling booths unstaffed by No campaigners, while others were crowded with Yes volunteers handing out a form showing you how to answer one question with a Yes. 

Most aren’t hard-hearted to the deprivation of Indigenous communities in the north, but most in the south and east view it as about as connected to them as a famine in Africa. The Coalition is looking at Labor’s slight dip in Newspoll numbers, and PM Anthony Albanese’s larger dip in approval rating, and judging, not unreasonably, that it came from Albanese’s attachment to the Voice cause.

But if they believe they can benefit from maintaining the white rage, they will fall into the same trap. For all progressives frothing at the mouth over Opposition Leader Peter Dutton, his presentation during the referendum unquestionably assisted him in mainstreaming his image from Queensland junkyard attack dog. 

His arguments may not have been pretty forthright, but they were presented in a fairly calm and authoritative way. It was Albanese who looked flustered and irritable throughout, and the leaders of the Yes case were on a gonzo ride, calling their critics bedwetters and by sloppy phrasing allowing it to be said that they viewed No voters as racist.

But if Dutton and the Coalition listen to their culture war crazies now they’ll lose every advantage they gained. Labor will presumably, eventually, swing round to thinking about the 30% or so of Australians whose lives are being very, very squeezed at the moment — who are feeling they can’t really live much at all, with nowhere to live, and inflation eating away at the conditions of their existence.

But does Labor, trapped in both the referendum disaster and now the moral squalor of Israelolatry in Gaza, have the ability to pivot back to a politics of the mainstream?  There’s no vision that one can see.

Whatever emerges will presumably have very little focus on Indigenous matters. Truth-telling and Treaty — that’s going to be over, at least as a federal process, before it really got started. No-one in Labor is going to want to know. And, it needs reminding, Labor could end the incarceration regime in both states and territories tomorrow if it wanted to. It doesn’t want to, many non-Indigenous people don’t want it to end as firm “law and orderistas”, and there is no reason to suppose a Voice would have been more likely to make them do so.   

Indeed, the paradox of this country at the moment is that Indigenous peoples are quite right to say they are largely invisible as a people — as the 800,000 or so living suburban or regional urban lives with varying degrees of community close connection. 

But they are highly visible as remote area communities in the north, and in their most traditional presentation, in the heights of culture. It is in the latter area that the paradox of race and class politics in Australia lies. 

The plain fact is, many people feel that Indigenous culture — the welcomes, the ceremonies, the names — is the master’s discourse now, the adopted vehicle of the cultural elite, to enforce their values on  the general population. 

The cultural elite have made it easy for many people to feel irritated and hostile to the enforcement of such culture. The culture of Anglo society — what was Australian culture for 130 years or so — has been dissolved, first by successive waves of mass culture Americanisation, and then the discrediting of any attachment to it whatsoever, because it was founded in dispossession and violence. 

The implicit feeling is that the cultural elite have adopted Indigenous culture as part of their own culture war, to thoroughly and finally scatter and discredit what remains of a mainstream Anglo culture. The process is killing what casual interest many might have had in Indigenous culture, and setting up a “take it or leave it” process on the whole  package. 

Much of this has started to work in reverse. The practice of Indigenous peoples, and the media featuring them, putting their several mob names after their names started as a legitimate reassertion of the complexities of Indigenous cultures. Now it’s starting to seem aristocratic and elitist, like we’re dealing with a bunch of Hapsburgs, and the rest of us are null sets.  

The same is true of the “oldest living culture” stuff. Once again, one understands that it was a reassertion of heritage against the idea that Indigenous peoples were just a bunch of folks waiting for the boats to arrive. But continued on, it’s turned cultural history into a weird competition.  

It works against the notion of universal acceptance — that everyone has a culture, a framework of meanings, through which they express universal passions of love, courage, solidarity, wonder etc — that is necessary for interest and exchange between particular differences of cultures. Maori culture is 800 years old, distinctly different from the Oceanic cultures that its original arrivals must have had. It is no less rich for that. 

No-one can blame Indigenous people for spruiking their own culture. The motives and consequences of progressives doing it are less admirable. Jaded magazine editors do it for product branding; knowledge class people do it to assuage the meaninglessness that arises from existing in a post-cultural milieu that has no bounds or frames. It has a therapeutic purpose, cultural Lexapro.

It’s in that context that the Yes campaign’s post-silent week comment on the referendum falls so flat. It wants the same drama, the same sense of contest that the cultural war right does. The repeated notion that we have refused a modest Indigenous request, in a shameful process, does not fly, because we were simply not presented with an Indigenous united front of sufficient comprehensiveness throughout the campaign.

This isn’t Fretilin getting the vote of just about every East Timorese citizen on independence. It isn’t the near-total vote for the ANC and Nelson Mandela among non-Zulu black South Africans. Indigenous opposition to the Voice wasn’t just carpetbaggers, though there were one or two of those. It was multiple, from people with community support and cogent arguments. 

If they were a minority within the Indigenous community, what of it? Surely a request constructed as from one people to another must be relatively totalisted, to raise to the level of people undivided, rather than party? This is what prioritising Teaty might have done. But the Voice champions were insistent that Voice must be first. Theirs is the spoils.

Australian Anglo culture was once distinct, particular, involved, rich in unique language and image, from slang to local products. It took barely 50 years in the 19th century for the base of it to form. It was viable even into the 1970s, despite the tide of Americanisation. Now it no longer exists as anything other than a few distinct objects. Its framework, that people once lived inside, is gone.

Now one can damn that as settler culture, but it’s worth understanding that wherever a cultural vacuum occurs, a cultural envy appears. If what is presented relentlessly to people is another culture, valorised against that, by an elite who appear to share no common culture at all — then people will define themselves against the offered and valorised culture, as a way of creating some sort of negated meaning.

Fortunately, there seems no sign that this will be a passionate cause among Australians, nothing like the obsessive revival of European anti-Semitism, or British Brexit mania. 

What Indigenous peoples do next is up to them, a process that may take some time to work out. One can only say that any strategy that works on the assumption that the non-Indigenous constitute an active “other party” to define one’s demand to, is in error. You can’t get recognition from someone who can’t even see you — or refuses to. 

Meanwhile the non-Indigenous media and commentariat might want to quit their own vow of silliness, of telling the majority of the country how shit they are, and how they have failed to live up to a projected imaginary standard, and start to investigate the particularity of politics, conditions and cultural lifeways on this continent, of the multiple peoples who live here now.