Noel Pearson likened Indigenous Australians’ push for justice to a mouse taking on an elephant. Tonight, the mouse got squashed.
Noel Pearson calls it “the elephant and the mouse problem that has characterised Indigenous affairs” – the fact that Aboriginal people, who make up 3 per cent of the Australian population, have “extreme minority status” and have had no choice but to tolerate discrimination, and then beg for crumbs, from the 97 per cent.called the referendum for the No vote at 7.29pm. Vote counting had not even started in Queensland or Western Australia yet.
Any chance of Yes was sunk, really, the moment in April when Opposition Leader Peter Dutton rejected the proposal and killed any chance of bipartisanship. And then a few weeks ago, Warren Mundine said the Uluru Statement – an expression of the utmost grace – was a “symbolic declaration of war”. But democracy is brutal when it is brutal, and the only thing that matters in politics are the numbers.Another statistic that may be useful: a third of the Aboriginal population is under 18, compared with 18 per cent of the general population.The Aboriginal people who lobbied for this change are much older – elders like Pearson, Marcia Langton and Pat Anderson are getting on, and their hearts will be broken by the result.
The No campaigners and their conservative sympathisers can be pleased with the effectiveness of their campaign. That it contained mistruths and disinformation is not a source of shame for them. That neo-Nazis haunted the fringes of it, is something they take no responsibility for.Presumably these conservatives will take all their successful strategies and roll them out for other issues.
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