Around noon, at a polling station in Surry Hills, Sydney, a blonde boy with long hair declined to talk about the referendum. “That's because you voted no, and they don't want you to know it at work,” his friend tells him. “And your ‘yes’ because everything you know you got from The Guardian.”
Not many hours have passed until at 7.17pm on the east coast, Australia has finished the Indigenous Voice to Parliament project and the inclusion of its first nations in a new chapter of the constitution. A result that all the surveys predicted.
Tasmania, New South Wales and Victoria have voted no with percentages between 59% and 54%, making the 'yes' feat impossible since the electoral law demands a double victory, in votes and in states: four out of six.
Queensland and South Australia have joined the no before Western Australia had conclusive results. The Northern Territory has also said 'no' and only the capital territory has voted yes, as well as some urban electorates in the capital cities.
“I want to acknowledge that for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people this campaign has been a hard burden to bear,” acknowledged Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, “and its outcome hard to bear.” An image totally opposite to the election night, when, in May 2022, the first thing he promised was this referendum.
The 'yes' has obtained 39.86% of the 17.6 million voters at the national level, although among the Indigenous population, surveys place support at 80%. “I will always be ambitious for our country,” Albanese remarked today, having already announced before the referendum that this year's budget had planned an extra allocation for mental health for the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander population.
On the other hand, for the conservative opposition, which opposed the process, it has been a night with a taste of electoral revenge. Its leader, Peter Dutton, has assured that it was “a bad idea to divide Australians by their heritage or when they arrived in the country” and has insisted on the idea that it was “the prime minister's referendum.”
“Dutton's first objective is to survive long enough to reach the next election as a candidate and this will possibly help him,” says Mark Kenny, journalist and professor at the Australian Studies Institute, part of the Australian National University.
Kenny believes that Dutton's tough game – especially after losing the seat of Aston, Victoria, last April in a mid-term election – will help him establish himself among his people, but that it may not bring him electoral benefits in the 2025 elections.
The campaign has had tense moments, with social media flooded with misinformation: land grabs, global government, that people's yards will be expropriated or that the Indigenous Voice could dictate interest rates. So much so that the Australian Electoral Commission had to confront some hoaxes.
It is the technique of ultra political strategist Steve Bannon and Trump, Kenny acknowledges, “flooding the space with shit.”
The 'no', supported by ultra-conservative groups such as Advance Australia or the mining billionaire Cilve Palmer, has spent months saying that it was Albanese's referendum, although the proposal of The Voice to Parliament and the
Constitutional recognition was born in 2017 when 250 First Nations delegates met at Uluru to talk about reconciliation.
In an intervention at the National Press Club, Warren Mundine of the 'no' party said that this was a symbolic declaration of war and even Dutton assured that the country's largest airline Qantas took a 'yes' position in exchange for vetoing Qatar Airways flights. or that the proposal was going to include race in the constitution.
But as Anne Towmey, emeritus professor at the University of Sydney and constitutional expert who participated in the parliamentary committees on The Voice, recalls, “race is already in the text.” In fact, there are two prerogatives, one on the reduction of state parliamentarians if they deny the vote to some races (linked to the 14th amendment of the United States) and the second, the 51st, which allows Parliament to make special laws for races. that considers that special laws should be enacted.
“This power can be used to protect indigenous cultural heritage and native land titles,” Twomey acknowledges. But it was also used by Prime Minister John Howard in 2007 when he declared the Northern Territory Intervention, commanding the army and police over more than 70 indigenous regional communities.
Amid the smell of grilled sausages, in Surry Hills, the two boys, the blonde and the dark-skinned one with their dogs, have declined the interview. “I just don't have a very formed opinion,” the blonde excused himself, although he had to vote, since it is mandatory. In fact, one of the slogans of the 'No' campaign has been this: If you don't know, vote no.
Kenny, who had previously been a journalist for several Australian newspapers, points out that this was precisely one of the objectives of the no campaign; complicate the
proposal and stating that it was divisive “when it is only divisive if one of the two parties does not support it,” he emphasizes.
