The Voice Referendum was not lost because of misinformation and lies.
The Voice Referendum lost because the majority of Australians did not want a legislated divided country.
The Voice Referendum lost because there was a lack of detail from the federal Labor government.
The Voice Referendum lost because of a lazy PM who did not do the hard work early on.
Megan, if you recall in the very early stages of The Voice campaign support was very high and that it would sail through. However with each passing month the problems with the proposition emerged and it was obvious the hard work as to how it would operate practically had not been worked through in any substantive manner, hence my comment about a lazy PM.
Every state rejected The Voice Referendum, including socialist Victoria.
Overall it was a thumping rejection 60:40
And Megan, believe it or not, the vast majority of Australians, including me, want to close the gap as soon as possible.
The comments above are in response to the AFR article set out below.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Voice architect says Labor should have delayed referendum Tom McIlroyPolitical correspondent
Oct 4, 2024 – 3.40pm
A key architect of the Uluru Statement says Anthony Albanese should have called off the Voice to parliament referendum when internal polling showed a heavy defeat was inevitable, blaming Labor for a failed political strategy on Indigenous constitutional recognition.
Megan Davis, who helped draft the landmark 2017 statement and helped campaign for an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander advisory body, said disinformation and overheated partisanship had fuelled the defeat. Voters rejected the Voice 60 per cent to 40 per cent on October 14 last year, with only the ACT recording a majority Yes vote.
Voice advocate Megan Davis is a visiting professor of Australian studies at Harvard University. Natalie Boog
“If I was in government, if I’d been elected a leader, and I had polling that suggested that the referendum might not win, I would have pulled up stumps,” Professor Davis told AFR Weekend.
“I don’t think anyone was prepared for how divisive and nasty that no campaign would be. No one.”
The constitutional lawyer and NRL commissioner used a raw interview ahead of the first anniversary of the vote to argue the government and Australian Electoral Commission did not do enough to combat false claims and racist attacks about the Voice’s powers.
A visiting professor of Australian studies at Harvard, Professor Davis believes Voice proponents misinterpreted Australia’s shifting demographics, including overestimating a decline in the relative voting power of Baby Boomers.
She said delaying the vote could have been sold as a strategic move to build support, rather than the end of the road for constitutional recognition.
Internal polls had soft support for the Yes case in late 2022, with the No side gaining in the final six months.
“You have a really dramatic change 10 years ahead from now, because all the Baby Boomers will be gone, and our multicultural brothers and sisters are going to overtake the Australian-born population,” Professor Davis said.
“We are on the cusp. We thought we were on that wave, but we weren’t. We’re on the tail end of old, white Australia.”
Professor Davis, a Cobble Cobble woman and Uluru Dialogue co-chair, said many older Australians were not open-minded about change.
“They’re not shifting. They’re not changing their democracy for anyone.”
Analysis of the results by Australian National University researchers found electorates with higher Indigenous populations were more likely to vote Yes, while support from women was about 7 percentage points higher than men.
Voters aged 18 to 24 were more than twice as likely to vote Yes than those over 75, while voters speaking a language other than English were more likely to vote No.
Researchers found only 4.8 per cent of survey respondents shifted their vote to Yes between January 2023 and the October vote, while 42 per cent went from Yes to No.
Despite the defeat, Professor Davis said the case for the Voice was still pertinent, insisting the work of the Uluru Statement continued. Labor has abandoned plans to establish a Makarrata truth-telling commission and will rely on state governments to create Indigenous representation bodies and treaty making.
“Nobody says to the Republic movement or the movement for four-year parliamentary terms that they should stop because they’ve lost one or two referendums,” she said.
“We’re still in the aftermath of that loss, and a lot of old people who we work with are grieving the missed opportunity. Because of the way that misinformation spread and the way that the campaign ran, most Aussies really didn’t get to hear from Aboriginal voices
“They didn’t realise the Voice came from Aboriginal people on the ground, and not politicians. That makes you look back on the whole period of 2022 and 2023 with different eyes.”
Thomas Mayo, one of the most recognisable faces of the Yes campaign, told AFR Weekend disinformation was a factor in the defeat but the loss of bipartisanship in parliament doomed the Voice. Opposition Leader Peter Dutton opted to campaign for the No side in April 2023.
“That was the ultimate killer,” Mr Mayo said. “Support for the reform we proposed was around 49 per cent in 2017. It got to about 60 per cent in late 2022 and then really started to dive.
“That corresponds with the Nationals taking a position against it and then Peter Dutton saying ‘no’.”
A Kaurareg Aboriginal and Kalkalgal, Erubamle Torres Strait Islander man, he said some Indigenous leaders had considered calling for a delay in the vote as polls soured.
“But from my personal point of view, you just don’t know when you’re going to have another opportunity. The matter was urgent and couldn’t wait another decade.”
Both Professor Davis and Mr Mayo are strongly encouraged by the 6.2 million Yes voters.
“Before the referendum, we didn’t know where we stood with the Australian public,” Mr Mayo said.
“I don’t think the 60 per cent of Australians that voted No were all against progress either. I don’t think they don’t want to see improvement or Indigenous rights.
“I think a lot of them were taken by the very effective slogan ‘If you don’t know, vote No’. That, combined with the difficulty to understand the difference between truth and lies ... combined with the pressures that people have in their life, was effective.”
