The victorious ‘No’ camp is oddly reluctant to examine the roots of its cruel snub to our First Nations peoples. More ink has been expended on how badly the ‘Yes’ campaign was managed, and how ill-advised Albanese was to propose it at all.
But the Voice to Parliament was an election promise and only destined to fail when Dutton realised he could deal the government a rare defeat.
When such well-loved organisations as BHP and Qantas publicised their support, along with various sporting bodies and celebrities, failure was assured, because ‘Yes’ could be equated with ‘Elite’.
On the other hand, the broad church of the ‘No’ encompassed people against any change in the Constitution, people against special treatment for the Indigenous population, and people against anything proposed by a Labor government.
Significantly, it included all the conspiracy theorists of the last few years.
The conduct of the two campaigns was also very different. The ‘Yes’ movement was in general very polite, believing that contrary opinions are not swayed by critical language, but only by sweet reason.
This lack of energy from the Voice supporters gave the ‘No’ alliance room to be brutally careless of the truth and to invent any number of false narratives evoking fear and hatred. In Dutton’s whatever-it-takes politics we have entered a period of ‘post-truth’ reality, where emotion trumps reason.
Lurking behind all the post-mortem discussions of the referendum is of course the disturbing question: ‘To what extent were the sixty per cent of Australians who voted in the negative motivated by racism?’
The question certainly disturbs the sixty per cent.
There is such a lot of defensive commentary arguing that racism was not involved in the result that you might wonder if there is an attempt going on to rewrite history.
Gaslighting the public
No doubt some people were simply deceived by the gaslighting of the far right. Some may have voted ‘No’ because they wanted something better for Indigenous people than simply a voice to parliament. Some objected in principle to such a voice, arguing that it would be wrong to allow one group special access to lawmakers, overlooking the special access industrial lobbyists already have.
Racist or not, it was dishearteningly easy for people to turn their backs on the simple request for recognition. The massacres and dispossessions all happened in the past and we, personally, were not involved and therefore need feel no responsibility.
After all, what possible connection could those historical events have with our lives today? We only inherited the plantation; it wasn’t us who put those people in chains.
Most people are not caricature racists like Dutton, but they simply don’t care. And when entreated to care they closed ranks in tribal solidarity against perceived elites telling them what to do, much like Trump and Brexit voters.
In the end it was probably ‘don’t know and don’t care’ that sank the referendum, rather than the active malignancy of the ‘No’ leaders. Nevertheless, rejecting the just and generous Uluru Statement from the Heart cannot be seen as anything but callous, and will remain a low point in Australian history.
David Lovejoy, Echo co-founder
For four decades The Echo has printed the stories some people loved, some people hated, and some pretended not to read. If you want us to keep telling the truth, the real truth, not the sugar-coated version. We’ll need your support to keep the presses rolling. 
