‘Shut up! We’re trying to get you a Voice!’

The joke often celebrated as the single funniest line of satire was written by novelist and screenwriter Terry Southern, and it occurs in the 1964 film Dr Strangelove when a Soviet ambassador and a US general come to blows, only to be reproached: “Gentlemen! You can’t fight in here! This is the war room!” So simple, so direct it almost comes apart. But it gets a laugh every time. It hasn’t been beaten yet. 

That is, until the Voice referendum started, and became a testing ground to see just how many Indigenous people can be told to “shut up” by white people, because “otherwise you’ll never get a Voice!” This has become grimly hilarious now as the number steadily rises of visible First Nations leaders and everyday folk raising their, gosh, voices, to say they’re against this Voice thing, or not sure what it is, or think it is being done in the wrong way, at the wrong time, or…

I mean, how many do you need for this ridiculous claim — that voting or advocating No or “not Yes” is racist — to be demolished entirely? How can such a thing be taken seriously, especially when it comes from people who used to present themselves as fearless empiricists not bound by any ideology, blah blah blah? How many dissenting Aboriginal voices do you need to tell you there’s a non-racist argument for No?

The initial high-profile figures — Lidia Thorpe, Jacinta Nampijinpa Price, Nyunggai Warren Mundine, all coming from different angles — were soon joined by others who were No, such as Anthony Dillon, and either “No-ish” or highly critical of the assumptions of it, such as Gary Foley, Michael Mansell and Celeste Liddle (the latter two in the current Voice issue of Arena). Surely so many differing opinions cannot be dismissed as “cut-off intellectuals” or nastier attacks?

The Indigenous No voices are beginning to crowd out the actual Yes voices, and it’s not News Corpse doing that. It’s the sheer volume of dissent to a proposal and a plan — demanding the minimum possible political change so that the right would support it, and excluding from the start those likely to dissent from it — that’s doing it. The Voice has come apart on the Indigenous side, and whites have rushed in to fill the void.

In so doing, the high-profile Yes case, or the white side of it, has become a festival of political narcissism — and at the same time as a positive development: the rise of the Yes volunteer army. That tension was visible over the weekend as the Yes rallies surged across the country in a genuine outpouring of affirming energy, while Yes thought leaders upped the narcissism and fundamental misrecognition by the Yes case of the wavering or sceptical people whose votes they need. 

There was so much of this. It was everywhere, and it builds and feeds off itself. It started with the new Yes campaign ad, with a young First Nations boy hoping he’ll get to a school good enough to let him have a life. People billed and cooed about its beautiful and inspiring nature. It was beautiful and inspiring, and it may well move a few waverers who see it to come down on the Yes side. 

But within its design and appeal is a circular logic: it targets people on their capacity to feel empathy for, and join, the First Nations cause, and to feel that the narrative of reconciliation — of an equality of opportunity arising — is meaningful and involving. Well, of all those who feel that, the vast majority are in the Yes camp already. 

The waverers, undecideds and “soft Nos” the Yes vote needs are those who come to this issue with no narrative of Black and white at all, with indifference to the narrative, or with mild disdain for First Nations peoples but sufficient sympathy for them as human beings to be persuaded to vote for something that may address their plight. 

The mild disdain is in many cases unformulated. It is a sense that there was dispossession and violence, that the IPA/Tony Abbott/Jacinta Nampijinpa Price “better off” test — “without the First Fleet, how could Indigenous people stream old episodes of Friends, etc?’ — is silly. But it is also an irritation that First Nations peoples can’t get their act together after half a century of positive action, that so much time, energy and (inaccurately) money are devoted to the issue.

That is unfair for all sorts of reasons, but there it is. On the vast plains of terracotta and concrete that spread for thousands of square kilometres around the Australian civilisation we have built, one suspects that most non-Indigenous people have never knowingly met a First Nations person, save through official stuff like Welcomes to Country or school visits for talks. Torres Strait Islander peoples are all but invisible; Aboriginal peoples remain thought of as desert communities — in a terrible state, but outside the stream of Australian life.  

None of this sense-of-destiny stuff will be persuasive — neither Linda Burney’s renewed call to “make history”, nor Geoffrey Robertson’s worry that we may lose our access to global levers of power, Julianne Schultz chiding us for not knowing the constitution by heart, or Barry Jones’s caution that this may be our Brexit moment will persuade sufficient people that they must vote Yes. 

They see, if they are following the news at all, that First Nations peoples are divided about the Voice. How then, if it is so fractured, can it be a call to make history? They see a bizarre turnabout, where Yes camp leaders claim their mission is one of unity against the No camp’s division when the Yes camp’s cause is to institute a (legitimate) division of two types of Australians into the depth of the constitution.

That latter move — which re-institutes official legal First Nations status, and will have the potential to generate lawsuits about who is and isn’t eligible to vote for or help select Voice delegates — is only a move to a higher unity, if you already accept the reconciliatory notion that we have to pass through difference to a higher unity. The Yes case leaders are so deep into that, they can’t see how cockeyed that logic appears to many people. 

The Yes leaders haven’t been able to kick the habit of presenting the No case not as an active opponent to be bested*, but as resistant sludge to be waded through or drained away. The arrogance is overweening, and it distorts thinking. Media Watch’s coverage of the No campaign on TikTok — which is faster and more compelling than anything Yes has done — was a case in point. 

Thus, one ad juxtaposes Noel Pearson talking about the Voice leading to Treaty, with Anthony Albanese waffling and avoiding on RN Breakfast when asked about it. This was presented as duplicity by the No case, and the right. Yet it is double duplicity by the Yes case to argue this. Pearson has been linking the Voice to Treaty for years. The Voice was devised for Treaty purposes — so as, in Pearson’s phrase, there would be another constituted party for the government to “treat” with. Albo was simply lying by omission by ducking that, got caught doing it, and it was slapped into an ad. 

Lying that that is lying, which the Yes case and its allies are doing, is about as counterproductive a move as it gets. Perhaps it all came together when an Aboriginal woman stood up before Senator Price’s NPC speech to state that she too was a No, and did not feel represented. She could have been given a few minutes to say something, maybe asked a couple of questions. Instead she was shunted off. “You can’t make verbal statements which count as publishing here! This is the Press Club!”

There is still time, I think, for the Yes leadership and the burgeoning Yes army to realise that they are trying to do two separate things. They want a Yes vote that comes from an acceptance of the narrative of dispossession and reconciliation, that an Edenic society was destroyed by the arrival of carceral settler colonialism. But they don’t need people to believe that for a Yes vote to count. They just need to get to Yes. Swear to God, slap together a quick and dirty TikTok ad saying this in its entirety: 

A Yes vote in the October 14 referendum will set up a First Nations advisory group to help Parliament improve the lives of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. They’ll do all the advising. Vote Yes and you won’t have to hear or think much about most of this stuff ever again.

That would do the trick. (Here’s the soundtrack.) Do you think the 90% vote in 1967 was all liberal, colour-blind anti-racists? In 1967? In Australia? No, it was many, many convinced racialists and supremacists voting simply to hand the problem over to the federal government, with some increased powers to get something done. 

Maybe that ad would be a good idea, maybe a bad one. But if it seems to you, as a Yes proponent, a shocking or impertinent or denigrating one, you’re still not thinking about winning this vote. You’re thinking of changing the culture of large sections of non-Indigenous Australia, which is a rather taller order — and why I guess, the cry has gone up against so many people: “Shut up! We’re trying to get you a Voice!” 

*Yes, grammatically that should be “bettered”. Now go correct apostrophes on menus.