For months Australians were told the referendum was about a simple issue. But there was nothing simple about it.
Referendums are mostly awful beasts. Occasionally necessary ones, sure. But awful, nonetheless. That’s because they are designed to take endlessly nuanced, complicated questions, and reduce them to a cold binary: yes or no. They admit no qualification or condition. You can’t say “yes, under certain circumstances”, or “not quite”. And the more nuanced or complicated the proposal, the more necessary such shades of response become. Without them, we’re left with something crushingly blunt.
But No – and simply No – obscures all that. It delivers its verdict, then enters into no further correspondence. It leaves a completely clear result, but with opaque reason. This is obviously crushing to Indigenous Australians –– who are left to make sense of a brutalising experience. And for the rest of us, we’re flattened into two camps that risk something even worse than polarisation. We risk becoming inscrutable to one another. We risk not just disagreement, but mutual incomprehension.
Two things seem true. First, that Australians were initially open to the Voice, and second, that in the end it wasn’t even close. The drop-off in support itself isn’t unusual in Australian referendums, and is a common feature of the ones that lose. But ultimately the margin was simply too big to suggest the Voice could have been tweaked to victory, or that a better Yes campaign would have done the trick.
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