On Saturday 14 October 2023 the 17.6 million registered voters in Australia and her offshore territories were asked to vote on the referendum question:
“A Proposed Law: to alter the Constitution to recognise the First Peoples of Australia by establishing an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice.
Do you approve this proposed alteration?”
For a referendum to pass, the proposed alteration to the Australian Constitution must be approved by:
a national majority of voters, and
a majority of voters in a majority of the states (at least four out of the six states).
With 8219 of 8253 polling places counted from 6pm on 14 October 2023 through to 1:38am 15 October the national majority vote percentages were:
NO – 60.25% or 7,830,019 eligible voters
YES – 39.75% or 5,166,682 eligible voters
There were 140,116 ballot papers judged to be Informal.
Based on votes counted so far, zero out of six states have a majority of 'yes' votes and there is no national majority for ‘yes’.
In New South Wales with 2825 of 2835 polling places returned the counted voter majority percentages stand at:
No – 59.14% or 1,758,814 eligible voters
YES – 40.86% or 2,545,732 eligible voters
There were 53,947 ballot papers judged to be Informal.
There are two federal electorates covering the NSW Northern Rivers region, Richmond and Page.
PAGE returned ordinary vote counts from 89 of 93 polling places on the night and counted returned postal votes in hand, resulting in voter majority percentages at:
No – 67.54% or 68,152 eligible voters
YES – 32.46% or 32,747 eligible voters.
There were 1,159 ballot papers judged to be Informal.
RICHMOND returned ordinary vote counts from 63 of 69 polling places on the night and counted returned postal votes in hand, resulting in voter majority percentages at:
No – 56.69% or 54,801 eligible voters
YES – 43.31% or 41,865 eligible voters
There were 1,341 ballot papers judged to be Informal.
The Australian Electoral Commission's online Virtual Tally Room carries all majority vote counts at:
https://tallyroom.aec.gov.au/ReferendumNationalResults-29581.htm.
Votes across Australia by state polling places can be found at:
https://tallyroom.aec.gov.au/ReferendumDownloadsMenu-29581-Csv.htm
Note: These two databases are still updating
There is no getting away from a painful truth that the majority of Australian voters counted in the national referendum rejected outright the proposal to insert an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Peoples Voice to Parliament in the Australian Constitution.
Rejecting the agreed wording of the proposed amendment to be inserted, which the Australian Parliament had passed on 19 June 2023:
“Chapter IX Recognition of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples
129 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice
In recognition of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples as the First Peoples of Australia:
there shall be a body, to be called the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice;
the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice may make representations to the Parliament and the Executive Government of the Commonwealth on matters relating to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples;
the Parliament shall, subject to this Constitution, have power to make laws with respect to matters relating to the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice, including its composition, functions, powers and procedures.”
I take no pleasure in writing this piece. I have spent my life campaigning for recognition and reconciliation in this country. Through all that time, I have found ways to feed hope. I have believed often in our better angels.
Now, though, I can see the truth: whatever the outcome of today’s vote, whether the double majority required to make this alteration to the Constitution is achieved or not, reconciliation is dead.
Australians had the opportunity to accept our invitation in the Uluru Statement from the Heart. Only they had the power to decide whether to accept or reject constitutional recognition of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people by voting “Yes” or “No” on a representative body enshrined in the Constitution.
I hope I’m wrong, but everything around me is saying that today Australia will reject that invitation. It will choose to leave our hand outstretched.
In a recent column, Chin Tan, the outgoing race discrimination commissioner, rightly identified a key lesson from the referendum campaign: “What we do already know and what has been reinforced during this referendum is that Australia urgently needs a national anti-racism framework and bipartisan response to racism.”
It’s a rational response, based on the overwhelming evidence of the surge in race hate and anti-Semitism during the referendum, not just from common or garden-variety race haters, who think we’re going to take their backyard, again, but Neo-Nazis spreading vile falsehoods in videos and memes online, threatening the lives of not just Senator Lidia Thorpe but numerous Indigenous and non-Indigenous campaigners for the “Yes” vote.
