The Voice: The End of Liberal Anti-Racism in Australia
The Voice: The End of Liberal Anti-Racism in Australia
The liberal project of "Reconciliation" is dead. Who killed it, how they did it, and what should be next.
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When British colonisation commenced in 1788, Australia was foundationally committed to the genocide, dispossession and oppression of some 300,000 to 1,000,000 Indigenous people already living here. The decision by colonists to legally designate the continent ‘terra nullius’ – empty land – is the most pivotal wellspring of all laws, policies and actions of the colonies which followed and the capitalist state emerging from them.
This unilateral decision was based on the judgement that Europeans were so civilisationally and genetically superior to the Indigenous people that they need not even be deemed human. Land can’t be stolen if “nobody” is there “owning” it. That this project is inherently racist is self-evident, and this racism was encoded in the Constitution at federation in 1901: Indigenous people were not counted as citizens. Among consciously political people, no one denies this except those most committed to the maintenance and extension of the immense system of racial subjugation.
To crudely summarise history, this system includes hundreds of massacres, the intentional introduction and spreading of colonial diseases, slavery, the Stolen Generations and forced Christianisation. The Stolen Generations represent up to one in three Indigenous children being forcibly removed from Indigenous communities from 1905 into the 1970s by the Australian state and church.
In 2023, Australians are voting in a referendum which proposes to amend its colonial Constitution to “recognise” Indigenous people and establish the Indigenous Voice to Parliament. The Voice would be an advisory body of Indigenous members who could issue advice regarding Indigenous affairs to the federal parliament. If established, this body would have no effective power to exercise control over Indigenous affairs. All such discretion would remain with the Australian state.
Initially, support for the proposal, backed by the in-government Australian Labor Party and key blocs of big capital including mining, was above 60%. At the time of writing, nothing short of a miracle and unprecedented polling error could see the Yes vote claim victory, sitting at a paltry 38% support – effectively half what it once was in some polls. Focaldata polling now projects that only 22 of the 151 federal electorates will return a majority vote of Yes. This is not a simple defeat: it is a vicious repudiation with scant comparison.
This is alarming for many reasons, but the two principal causes for dismay are the success of the hard-right Racist No campaign headed by Liberal Party leader Peter Dutton and the further delay defeat imposes on even the simulation of redressing Indigenous oppression. It was not a fait accompli for such a conservative, inoffensive and mostly symbolic proposal to be defeated, as earlier support shows.
The vast majority of well-meaning political Australians will be left totally demoralised, confused and likely to view the defeat as evidence that the public is unsalvageable in its anti-Indigenous racism. Racism is indeed an important component of the No vote, and while despair is understandable, concluding that it is the dominant factor would be wrong.
The central reason for the Voice’s failure that all subsequent factors flow from is its very nature: the proposal is a liberal anti-racist wet dream. It aims only to “recognise” that Indigenous people exist and that they need a “voice” to advocate for advancement of their interests, given the appalling consequences of racist oppression.
It is a remarkable marker of the impotence of the liberal ideology that, this far into the project, its lauded guarantee of “rights and equality before the law” is not yet meaningfully extended to colonised people. As many Indigenous activists have pointed out, the Voice provides First Nations people no sovereignty over land or their own affairs, nor any “rights” to protect them from ongoing brutal racist oppression.
In fact, the Voice was proposed and prosecuted by the chief administrators of this oppression, giving rise to valid scepticism around its efficacy and the sincerity of those behind it. Liberalism is no stranger to making a mockery of itself, but even ardent critics should reserve the right to be shocked by its gall.
In the year of the referendum alone, the Queensland Labor government suspended its Human Rights Act not once but twice, solely to ensure that greater numbers of Indigenous children could be incarcerated and tortured in adult prisons where abuse of detainees is the rule.
