Before the Voice, count the cookies
Let’s talk about what this is really about
‘A banker, a worker, and an immigrant are sitting at a table with 20 cookies.
‘The banker takes 19 cookies and warns the worker: “Watch out, the immigrant is going to take your cookie away.”’
While world+dog is going to have opinions in the post mortem to the voice referendum I want to take a second to offer my predictions, and my reasons for them, while it’s still a view to the future.
It’s going down
It doesn’t bring me any joy but it’s hard to see how this government, and this voice campaign, can turn around the polls.
Polls can be wrong, but not this wrong, and the trend lines are if anything worse than the numbers on their own.
Don’t want to believe me? Have some Casey Briggs from the ABC:
“Yeah John, but that was like 6 weeks ago… Maybe things have improved?”
Sure, check out the Guardian’s poll tracker updated… four days ago…
For a proposal needing a double majority that’s worse than bad, and frankly well beyond terminal. (A double majority being the constitutional requirement for a majority of people in a majority of states)
So how did we get here?
The Uluru Statement was always an interesting document. It represented an unprecedented unity of consensus in indigenous politics. But that consensus was only reached by marginalising the most troublesome of voices. It should not be a surprise that those voices (most spectacularly led from the left and right by indigenous women in the form no less of Senators Thorpe and Price) would not go quietly through the referendum campaign.
As is so often the way Labor is hoping to make the most minimal of tokenistic changes, sell it to the public post-facto as a momentous token of progress, without actually changing very much at all, and basking in a warm fuzzy glow while business continues as usual.
To the colonial mindset embedded in the Australian State (which I will freely admit to being my own starting place) it makes sense.
Having said that Lidia Thorpe has correctly reached the conclusion it involves a surrender to the Australian constitutional polity. Some would argue that’s necessary, but if you’re going to surrender there’s an argument for extracting some terms first. You don’t get to seek terms post-surrender.
So where’s the opposition coming from?
All of this misses the point about Australia actually is: Which is a resource extraction operation for the benefit of foreign multinationals.
The Australian population is generally kept to buying and selling houses from each other in the coastal fringes of the continent and staying out of the way of the mining companies.
“Terra Nullius” might have been thrown out in the High Court’s Mabo decision of 1992 but it’s the underpinning of both mining and agribusiness. Those concerns, engaged in raping the continental interior of everything of value as quickly as possible are intensely interested in making sure no-one thinks of remote Australia as anything more than distant heat shimmer.
For all the effort to soft soap the Voice into a glorified student council the step it represents is still far too great a concession to the commanding heights of the Australian economy.
And so in a very American campaign they’ve set out to scare the bejeezus out of the population and to normalise apathy.
Failure of Yes
One thing I love about the Australian left is their childish belief; that if only people knew how cruel our material conditions are, something would be done to rectify them.
This of course misses the point that our material conditions have been created for the benefit of the most powerful in our society.
These aren’t bugs. These are features that will be fought tooth and nail to be preserved.
And if we are not clear eyed about the nature of this conflict we are doomed to failure.
Vote yes anyway
Once again Labor has mistaken being less hated than the Liberals for being actually popular. Once again, a doomed campaign has been built around the insubstantial cult of their own personalities.
The Voice proposal is manifestly inadequate, but it’s what we’ve got in front of us.
If the billionaires hate it then that’s reason enough to support it.
If the Nazis are turning up at rallies in support of “No” then I’m voting “Yes”.
I’m voting “Yes, but give me more”.
And I’m saying let’s nationalise that cookie supply and share it out evenly.