I agree with Chin Tan intellectually, but if he’s talking about bipartisanship in overcoming racial discrimination, he is dreaming. The nation has been poisoned. There is no fix for this terrible outcome. The opposition leader, Peter Dutton, has made racism his calling card. He has injected fear and race hate into his campaign against the referendum proposal with such gusto, such deceit, there is no hope that a national stance against racism is within reach for generations.
Dutton has cemented race hate into the body politic in a way we did not foresee last year but that now is very clear. He has killed any hope of reconciliation, ably assisted by Senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price and Nyunggai Warren Mundine.
Dutton began his “No” campaign by claiming the referendum proposal would “re-racialise” Australia. He has been a member of cabinet for a decade, a parliamentarian since 2001 – it is improbable that he has not read the Constitution or at least been briefed on it, particularly the “race power” at section 51 (xxvi). He was a minster in a government that used that very power to harm Indigenous Australians.
His other lie to Australians was “no detail”. Again, he was in cabinet when both the interim and final of the Calma–Langton Voice co-design reports, totalling more than 400 pages, were tabled and released for further consultation. It’s doubtful he read them because the detail he keeps asking for is right there in the pages.
Beyond this, the key message sold by his “No” case is that we, the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people of Australia, are entirely to blame for our predicament. “Colonisation,” Price said at the National Press Club during the campaign, had a “positive impact”. She elaborated with another monstrous lie: “I mean, now we’ve got running water, we’ve got readily available food.” She said there were “no ongoing negative impacts of colonisation”.
This was just one of the extraordinary, baseless statements made during her appearance at the National Press Club. She clearly does not know or care about the enormous body of evidence that contradicts her, nor the people to whom this evidence refers.
Just last year, a report from the Water Services Association of Australia showed that tap water in more than 500 Indigenous communities was not regularly tested and often wasn’t safe to drink. In remote areas, communities are receiving drinking water with unacceptable levels of uranium, arsenic, fluoride and nitrate. Fixing this is estimated to require an investment of $2.2 billion.
Price also rejected the suggestion that colonisation has led to generations of trauma and suggested families of convicts faced similar struggles. Again, the medical evidence for trauma and intergenerational trauma is substantial and very much a part of the allied health initiatives that are available to those who have access to a health service.
We know from this evidence that trauma causes high blood pressure and stress, which leads to heart problems and shortens life. It reduces one’s capacity to engage in normal social interactions, such as in the workplace or in school and in the family.
I don’t know a single Indigenous person who hasn’t encountered these issues, who hasn’t come from families that struggled and were discriminated against in profound ways. The denial of these realities by the likes of Mundine and Price, and the motives of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people willing to back their views, is truly difficult to understand. Getting to this point in the logic of your argument deceives the public in the face of centuries of knowledge, understanding and experience from those of us who have done the hard yards for decades. It is denying the real experiences of Indigenous people.
Of course, there are hundreds of dedicated and passionate community-controlled organisations across the country that are doing the invaluable and gruelling work, not only on the frontlines caring for the people who are experiencing these dire realities, but also gathering the data and evidence to present to each successive government to try to advocate for change in these areas. It’s a slow and often ineffective process. These people are doing the work that would become the work of the Voice if the country sees fit to enshrine it.
In the event of a “No” vote, it will be these organisations that will continue to experience the dual trauma of witnessing the real-world, real-time consequences of ineffective and discriminatory government policy and decision-making on their communities, while simultaneously trying to work and advocate within that same system. The “No” campaign and the architects of it will have a political win that will only further entrench structural racism in our lives. They will gloat about it. They will go out of their way to make our lives worse simply because they are filled with a hatred of the marginalised. This is a curdled view of the world, based on a perverse neoliberal agenda that divides people into those who deserve support and those who don’t. Pull up your socks, get a job, the gap will be closed.