The Western Australian Labor government caved without resistance to a racist campaign of farmers, mining companies, pastoralists and culture warriors, giving them a green light to desecrate Indigenous land and the environment by repealing its Aboriginal Cultural Heritage Act. Federal Labor and their Northern Territory counterparts spent the lead-up to the Voice campaign reimposing paternalistic alcohol bans, acquiescing to yet another Dutton-led law and order moral panic.
For their part, federal Labor also reneged on an election promise to do away with the similarly paternalistic policy of cashless income management. And Daniel Andrews, credibly seen as the most progressive of any Labor leader, departs state politics having presided over record rates of Indigenous incarceration, refusal to raise the age of criminal responsibility and cover ups of Aboriginal deaths in custody.
Always opposing these racist crimes are the “voices” of countless leading Indigenous advocates, experts and their allies. Only when the Voice campaign was already lost and desperate did anyone affiliated with Yes23 utter the word ‘racist’ or highlight the obscene disadvantage that their policies directly create.
From the very start, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and prominent conservative Indigenous architects of the Voice pursued a conciliatory strategy. Rather than confront the self-implicating source of Indigenous disadvantage and combating the racist canards and baiting of the far-right, proponents of the Voice sought to placate reactionaries and court their votes. Predictably, this emboldened the highly coordinated Racist No campaign, knowing they would experience no pushback from Yes23.
Faced with opposing the limpest political campaign in living memory, a cunning Dutton steered the Racist No campaign toward successfully embedding three key messages into media coverage:
The Voice would divide Australia by race
Indigenous Australians don’t want or need the Voice
There is no detail on what the Voice will look like, thus it poses extreme risks
The first is easy enough to achieve – just keep saying it, they keep printing it, people start thinking it. The second was the masterstroke, enacted via empowering far-right Indigenous political figures Warren Mundine and Jacinta Price in a deft deployment of right-wing identity politics.
Relying on the help of racists like Tony Abbott and black faces willing to spout the most vile and longstanding white supremacist arguments, Dutton was able to mostly confine himself to point 3 (though he dipped into all three) before disappearing for many weeks ahead of the vote. In a campaign-before-the-campaign, Dutton’s concern trolling dominated the slavish media cycle for months as Albanese and Voice architects appeared panicked, unclear and disgruntled, allowing fear and doubt to be sewn. It stuck, and Yes23 had to spend virtually all of the official campaign “educating” voters on their proposal.
This education around the Voice largely sucked up the oxygen that should have been spent impressing the severity of Indigenous disadvantage and the urgency to address this. At the same time, endless tutoring on the nature, structure and such of the Voice worked to depress public support, as it made salient the argument from both left-wing Indigenous activists and the opportunistic Racist No that the Voice would be powerless and practically ineffectual. With Yes23 officials opting for only one mass mobilisation in each major city during the campaign, there was never any chance for the kind of critical mass of public activity to develop that would be required to carry a referendum.
This strategic review could go on because the mistakes were copious, but the more important question is how this catastrophic failure of Labor and Yes23 changes the politics around Indigenous issues in Australia going forward.
The headline consequence is that liberal anti-racism has failed to move the needle toward a modicum of justice. Indeed, it has set the Indigenous movement back monumentally. As observed by Rachel Withers, the triumph of Racist No has reintegrated eugenic racism into “legitimate” political discourse:
“Over the weekend, we got a full whiff of what a “No” vote might enable. Abbott and fellow former prime minister John Howard declared to The Australian that the Northern Territory was a “failed state”, suggesting nothing had improved since the 2007 intervention (almost as if that was a terrible idea), while controversial anti-Voice advocate Gary Johns, who has made deeply racist remarks about Indigenous Australians, including that they should be blood-tested, said that he would turn his “No” outlet into a charity after the referendum, with the aim of countering the dominance of “elites” in Aboriginal affairs.”
