Reading Katharine Murphy and Josh Butler’s simple-minded autopsy of the Yes campaign made me sad: here was more of the same idiotic childishness that had cost the nation a referendum.
A facile failure to acknowledge what should have been recognized at the very start: the precise nature of the Uluru agenda. The agenda set in the final report of the Referendum Council in 2017. Not be confused with the Uluru statement (from the heart), which is merely a preface to that report.
From the moment Albanese, the ALP, and the Yes campaign failed to recognize or acknowledge the precise contours of the Uluru agenda, the Referendum was lost.
Instead, the Yes campaign was conducted according to delusional, wishful thinking.
Realistically, the ALP should have subjected the agenda to intense critical analysis, starting with the Referendum Council’s final report, which clearly illustrated the biggest weakness of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander advocacy: quite a bit of effort had to be put into gaining input from many disparate communities about their ambitions for the future.
That weakness continues to make it easy to argue that there is no agreement among First Australians about any part of the Uluru agenda. A somewhat specious argument, but one you can use to arm bigots with language that stays away from more obvious racist narratives. But an argument that should have been easy to counter on the basis of the report: how racist it is to deny First Nations communities the very organization they need to speak with a more unified voice. Calling out the racists, however, was just a step too far for the timid ALP campaigners, and was left almost entirely to First Nations figureheads.
My own undiluted assessment of the Referendum Council report is that it reads like amateur-hour, undergraduate project work. There appears to have been no real notion of audience. Was it the Malcolm Turnbull Liberals? Where was the terse business language about value propositions and outcomes? Was it the Canberra bureaucracy? Where was the never ending cross referencing back to past bureaucratic efforts and the forecast of future bureaucratic fiefdoms in perpetuity? Perhaps the audience was really only the Referendum Council itself, perhaps relying on support for its findings solely on fellow idealists naïve enough to believe Canberra would ever endorse an agenda decoupled from currently dominant political economy.
The statement from the heart reads like overly emotional song lyrics by a teenage band, and is so heavily slanted towards crime and punishment that a simple reading could conclude quite quickly its ambition was to achieve some sort of amnesty for First Nations criminals. Where were the adults to advise that it either mention all the issues (mortality rates, healthcare, education, employment discrimination, loss of culture, and so on), or none in particular? How did it escape the authors they were playing directly to racist stereotypes, weakening all the more mature arguments that could have been made later about addressing and removing all the causes of crime in First Nations communities in the first place?
Other serious flaws in the Uluru agenda included using words never clearly explained. For example, what is the precise legal definition of the word Makaratta? Some vague synonyms won’t do, since a Makaratta Commission would have to have very precise terms of reference. And what does ‘truth telling’ actually mean in a polity in which no politician, bureaucrat, or legal officer has ever spoken anything close to something recognizable as truth?
It’s not good enough to insist, like children, that truth would be apprehensible somehow by dint of just believing in it. How does it arise in ontology or epistemology? In historiography? In courts of law? These are not distractions, but core elements of the truth telling argument that should have been thought out very clearly well before any referendum ever saw political sponsorship. It turned out to be a major weakness, contributing to the News Corporation/Coalition No argument about divisiveness and lack of detail.
My point is not to denigrate the Uluru agenda. It is to highlight how its obvious weaknesses were never taken seriously, and no work was put into developing it into an iron-clad political instrument that could withstand the inevitable opposition it would face, first by the Murdoch anti-democracy machine, and then by its minions in the Coalition parties, even more extreme political splinter groups, and the coterie of plutocrat sociopaths that are invariably drawn into that orbit.
Why did no one in the ALP or the Yes campaign see any of this?
I’ve argued elsewhere that this is a matter of bourgeois prejudices. A set of assumptions and preferences tied to a socio-economic status within our political economy that is assumed by its subjects to be universal, when, in fact, it is increasingly isolated from the experiences of most Australians because wealth concentration has created a greater community of concerns at a much lower socio-economic level than the one enjoyed by politicians, bureaucrats, academics, and media workers (like Murphy and Butler).
The incomprehensibly stupid assumption by Albanese, the ALP, and the Yes campaign that people would just share their own bourgeois outlook failed miserably, and yet not any of them seem ready to admit this simple reality.
(Michelle Grattan offered a much more conventional political analysis of ALP stupidity.)
Nor did any of that bourgeois clique ever deal seriously with the reality that the Voice was all about embourgeoisement of the Uluru agenda. That is, absorbing the agenda wholesale into the existing political process, thereby elevating a new class of First Nations politicians and bureaucrats into the bourgeoisie, as prelude to the embourgeoisement of all First Nations communities. Never mind that this isn’t exactly how the Convention delegates imagined it in 2017. It is the unvarnished political reality.
Without recognizing this reality, however, how could the Yes campaign argue that far from dividing Australia, this process would at last offer a real prospect of embracing First Nations people as indivisible from the Australian polity? And far from being just another costly bureaucracy, it would cost less than having a white bureaucracy continue to fail in closing the gap? The answer is these arguments could not be made because the reality of the Uluru agenda was never seriously acknowledged or leveraged.
Perhaps the single biggest failure in
the Yes campaign, or any other political issue for the past thirty years, has
been the staggering failure by the ALP and media not owned by the Murdoch
family to address the latter’s deliberately and sustained nihilistic attack on
democracy, here and everywhere else it operates. Novelist Thomas Keneally said similar things recently, even if his perspective is far less political.
Left unaddressed, it will be News Corporation that will defeat the ALP at the next election, not Dutton’s rabble, which couldn’t function at all without News Corporation employees telling it what to say and do.
Therein lies the weakness, too, of the contemporary ALP, and the Yes campaign: being too stupid or cowardly to look at facts squarely, and to derive from them powerful arguments against an increasingly deranged right wing extremist demographic, means quite a lot of progressives and idealists are left without the intellectual weapons to counter and defeat the extremists. Sadly, we don’t seem to have enough independent thinkers anymore to see that job done without rôle models in politics and the media.
Regrettably, too, such journalists as still exist in Australia are too cowardly to call out News Corporation and all of its employees for their overtly political and entirely destructive activities. That is certainly the biggest failure in the editorial presented by Murphy and Butler: it fails to present any meaningful analysis by dint of the blindness that comes with living in bourgeois fantasies, and the cowardice of not calling out the Murdoch sabotage of our nation, our democracy, and our civilization.
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