Australia says No

No surprises for those watching Australia’s referendum results on Saturday evening. Just as the polls said, the proposal to give constitutional recognition to Indigenous Australians was comprehensively defeated, with a No vote currently running at 60.6%. (Official results are here; the ABC depicts them geographically. Absentee and some postal and pre-poll votes are yet to be counted, but they will not change the picture significantly.)

“No” carried every state, with 55.0% in Victoria being the closest. The Northern Territory behaved, as usual, much like a state, voting 60.5% No; the Australian Capital Territory, also true to form, behaved nothing like one, giving Yes the majority with 60.8% – vindicating my prediction from a couple of weeks ago.

Many people, both Indigenous and non-Indigenous, are evidently appalled and distraught at the result. Among the many possible targets of blame, they could usefully direct some attention to the media, which misled their audience by suggesting that the result was still in some doubt up until polling day. If people had not been given false hopes about the outcome, they might not have taken it so badly.

Instead, journalists who didn’t understand polling combined with partisans who were hoping for a miracle and proprietors who just wanted to sell papers. None of them had any interest in admitting that the referendum was already lost three months ago.

But some of the reaction from Yes proponents is also of a piece with their conduct before the vote, with their determination to believe (and, more importantly, to say) that opposition to the Voice was driven by ignorance, disinformation and racism. Which might be comforting to their egos but is extraordinarily unhelpful in political terms, even if it’s true – indeed, perhaps especially if it’s true.

Although the stakes are very different, some of the reaction reminded me of the pro-Palestinian demonstrators of recent days: not the openly antisemitic ones, but those whose sin is insensitivity rather than malice. People who inhabit a certain progressive subculture take some propositions – that Aboriginal sovereignty was never ceded, that Israel is an apartheid state – to be truisms, whereas for the majority of their fellow-citizens they are still deeply controversial and provocative.

That doesn’t mean people’s attitudes can’t change; even on Indigenous issues, the shift in recent decades has been dramatic. But they need information and argument, not self-righteous slogans. And making big ambit claims (in this case constitutional amendment) is a risky strategy, especially when no-one seems to have given much thought to a fall-back position.

Contempt for democracy is rife on both sides, but it’s especially dangerous when it comes to constitutional change, because the constitution underpins all the other workings of the system. Those who are now complaining that the result shows there is something wrong with the amendment process, and that constitutional change should somehow be made easier, need to think seriously about whether they really want their opponents to be able to change the rules whenever they win a transient majority. All too many countries have come to grief in exactly that fashion.

There’s nothing wrong with a constitution being difficult to amend, and nothing wrong with the fact that that will usually require bipartisan support. Some now argue that if prime minister Anthony Albanese had withdrawn the referendum proposal when the opposition failed to come on board with it, he would have showed political cowardice. But would that really have been a worse outcome than the one he predictably got?

Some referendum proposals are sufficiently simple and well-understood that they could overcome an unscrupulous opposition (same-sex marriage might have been in that category, although the situation there was different in several ways). Others might at least be worth a try, in that no great risk is being taken – defeat, even if practically certain, would not be a national embarrassment (no-one has much emotional investment in, say, local government funding).

But the Voice referendum was manifestly not in either of these categories. And with most voters having little knowledge of or interest in either constitutional law or Indigenous issues, it’s no surprise that they followed along with whatever their friends were doing, or whatever the talking head that they mostly listen to said, or whatever their preferred political party recommended. And failing any of that they voted No, because if you don’t know, then of course that’s what you do.

Telling people, especially people who might well be struggling just to get by, that they should be interested in issues that they’re not, isn’t a winning strategy. (Getting rid of compulsory voting might help, but there seems little enthusiasm for that.) And people’s ability to disengage from constitutional politics is itself a tribute to what a safe and stable place Australia is: many countries do not offer that luxury.

There’s more to be said on the pattern of the result and what it says about how party politics is evolving, but it’s probably best to wait for that until counting is further advanced. In the meantime you can get a taste from Ben Raue’s excellent post on the subject yesterday. And of course there are other electoral results to catch up with – tomorrow we’ll look at New Zealand and/or Poland.