Non-coincidentally, this is a reversion to the status quo of the profoundly racist climate of the Howard and Abbott years. The runaway trainwreck of the Voice referendum has managed to squander a historically high degree of consciousness around racism and general soft anti-racism, brought about by decades of Indigenous activism (currently best embodied by Invasion Day rallies, the largest and most radical annualised protest in the country) and the Black Lives Matter 2020 movement.
As a result, the percentage of Australians who viewed racism as a very big or fairly big problem in the country spiked from 40% to 60%. This terrain partially explains why Dutton’s personal approval was savaged by 11%, hitting an all-time low of minus 28% right after making himself the face of Racist No.
While the campaign has boosted the confidence of racists to espouse their filth and heightened conspiracy and reaction, it is not likely that popular anti-racist sentiment has been totally liquidated. More likely is that the solid third of the country that are Liberal Party voters and other Rightists, implacable racists as they are, combined with those unconvinced of the Voice’s potential efficacy but who may abstractly support Indigenous advancement, explains the majority of No support. These voters are mostly infected by a mix of the fearmongering lies pushed by Racist No and are registering a generic dissatisfaction with the government for its refusal to act on the cost of living crisis.
Men, especially older men, often more susceptible to grievance and bigotry, are the strongest demographic for No, while young women are the Voice’s core base, and Greens voters overwhelmingly support Yes. It’s an imperfect measure, but all analysis on who remains “undecided” points to middle-aged female Labor voters sympathetic to Indigenous people, but who aren’t convinced the Voice is the right policy for the job.
After all, why would people trust a government perpetrating a litany of crimes against Indigenous people, refusing to implement recommendations of the decades-old Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody and Bringing Them Home Report?
Australia is isolated worldwide for its unwillingness to adopt the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. Senator Lidia Thorpe has made these points and more persuasively. And this is the same unpopular government simultaneously stonewalling an increasingly precarious working class.
Given the scale of the Voice’s defeat and Albanese’s hastiness to move on, one can expect a total abandonment of Indigenous issues for years to come without some kind of major spark. Importantly, this ghastly backsliding – even burial – comes as a number of key conditions are worsening for Indigenous people.
We can expect this regressive trend to continue unabated indefinitely, so long as Indigenous people are deprived of control over their own affairs. Placing the Voice’s failure within the global context of an increasing inability of liberal elements of the ruling class to pursue their agenda in any democratic fashion, this is the effective conclusion of liberal anti-racism in Australia, as it has been known until this point.
Don’t take my word for it, this is the view of arguably the principal architect of the strategy epitomised by the Voice, Noel Pearson:
“Frankly, the voice is a proposal so pathetically understated that I’m amazed most Indigenous people are settling for it. After all, I helped design it as something so modest that no reasonable non-Indigenous Australian could reject it. More fool me.”
If liberal anti-racism in Australia has met its end, the only remaining question is what possibilities there are to build a resilient, effective and ambitious anti-racist movement from the current aborted tragedy. This begins with the grassroots Indigenous left, who have built Invasion Day into a beautiful repudiation – on their part and that of their anti-racist, predominantly young supporters – of the celebration of the colonial nationalism “Australia Day” symbolises.
Their constant struggle has made issues like Blak Deaths in Custody and routine police brutality far more likely to be covered, and covered sympathetically, by the mainstream media. More popular mobilisations along the lines conducted by these activists is an essential baseline component of any progress to come. That makes it a duty for any anti-racists to build and attend rallies not as a one-off yearly excision of shame but a consistent fightback. Demands for Treaty, land rights and an immediate relinquishing of stifling top-down control of Indigenous communities and affairs are central to that fight.
As part of this, all illusions in reformist liberal political forces like the Labor Party must be abandoned, lest any renewed energy for Indigenous liberation be captured, betrayed and disfigured yet again. As capitalism’s climate catastrophe envelops the whole of society and the environment, there simply is no more time to rely on snakes and failures to advance just causes that are inextricably entwined. A precondition for meaningful success of any progressive movement will be organisational and political independence of the movement from its enemies and compradors.