In the highly unlikely event of a successful referendum outcome, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has committed to establishing a parliamentary committee chaired jointly by a representative from Labor and from the Coalition who will work together to legislate the Voice. How the Voice will look – its membership and functions – would be decided by parliament, as plainly stated on the ballot paper and in all official statements of the question.
The Voice would make representations to the parliament and to the executive government, the barest measure imaginable that would give Indigenous Australians a formal say in policies and legislations that affect us, an opportunity to advise against using the “race power” to discriminate against us. This would be nothing more than advice: the parliament would retain absolute sovereignty in legislating all matters, as it has constitutional powers to do so.
But who from Indigenous Australia would serve with Dutton’s appointments to this parliamentary committee?
If the majority of Australian voters agree with the “No” campaign and laud the New Right version of racism, the approach to Indigenous Affairs will be poisoned from the top level of party policy to the bottom of the bureaucratic chain. Thousands of pages to the contrary, the data from medical specialists, epidemiologists and other experts will be out the window in favour of cheap, nasty, false, racist sloganeering.
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people themselves will be ignored and excluded from policy decisions because the electorate has said “No”. No to including us in the constitutional fabric, no to empowering us to advise on our own futures. No to submissions to parliament and executive government to avoid using the “race power” to discriminate against us. Any Indigenous person with an iota of self-respect and regard for the futures of other Indigenous Australians will stay well away. To be a puppet for the foul vision created by Dutton and his mates, the great replacement theory advocates, would be conceding to their core belief – that we are members of an inferior race and incapable of making decisions for ourselves. Only political grifters such as Price and Mundine, both of them incapable of understanding the import of the Closing the Gap statistics, will sign up for a tour of duty with this vision.
Dutton has cemented race hate into the body politic in a way we did not foresee last year but that now is very clear. He has killed any hope of reconciliation, ably assisted by Senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price and Nyunggai Warren Mundine.
Both major parties say they support the recognition of Indigenous Australians. This is not true in practice. In fact, the appearance of policy agreement on Indigenous constitutional recognition is a saga of deceit and treachery, kicked down the road for more than a decade. The prime minister is erring on the side of good faith in citing Coalition statements in support of recognition, when those of us who have been along for the ride have watched in dismay as each government manoeuvred out of their commitments by delaying until the next election and then tossing their responsibility to the next government.
Since the Council for Aboriginal Affairs was established in 1967, in response to that year’s referendum, there have been 11 Indigenous representative bodies in total, operating with varying degrees of success. Each one of them has been dismantled on a political whim. With each election, the advances we make are swept away and new and far too often inappropriate policies replace them, policies in which we have little to no say. For more than a decade, we have had no representative body, no single group to give advice on our behalf to the parliament.
Both major parties have been responsible for abolishing these Indigenous representative bodies. The Council for Aboriginal Affairs reported directly to then prime minister Harold Holt, but following his death it was redirected to report to a new minister in charge of Aboriginal affairs, William Wentworth, and received little cooperation from the rest of the government. It was dissolved by Malcolm Fraser in 1976.
To support the aims of Aboriginal self-determination, the Whitlam government in 1973 created Australia’s first elected Indigenous representative body, the National Aboriginal Consultative Committee, to provide advice on Aboriginal policy. More than 27,000 Indigenous people voted to elect the 41 members of the committee. As it was created administratively, no parliamentary action was necessary when it was abolished in 1977. It was succeeded by another “administrated program”, the National Aboriginal Conference, which was abolished by the Hawke government in 1985.
One of the more longstanding representative bodies, the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission, was created by Bob Hawke in 1989. This commission, known as ATSIC, was intended to combine representative and executive roles by taking over the responsibilities of the former Department of Aboriginal Affairs.
