Quote:Loud and ‘nasty’ voices may not speak the truth on the Voice
Sean Kelly
In 2016, two votes, quite close together, helped shape a narrative that has affected the media’s approach to elections ever since. The victories of Brexit and Donald Trump were used to tell many stories. Among them was the idea that the loudest voices on the right may be more significant than they may at first seem; that the polling might be wildly wrong, disguising battalions of “shy Tories”.
The lingering effect of this story could be seen in 2022, in another pair of oddly similar elections. Many predicted the midterm elections in the United States would be a bloodbath for Joe Biden. Instead, there was remarkable stability – not a single sitting senator lost, the first time that has happened since 1912. In Victoria, many in the media expected the state election to be close, with Daniel Andrews losing seats. Late last week the final lower house result was called: Labor had in fact gained a seat.
It is important to note that in both cases the pollsters were fairly accurate. Certainly, the media prefers certain narratives over others (close contest versus blowout, say), which played a part. But it is hard to avoid the sense that here, as in America, loud and nasty voices somehow managed to convince large swathes of media that they were far more representative of general opinion than they in fact turned out to be.
Given this country will, next year, see a major national vote on a matter of historic importance – the referendum on the Indigenous Voice to Parliament – it is worth asking which of the two narratives will influence the media’s approach. Will editors and journalists approach it in the shadow of 2016, believing the loudest voices deserve coverage because they are broadly representative, even if polling suggests otherwise? Or will they take the more recent lesson: that vitriolic opposition from the usual suspects may tell us little that is useful?
Because of course there will be vitriolic opposition. Last week marked five years since the same-sex marriage plebiscite. By now, most will remember the result and little more. And most – though not those in the LGBTIQ community – will have forgotten how nasty things became. I cannot do better than quoting arts writer Dee Jefferson, who wrote at the time: “the debate has been as much a debate about homosexuality as it has been about marriage. The hardest part has been realising how much homophobia and hate actually exists.” There was a huge increase in demand for mental health services, and one study afterwards found increased levels of stress, anxiety and depression in the community whose rights were the subject of national debate.
Most will have forgotten the foolishness, too – the lame attempts by public figures to jump on every possible hook as a way of gaining relevance. Remember Tony Abbott attacking the NRL for allowing Macklemore to sing a hit song, supporting marriage equality, at the grand final – followed by Peter Dutton suggesting “free speech” implied a second song “against gay marriage” should be played as well?
The greater foolishness, though, came about in the way that the actual topic of debate was quickly left behind, in favour of feverish speculation about what might come next. Marriage was not really the issue, “No” campaigners declared. They were fighting to prevent the end of Mother’s Day. From the thinnest of legal pretexts, they argued the real danger was that priests would be punished, and that defending traditional marriage would become illegal. Marriage equality was, said Senator Cory Bernardi, a “rainbow Trojan horse”.
On the Voice front, both the Minister for Indigenous Australians, Linda Burney, and Indigenous academic Marcia Langton have recently warned of vitriol. We are in the early days of this new debate; still, the signs are not good. In recent weeks we have seen prominent commentators recycle old, dangerous tropes. One referred to “the Indigenous industry”, with its nasty implication that there is good money to be made out of being Indigenous. Another warned us that the Voice could be filled with people like Lidia Thorpe; it might behave like Noel Pearson. This is the worst type of condescension: you cannot have a Voice because you cannot be trusted to appoint the right type of Indigenous person.
And sure enough, the other pattern from the marriage debate has recurred too: such insinuations are accompanied in the public sphere by wild speculation about legal consequences, with rhetoric just as absurdly overdone. The Voice will be a “shadow government”, we have been warned. And “Parliamentary democracy as we have known it will be dead”, we are told.
This past weekend marked 30 years since Paul Keating’s landmark Redfern speech, in which he told the truth about our violent history. Another recent anniversary went largely unremarked: it is 25 years since John Howard, on the ABC, held a photocopied map of Australia up to the camera and told viewers that without his intervention native title laws would allow Aboriginal veto over development on 78 per cent of the land mass of Australia. “Now, that is a very simple message.” It was, too – he was telling voters that First Australians were coming for their land. Now we are being fed a similar line: they are coming for our government.
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