Clearly though, these movements have only so much momentum, ability to extract concessions or effective power without a union movement. This is not the place to recount history, but the Australian workers movement has been systematically conservatised and dismantled across decades, once again at the hands of the yellow dog Labor Party. Without a regrowth of the kinds of working class anti-racism, support for Indigenous rights and environmentalism best employed by the former Builders Labourers Federation, each component of the struggle for justice will remain in their fettered states.
But conditions are vastly different from the BLF’s heyday of working class militancy. I don’t have all the answers, but I am certain that the kind of fighting coalition that can help propel Indigenous activism to transformative achievements must be built on the existing base: the young women who are the most progressive bloc in society. Today, these women live in economic precarity and are constantly targeted by sexist vitriol, given the erosion of the feminist movement once buoyed by working womens struggles. People should not be deceived by glossy marketing strategies: being an anti-sexist of any level of sophistication is not mainstream.
Tellingly, leading Yes campaigners have produced sexist material scapegoating this demographic for the confusion around the Voice (rather than confronting the Right directly). This material relies on right-wing propaganda around how supposedly airheaded and fake “progressive” artistic, urban women are – a total inversion of the reality of education attainment and opinion polling.
Yet, this very sexist crux is precisely the reason that said material outperformed official Yes23 videos by orders of magnitude. That Yes campaigners would diminish the intellectual and political confidence of young women is but the self-inflicted nail in their coffin of arrogance. Their only hope of success was to organise and motivate this fundamental base of support, as the campaign for marriage equality showed.
In contrast, fascinating polling on the Voice shows that young people who speak a language other than English at home have been the most engaged by the Yes23 campaign. What this evidences is twofold. First, whites are by far the most concentrated demographic of racists in the country which, while hardly surprising, can only be shifted through struggle, as BLM 2020 demonstrated.
Second and most crucially, there is in fact a material basis for a genuine anti-racist movement based on solidarity between Indigenous people and non-Indigenous racialised people in Australia. While abstract now, this points to the possibility of a sustained anti-racist pole with real roots in working class migrant communities.
In a curious convergence of these axes, young women, many of whom are racialised, have organised a number of strikes against dodgy, exploitative Mint My Desk bosses in Brisbane this year. At the same time, migrant women have been core to brave and successful strikes against Ingham’s and Hussey. This is an emergence in its infancy, dispersed geographically, with zero institutional backing and mostly compelled by the need to defend against horrific conditions and real wage collapses. But as in every Invasion Day and Stop Blak Deaths in Custody rally, the glimmers of hope for a future where racism is beaten back, not triumphant, are nestled within.
Note: This piece was initially published on Wednesday October 11, 2023. On the day of the Voice referendum vote just three days later, chief architect of the Voice, Marcia Langton, has published an incredible essay affirming what is effectively the exact line of argument made here.
While her honesty and analysis can be commended, that head figures behind the Voice could only offer such clarified, critical words now, in the form of a eulogy, is a betrayal that must never be forgiven. Peter Dutton and the forces of extreme “race-hate”, to use Langton’s own words, have been gifted a triumph at the expense of the people whose lives are degraded by oppressive policies, and climates of persecution.
Notably, Langton’s intellectually sharp, morally authoritative essay articulates no future potential for correction. One recalls what Russian Revolutionary Leon Trotsky wrote of similarly compromised social and political forces, in decisive times requiring clear political strategy and action:
“The frightened petty-bourgeois confronted by great events sees nothing but dangers and obstacles. His sole recourse is the pathos of alarm.”
Let us, the opponents of reaction, the strivers for a world free of racism and all other oppressions, be pellucid that merely picking up the pieces of a liberal-reformist “reconciliatory” programme will lead to yet more defeats and demoralisation.
Now more than ever, in a world increasingly enveloped by explicit racial vilification and violence, an entirely different, bottom-up anti-racist counteroffensive is desperately necessary. Lest humanity fail to recover its soul in time to prevent cataclysm.