Monday 14 October 2024

Anthony Albanese paid a political price for the Voice failure. Linda Burney explains why a delay was never considered.

Extract from ABC News

Analysis

On the first anniversary of the failed referendum on an Indigenous Voice to Parliament, the minister responsible for delivering the vote wants to set the record straight.

Linda Burney, the member for Barton and minister for Indigenous Australians from 2022 until July 2024, has spoken to this column against what she calls revisionism of the process that led to the vote. Such rewriting of the facts cannot go unchallenged, she says.

Burney's comments came after Megan Davis, one of the architects of the Uluru Statement from the Heart, revealed she was open to the idea of not proceeding with the Voice referendum once it became apparent it was very unlikely to win the public's approval.

Today marks the one year since that referendum. Professor Davis says it has been a tough week for many Indigenous Australians who remain "devastated" by the No result.

"If the prime minister and others had really definitive information that it was going to lose, we were concerned with why that would proceed, given that it was apparent we didn't have enough time to prosecute the case," she says.

Burney, who is no longer the minister for Indigenous Australians, told me from Washington she was in every deliberation about how the Voice vote should proceed and not once was there any indication from members that a delay in the vote would be accepted.

Burney says the prime minister, Anthony Albanese, made a decision to follow the advice of Indigenous leadership even when political bipartisanship had failed.

"The notion of waiting was not part of the agenda," Burney says. "Peter Dutton and David Littleproud had walked away [from the Voice] but there was no appetite for delaying the vote. Any suggestion that the referendum working group would have accepted a delay is false."

Albanese never expressed his political view, she says. "The prime minister made a decision to listen to what the Indigenous leadership wanted.

"He did what the Aboriginal leadership asked. It's exactly what happened and you can't rewrite history."

Asked if it was a mistake for the prime minister to go ahead when there was so little prospect of success, Ms Burney said Albanese had on principle elevated listening to First Nations leaders over political expediency.

"We know that without bipartisanship we can't advance these things," she says. "But to pretend that if we had delayed this or dumped this there would have been support [from Indigenous leaders] is just not true."

The debate over what went wrong continues

A year on from the vote, which devastated much of Indigenous Australia, the debate about what went wrong has again resurfaced.

It is a debate that has been quietly going on among Indigenous leadership — but the great Australian silence has continued. The disconnect couldn't be greater as Aboriginal people have been doing the heavy lifting.

The government has now solidified its view that without bipartisanship, constitutional change is impossible. The fact the government quietly dumped the role of assistant minister for a republic in the ministerial reshuffle in July is the best evidence of that.

Communities reflect on the 12 months since the Indigenous Voice to Parliament referendum.

The reasons why the prime minister stood firm to deliver the referendum as the public support was in decline are worth exploring.

Burney says the message from the Indigenous leaders — hand-picked to advise the government — was unequivocal: it must go ahead.

At the time, I spoke to some members who told me testing the question in a referendum must go ahead regardless of polling showing it could fail.

The magnitude of what a No vote would mean for the country was not at the centre of the conversations I had.

However, with the benefit of hindsight many believe the deep consequences of a No vote should have been considered.

As early as May 2023 Aboriginal activist and community leader Noel Pearson launched an attack against another Indigenous Voice campaigner for raising fears the referendum could fail.

Pearson labelled former social justice commissioner Mick Gooda a "bedwetter" who had done little for Indigenous people and dismissed "foolish" suggestions a compromise should be reached on the scope of the Voice.

"He's wetting the bed far too early in the day," he told me.

"This early bedwetting just when we're yet to start the campaign proper is not right. He does not represent Indigenous people in the position he's taken."

Gooda had called to remove any mention of executive government from the proposal after polling showed support for a Yes vote slipping to 53 per cent.

In hindsight, this appears to have been a pivotal moment.

The lessons from past failed policy

But many wonder why the prime minister didn't raise the likelihood the result would be No.

Albanese is a man of substantial political experience.

He understands Australia well — even the timidity he is sometimes accused of must be placed in the context of that broader understanding.

Given that foundation — the mounting momentum of the No campaign and the ferocity of Peter Dutton's message against the Voice — many have asked why the PM didn't advise Indigenous leaders that while he understood their passion, he had to pause or shelve the vote or it could face catastrophic defeat.

I have spoken to several senior Labor figures to get a sense of why that decision was made.

One told me Albanese was genuinely committed to the letter of the proposal — the idea that listening was paramount and overriding what Indigenous leaders wanted would be antithetical to that.

But there was another dimension at play.

One senior Labor strategist told me he and former senior ministers from the Rudd era learnt the wrong lesson from Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme (CPRS) legislation, which is that it would have been worse to abandon the pledge.

The Rudd government dumped its CPRS climate change legislation during Kevin Rudd's first term. The move led to the government being seen as not standing on its principles and was fatal for Rudd.

A senior Labor figure says analysts underestimate how much the first term of the Rudd/Gillard government has shaped so much of the thinking of ministers who were part for it.

They said even as it was becoming clear the referendum would fail, the most senior government figures believed to delay would be politically dangerous for the government and risk accusations they did not have the courage of their convictions.

What will we say yes to?

We will never know what would have happened if the vote was shelved or delayed. But we do know now what some of the consequences of the No vote have been beyond the constitutional change, and more broadly, the impact on First Nations people.

Yet one year after the No vote, Australia still hasn't worked out what it is prepared to say yes to.

First Nations people are still dying prematurely and still being incarcerated at record levels. The stark statistics and reality remain unchanged. In fact, they are getting worse.

The reality of what that historic and thumping No vote means more broadly is only now being fully understood.

It has generated timidity within the government over a wider suite of Indigenous rights reforms. And it has been used by those who fought for No to assume a broader set of messages.

First Nations people have been subjected to racism, not just during the campaign that was often toxic, but in the year since.

Over the weekend, a group in Corowa, a small town on the border of NSW and Victoria, dressed in black, with some wearing sunglasses and face coverings, gathered in front of the town's war memorial.

They were seen holding a sign that read "white man fight back" and could be heard chanting the same words along with "Australia for the white man, the rest must go".

This is just one incident, but it should send chills. There are pockets of radicalisation that threaten the very fabric of what Australia is — an ancient nation of First Nations people, immigrants, and those of British heritage.

Queensland's historic Indigenous truth-telling and healing inquiry has commenced in Brisbane, nearly two centuries to the day after a penal colony was established. But its life will be short lived if the LNP wins the election this month.

Under legislation passed on a bipartisan basis in 2023, it will run for three years. But after the referendum led to a backflip last year, Queensland's Liberal National Party opposition plans to overturn the inquiry if it wins government at the state election on October 26.

Queensland had the highest No vote in the country. The vote was about constitutional change but the messages that have been taken by politics are a lot wider.

Where does it leave First Nations people?

Jacinta Price, the shadow minister for Indigenous affairs and the most prominent leader of the No vote, accused the government in an interview of ignoring the voices of First Nations people.

"They're not interested in hearing the voices of Indigenous Australians who want practical solutions and their voices heard through our democratic parliamentary system," she said.

Yet while the government has not announced plans for how to progress the issues that drove the Uluru Statement from the Heart and support for a Voice to Parliament, the proponents of No are also still trying to frame the messages it left behind.

And First Nations people are still begging to be heard.

Patricia Karvelas is the presenter of RN Breakfast and co-host of the Party Room podcast. She also hosts Q+A on ABC TV Mondays at 9:35pm.

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