Welcome to the whitelash: how an aggrieved refusal to learn is driving the No campaign

This is the month when the politics of white grievance broke to the forefront of the No campaign against an Indigenous Voice to Parliament. It’s no longer (if it ever was) about the technicalities of the Voice. It’s not even about the shoddy politics of attempting to maim a still-popular government.

Suddenly, publicly, it’s all about the “whitelash”: the backlash by the largely British-descended settler class (aging, usually non-urban, often poorly educated) against the increasing recognition that Indigenous culture is a defining force in the way we think about Australia. 

As is often the case, outsiders see us better than we see ourselves, with The New York Times explaining “How an Aboriginal ‘Voice to Parliament’ Could Be Australia’s Brexit Moment”.

Call it our Brexit moment. Call it our Trump moment. It sure feels like those ugly twin pivots of 2016, when the right shed the subtlety of the dog-whistle to embrace the rhetoric of white grievance sitting at the heart of ethno-nationalist populism.

In government in Australia, power meant the Liberals found the dog-whistle good enough to appease the populist right while wedging Labor just enough to keep the party off balance (mixed with a few more openly racist moments like 2018’s African gangs panic). Early last year, an already electioneering Scott Morrison seemed more eager to nod to a tolerant multicultural electorate whose votes he needed than whip up the right’s traditional Australia Day moral panic. 

Now, whether it be Tony Abbott’s public discomfort with the grace offered by Welcome to Country, or the racist slurs dressed up as comedy about domestic violence at the CPAC conservative conference, or the sneering by Labor apostate Gary Johns about Indigenous people living in “stupor”, the campaign is now openly centring the tropes of the whitelash.

The complaints oscillate between the pitiful and the false, but they have been circulating across social media, fed by the wilder reaches of right-wing media, for years. 

They’ve been feeding the No case from the beginning: when Opposition Leader Peter Dutton exploited the media’s silly season mindset back in January with a demand for “details”, he winked at a classic white grievance, asking: “Will the government clarify the definition of Aboriginality to determine who can serve on the body?” 

Like so much of our culture wars, both the term and the politics that drive them come from the United States. For “whitelash”, there’s the latest book by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Wesley Lowery reporting the rise in white supremacist violence following Trump’s first election. It’s a backlash, says US philosopher George Yancy in his 2018 book, against challenges to “the transcendental norm” of whiteness.

They find fertile ground in Australia’s own transcendental settler norm that drove the history wars of the John Howard era, in an attempt to deny how deep studies were remaking our non-Indigenous understanding of First Nations peoples on the continent: archaeology pushing our realisation of human habitation back 60,000 years; anthropology revealing the wonders of First Nations’ cultures; modern history uncovering the strength of Indigenous resistance to invasion.

But this eye-opening remains unevenly distributed. When Howard dog-whistled with “black armband” history, he condemned his supporters and political successors to shut their minds to what the research was offering them.

Noel Pearson’s poignant “We are a much-unloved people” Boyer Lecture last year foresaw this moment, noting that “despite never having met any of us and knowing very little about us … Australians hold and express strong views about us, the great proportion of which is negative and unfriendly”.

It would not take much, he warned, “to mobilise antipathy against Aboriginal people and conjure the worst imaginings about us and the recognition we seek”. Looks like plenty of the No campaigners have taken Pearson’s words as advice.

Although it’s uncomfortable to acknowledge, it’s easy to see why the No campaigners reckon they can ride the whitelash to a referendum win. Populist grievance politics draws its strength from attacks, particularly against an enemy it can characterise as “institutional” or “elite” (it’s why this past week Dutton has adopted the parallel Trump policy of attacking the Australian Electoral Commission).

Time to take the populist right at their word, to recognise that they’re looking beyond this referendum. In part, they’re looking towards the next federal election. Moreover, they’re already planning how to leverage a No vote into a cultural restoration of the comfortable, wannabe-English settler world they grew up in over half a century ago.

Is the No campaign riding the whitelash? Let us know 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.