John Howard vocally opposed the creation of ATSIC, saying its legislation struck at the heart of the unity of the Australian people. In what is now an old familiar argument, re-run by Price, Mundine and others, he said: “If the government wants to divide Australian against Australian, if it wants to create a black nation within the Australian nation, it should go ahead with its Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission legislation and treaty.”
To no one’s surprise, when Howard became prime minister, he conducted multiple reviews and audits in an attempt to expose fraudulent activity that would justify the shutting down of ATSIC. Following discretionary funding cuts, the commission was abolished in 2005. That same year, Howard appointed the National Indigenous Council. There was no consultation with Indigenous people. The council was dissolved by the Rudd government three years later.
So appalled were many Indigenous people at this, they began consulting across the nation on the structure of a replacement body that would be constituted by its Indigenous members and independent of government and legislation. The consultations and design process were led by Professor Tom Calma, Tanya Hosch and others, and resulted in a corporation rather than a government body, specifically so it could not be dissolved by government fiat. The National Congress of Australia’s First Peoples began operating in 2010 and its members voted for the representatives on the national body. However, following the global financial crisis, the government refused to create a permanent endowment to fund its ongoing operation and by 2013 the body was relying on paid subscriptions from Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander members and organisations. (The congress went into voluntary administration and ceased operating in 2019.) Also in 2013, the Abbott government appointed a new Indigenous Advisory Council, chaired by Nyunggai Warren Mundine. This body was never formally abolished but appeared to stop operating after the 2019 election.
This chronology demonstrates the absolute commitment of the conservative governments to ignore the grassroots Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander voices and appoint their own hand-picked favourites as a foil for ignoring the majority.
Not to be deterred by “identity politics”, in 2018, then prime minster Scott Morrison appointed Tony Abbott as his “special envoy for Indigenous affairs”, with a focus on “improving remote school attendance”.
In addition to representational bodies, our leaders have developed umbrella organisations or federations of community-controlled Indigenous corporations and sector-specific bodies in the fields of legal services, health and housing during the past 50 years to prosecute their policy and service approaches with Australian governments. In 2018, the largest of these, the National Aboriginal Community Controlled Health Organisation (NACCHO) brought these bodies together to form the Coalition of Peaks as a non-incorporated non-government organisation. It comprises more than 80 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander community-controlled peak and member organisations across Australia. Other bodies became members because of the urgent need to address the failure of the Closing the Gap strategy. These included the ACT Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Elected Body and several large Aboriginal land councils.
The formation of the Coalition of Peaks was in response to concerns that governments were proposing a new Closing the Gap strategy without any involvement of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. The chair of the Coalition of Peaks has said the proposed Voice to Parliament is complementary to its role.
This revolving door of Indigenous advisory mechanisms has an extraordinarily destructive impact on our people and their communities. The ability of representative bodies to provide independent, evidence-based advice to make a lasting impact is extremely limited when the body itself is under constant threat of abolition.
What has been notably absent throughout these decades of political football is bipartisanship on policies based on evidence, policies and programs that are allowed to run long enough to show some success in reaching parity in health, education, employment and income levels. What is also noticeable is the persistent refusal to acknowledge success in Indigenous affairs. The narrative of failure is wheeled out repeatedly to bolster the larger Australian narrative: Indigenous people will inevitably die out or be assimilated; Indigenous people are incapable; Indigenous people must be governed.
Marcia
Langton is an
Aboriginal writer, a descendant of the Yiman people of Queensland.
She is professor of Australian Indigenous studies at the University
of Melbourne.
NOTE: All yellow highlighting in this post is my own.
UPDATE
If you stood in line at Yamba Public School to vote on Sat 14 Oct 2023, 54.9% of you voted to deny ATSI First Nations recognition in the Australian Constitution & a Voice to Parliament. If you stood in line at Yamba to vote, 75.4% of you also voted to deny First Nations.
— no_filter_Yamba (@no_filter_Yamba) October 14, 2023
SHAME🧵
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