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Despite an 80,000-strong volunteer army, the endorsements of all the major sports codes, multi-million-dollar corporate funding, celebrity spruikers, months of favourable media coverage and Their ABC being even more unbalanced than is its norm, the Voice went to the people and was thrashed. And thrashed decisively.

Especially when you realise that every electorate in South Australia and the Northern Territory — which were states that were considered to be the biggest Yes supporters — voted No. In Alice Springs, every booth voted No. In fact, there was not a single electorate in the whole country which voted Yes that was outside a major city.

Even in the electorate of Indigenous affairs minister Linda Burney, more than 56% of voters wrote ‘No’. And if we break down the numbers by voting booths, Adam Bandt’s seat had the highest Yes vote of 93%.

All of these numbers have a stark similarity with the Republic Referendum in 1999. This is because the electorates which previously voted Yes for Australia to become a Republic, also voted on average 57% in favour of The Voice.

Pointing Fingers

Spare a thought for Australia’s First XI, who even before the referendum result, had all been offered counselling. And they’re not the only ones in mourning. Sydney’s mayor, Clover Moore, has found the decision is so “devastating and tragic” that she has ordered the flag over the Town Hall to be flown at half-mast. Somewhat predictably — having absorbed the Yes camp’s latest talking points — Ms Moore joined the chorus of the disappointed and blamed “ugly, Trumpian tactics” and “harmful misinformation”.

Such responses are one of the reasons why the Voice ultimately failed. The activists, their political allies and the mainstream media have not only turned a deaf ear to the needs of the most vulnerable, they have consistently sought to project the blame for their failure onto everyone else.

While being interviewed by the ABC on referendum night, for example, Labor Senator Milandirri McCarthy argued the Voice failed because of No campaign “misinformation”. When asked what she had in mind,  she cited the story of a voter who thought he was voting about fracking, not a Voice to Parliament. What the Senator failed to mention — a telling omission! — was that it was a Yes Campaign pamphlet, produced by GetUp, which quoted the unnamed and perhaps notional Aborigine as believing the Voice had something to do with gas extraction.

Other Yes campaigners, like the frontman for the referendum working group Thomas Mayo, railed against the No side’s “disgusting and dishonest” campaign of “lies”. Similarly, Voice architect and academic Marcia Langton (timestamp 3:10:50) blamed the Australian public, saying,

“It will be at least two generations before Australians are capable of putting their colonial hatreds behind them and acknowledging that we exist.”

Then there was Sydney City councillor and ABC panellist Yvonne Weldon, who blamed the outcome on ignorance, asserting rather than arguing that the multicultural voters of Western Sydney, where Yes was roundly rejected, were simple souls lacking the education to share her point of view.

Divisive

When Warren Mundine was interviewed by ABC reporter and host of Q&A Patricia Karvelas, she asked him (time stamp 3:21:50) why the No campaign spread the “lie” that the Voice would divide the nation when race provisions are already in the Constitution. But as Mundine pointed out, Voice architects designed their proposal specifically for those of Aboriginal descent and thus, by definition and in essence, it was all about race. Even the silver-tongued Noel Pearson twisted himself in rhetorical knots trying to untangle that one.

The insinuation that only the ‘No’ side was guilty of producing misinformation was an argument being made months before the referendum. For example, The Guardian earlier this year accused Peter Dutton of misleading voters by calling the proposal a voice not for Aborigines, but for Canberra’s elite. Dutton, as the results show, was over the target, as the ACT was the one and only jurisdiction on the entire continent in overwhelming favour of Yes.

According to the pollsters, the two biggest reasons why Australians voted no were a lack of detail and the belief the Voice would embed a formal racial divide in Australia’s foundational document. As ABC analysts pointed out on the night, other factors included wealth and age. (timestamp 2:50:00)

The three highest-income seats are Wentworth, Warringah and Mitchell, where the Yes vote was 64%, 62% and 62% respectively. Support for Yes in the lowest household incomes seats — Hinkler, Lyon and Grey — came in at 21%, 21% and 27%. Those electorates with the heaviest representations of people over 60 — Lyon, Gilmore and Hinkler — backed Yes only to the extent of 29%, 42%, and 20%.

Perhaps to be expected, electorates which voted Yes for a republic in 1999 were also Yes strongholds. On a deeper level, though, the electoral map highlights that there was scarcely an electorate outside a major city that voted yes. Indeed, the people furthest from the people the Voice was supposed to help, marginalised and remote Aboriginal communities, were the most likely to vote Yes. Once again, consider the Canberra example.

All of this shows that the Yes campaign cannot blame “misinformation” for their loss. There was no draft legislation to lay out what a Voice would look like, what it could and couldn’t do, and whether its members would be elected or selected. Rightly, Australians’ good sense raised multiple worries as the Yes campaign proceeded. Older electorates could see the dangers of an expanded bureaucracy; rural areas were sceptical of practical improvements to social outcomes in their communities.

The real danger — which the Yes camp’s sour losers are now promoting — is the slander that white people’s alleged “colonial hatred” remains a malevolent force shaping, limiting and afflicting indigenous lives. This language only stokes division where there is none and is itself an example of reverse race-baiting.

As Jacinta Price and Peter Dutton commented as referendum votes were tallied and the result became almost immediately clear, the real and pressing need is for a royal commission into Aboriginal child sexual abuse and a root-and-branch federal audit of funding to aboriginal programs and bodies. In the extremely unlikely event that the Albanese government were to accept it, this would be a unifying post-referendum first step.

As the Yes blames all but themselves for the loss, one can completely understand Warren Mundine’s impassioned plea for the media elites to wake up to themselves. As he passionately put it, journalists need to drop “the nonsense you people carry on with” and “wake up to themselves”.

Wouldn’t that be nice, and a change in public discourse we could all get behind?

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Image: Wikimedia Commons