Australia’s constitution, which was completed in 1898, and is based on the U.S. Constitution, has been changed eight times—out of forty-five attempts. Amending it is difficult, but not nearly as difficult as amending the United States’. Australians’ attitude to their constitution is less reverential; Patrick Keane, a former justice in Australia’s highest court, called the document “a small brown bird,” something that was modest and mostly invisible. The mechanism by which it can be altered is so simple that it is taught in seventh grade: if a bill to change the constitution is passed by both houses of Parliament, it advances to a nationwide referendum. Voting in constitutional referendums is compulsory (as it is in all Australian elections), and the population is relatively accustomed to national conversations of this scope. Nearly twenty referendums have been presented in the past fifty years; in 1999, Australia voted on whether to remove the Queen as head of state (which lost), and, in 2017, it held a non-compulsory national survey on same-sex marriage (which won in a landslide, leading to legalization).
The path to the latest question—whether to recognize Indigenous people in the constitution and give them a voice to parliament—which went to the people and lost, on Saturday, started more than half a decade ago, near the foot of Uluru, the enormous red-rock formation that stands at the center of the country. The site is sacred to Australia’s Aboriginal people, who have lived on the continent for at least fifty thousand years, but have been dispossessed and discriminated against since European colonization began, in the eighteenth century. That history has left lasting inequalities; Indigenous Australians continue to experience higher rates of incarceration and poverty and a lower life expectancy than white and other non-Indigenous Australians. For decades, politicians and activists have floated the idea that mentioning Indigenous Australians in the constitution would be a meaningful step, and, in 2015, the government convened a council of public figures—Indigenous and not—to travel the country, meeting more than a thousand local leaders, to explore this possibility. Two years later, more than two hundred and fifty delegates gathered at Uluru for a constitutional convention. Negotiations began; some people walked out. The meetings emerged with one message, a twelve-paragraph pronouncement that fit on a single piece of paper, known as the Uluru Statement from the Heart.
The statement emphasized that the “ancestral tie” between Australia and its first inhabitants was never extinguished. “How could it be otherwise?” it asked.
“This link is the basis of the ownership of the soil, or better, of sovereignty.” Its prime recommendation was to create a body of Indigenous representatives, called the Voice to Parliament, that would advise the government about laws affecting Indigenous Australians. The group would not have the power to veto proposed laws or to create new ones. It would be a form of recognition in the constitution, and would also, potentially, provide practical advice. The well-known Indigenous lawyer Noel Pearson, who was a key architect of the statement, called it a “safe and responsible middle path.” Pat Anderson, an Indigenous elder and longtime social-justice advocate, described it as an “invitation” to non-Indigenous Australians “to walk with us to a better future.” (Canada added recognition of their Indigenous peoples to its constitution in 1982, and British settlers of New Zealand signed a treaty to guide the relationship between the Crown and the Maori in 1840; Australia has no comparable national legal documentation.)
In general, Indigenous issues are a larger part of the public consciousness in Australia than they are in the U.S., but progress toward redressing past wrongs has been uneven and marked, for long periods, by silence. For many, there was a sense that even asking the question of this year’s referendum was overdue. Australia has previously used the constitution to drive change—in 1967, at the urging of Indigenous groups, the country held a referendum to alter a number of its discriminatory clauses. The proposal passed with a larger majority than any referendum in history. In a general election held last year, the Labor Party leader, Anthony Albanese, became the new Prime Minister and began his victory speech by declaring that he would “commit to the Uluru Statement from the Heart in full.” The party faithful cheered.
For a time, the Voice was popular. In January, support for it was polling above sixty per cent. It was supported by four former Prime Ministers; the Business Council of Australia; the national airline; the mining company Rio Tinto, which had previously blown up a forty-six-thousand-year-old Aboriginal sacred site in order to expand an iron-ore mine; major sporting teams; several former High Court justices; and a barrage of celebrities, including Russell Crowe, Cate Blanchett, and Chris and Luke Hemsworth. Prominent writers framed the Voice as a much belated corrective. “For too long we have been at the mercy of a European/American imagination,” Richard Flanagan wrote; Peter Carey wrote that “the weak and guilty might block their ears but a democratic people knows that listening makes us stronger.” But, over months, polling support gradually dropped to the mid-forties. When the result came in on Saturday, it was met with a heavy, known resignation.
The failure of something presented as a “middle path” has been attributed to confusion, both genuine and purposeful, and to racialized lines of thinking about advantage and disadvantage that have long been part of Australia’s political vocabulary. The center-right opposition, the Liberal-National Coalition, formally opposed the Voice, with its leader, Peter Dutton, saying that it would “permanently divide us by race”; in September, he published an op-ed arguing that the Voice would “confer a privilege” on Indigenous people. (Dutton, a former minister of immigration, is known for his hard-line policies around Australia’s offshore detention of refugees.)
Dutton also suggested that the Voice would lead to some form of reparations. Albanese denied this, but the idea that the Voice is part of a secret scheme to redistribute wealth or land remained a mainstay of the No campaign, with one campaign director declaring, baselessly, that white people will be “paying to live here” if the Voice won. Anti-government social-media pages that appeared during COVID went on to broadcast anti-Voice messages and conspiracy theories (previously not a particularly deep-rooted feature of Australia’s political landscape). One video insisted that the Voice would allow the U.N. to “control all land.” During the campaign, two contradicting Facebook pages emerged: one, opposing the Voice from a conservative perspective, claimed that the body would be “radical,” “dangerous,” and completely change “the way our democratic parliamentary system functions”; another spotlighted progressives and said that the Voice would not do anything substantive—it was called Not Enough. An investigation by the Guardian revealed that a leading organization in the No campaign was running both pages.
A majority of Indigenous people supported the Voice, but, as the vote drew near, a group of conservative Indigenous politicians said it was something that had been crafted by out-of-touch élites; a small share of Indigenous activists withdrew support from the progressive side, saying that the referendum did not go far enough. This year, the leading slogan of the No campaign was: “If you don’t know, vote no.” But public confusion over the Voice can be primarily attributed to efforts from the highest levels of government to muddy its message from the start. The center-right governments that were in power from 2013 until Albanese’s election rejected the Statement from the Heart when it was released, in 2017, with two Prime Ministers who served during that period describing it, inaccurately, as, effectively “a third chamber” of Parliament. The Yes campaign also had to contend with a period of high inflation and a cost-of-living “crisis,” which may have pulled the public’s attention away, or made the referendum seem, to some, less urgent.
On Saturday, Albanese acknowledged the vote’s defeat at 9 P.M., in Canberra. In Perth, on the other side of the country, the sun was still up. The No campaign tried to be muted; the deputy leader of Dutton’s party, Sussan Ley, said, “I take no joy,” of the result. The director of the Yes campaign, Dean Parkin, a former investment analyst who is a member of the Quandamooka peoples, held back tears toward the end of his concession speech. A statement shared by numerous Indigenous community organizations declared, “Now is the time for silence, to mourn.” The Voice was only the Uluru Statement’s first recommendation. It had also proposed a treaty-making process, which would create formal legal agreements between the government and Indigenous nations, and what it called “truth-telling”—facing up to Australia’s past. “Understand that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people have never wanted to take anything from you,” Parkin said, on Saturday. “All we have wanted to do was to join with you, our Indigenous story, our Indigenous culture.” At the start of his premiership, Albanese had hinted that he hoped to hold two referendums: the Indigenous Voice, in his first term, then another referendum, in his second, on removing the King and becoming a republic. It was a stark plan: two votes staring at Australia’s colonial history and possible future. The Voice was supposed to be the first step. ♦
