Referendum day: what we have become

 

It’s a hot day in Brisbane, expected to reach 30^o, and moderately humid.  Not unusual, and not yet shorts and singlet territory.  I was in black chinos and a loud bowling shirt.  Looking all of my years, I suppose.

The Holy Spirit Hall polling station in Villiers Street, New Farm, was almost deserted when I got there at 09:00.  A far cry from a street choked with traffic, parked cars, people crossing the road both ways, and a queue stretching onto the footpath outside the car park at about the same time of day on 21 May 2022.

My approach from the north-eastern end of Villiers Street brought me into contact first with the black-shirted white man promoting the ‘No’ case.  He gave me a courteous ‘good morning’ and didn’t push the pamphlet in his hand too obtrusively.

I thought he looked much like Peter Dutton himself, tall, rangy, with a face naturally at rest in a deprecatingly judgemental scowl.  I wonder whether he was aware of the blackshirt association so obviously attaching itself to his black tee shirt, adorned with that ridiculous ‘if you don’t know …’ slogan—as if to say ‘if you’re a moron like me’.

He was impeccably behaved.  Yet he now stands for everything I have come to dislike about Australia.  The Murdoch family propaganda about populist fascism, enthusiastically pursued by their Coalition minions.  The John Howard mean-spirited selfishness that has rubbed off even on some parts of the Australian Labor Party, and the Greens.  The lionization of ignorance and stupidity as if they were virtues, imported so zealously from Trumpian America.

Opposite Mr No, across the driveway, was a white-bearded Aboriginal man giving me a big toothy smile, and also bidding me a good morning.  He was wearing a white tee shirt with the Yes logo on its chest.  I wonder whether he anticipated what would happen today.

I smiled back at him, and gave him a friendly, open-palmed wave, which he returned.

The car park was also empty.  The election snag people were still setting up as I strolled every leisurely into the hall itself, where only six people waited in a queue in front of me.  I waited less than a minute to be directed to one of the staff striking off names from printed electoral rolls.

The AEC staff were cheerful and polite.  But I was struck that I didn’t see a face I’d have estimated at under 40.

I declined the election pencil.  A stub, really, like a normal pencil cut in half.  All part of some self-defeating economic efficiency, no doubt.  Less waste, they’d think.  But not really.  The remains of the stubs would amount to similar amounts of materials as the longer pencils of the past, which might at least have been recycled into schools, hospitals, gaols, community centres … it was idle thinking.  But also indicative of where we are today: Australia solely as an economy, not a nation, and much less a community.

I used my Jinhao 996 fountain pen to block in my ‘YES’ vote, folded the paper as instructed, and left the polling station.

It was all over in fewer than ten minutes.  Outside I wonder whether I had ever cast a more important vote.  The republic referendum in 1999 had already been so sabotaged by the Howard gang that losing the chance at independence seemed less of a blow.  Maybe the one on 5 March 1983, when Australia finally rejected the mediocrity of the 1970s.  But even that election now seems to be less significant than the one derailed this year by the ignorant, mean-spirited, selfish people that are now unavoidably the ugly Australians.

This might be the last time I will see any attempt at nation building rather than consolidating economic rents and squabbling among already privileged gangsters about the spoils of the obvious corruption that passes as politics.