Australia had a chance to take a step forward in redressing the exclusion of its Indigenous people – and chose not to. In a referendum held in October, voters rejected a constitutional amendment that would have established an institution, the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice, that could ‘make representations’ to government and parliament on matters of concern for Indigenous people.

To pass, the amendment required a double majority: it needed to take more than half of the national-level vote and win in at least four out of six states. It did neither. On a 90 per cent turnout under mandatory voting, 60 per cent voted against. It only won a majority in the Australian Capital Territory.

Supporters of the referendum were left pointing the finger at disinformation – and those who pushed it for political gain.

A history of exclusion

The Indigenous inhabitants of the land now known as Australia currently comprise 3.8 per cent of the country’s population. The overwhelming majority – almost 92 per cent – identify as Aboriginal, while roughly four per cent identify as Torres Strait Islanders and the rest as a mix of the two.

For a long time, Indigenous Australians lacked any recognition. European settlers saw Australia as an empty space ripe to be filled and, unlike in New Zealand, didn’t see any need for a treaty with the people already there. Indigenous Australians only got the right to vote in 1962 and, following a successful referendum, were put on the census as late as 1972 – until then, they literally didn’t count. They remain unrecognised in the country’s constitution.

For most of the 20th century, assimilation laws saw Indigenous children forcibly taken from their families on a mass scale and put into institutions, fostered or handed to childless white couples to be raised as white. It’s been estimated that between 1910 and 1970 this was the fate of between 10 and 30 per cent of Indigenous children. The horror of the ‘stolen generations’ only began to be acknowledged in the mid-1990s. In 1997 the Australian Human Rights Commission issued a report, Bringing Them Home, containing 54 recommendations for healing and reconciliation, including the disclosure of truth, an apology and the provision of compensation and family reunion services.

A belated prime ministerial apology came only in 2008. That same year, the government issued a plan, Closing the Gap, aimed at reducing disadvantage among Indigenous people. After most of its targets expired unmet, a new approach – the National Agreement on Closing the Gap – was developed in partnership with the Coalition of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peak Organisations in 2020.

But little progress has been made in making good on a long history of exclusion. On almost any indicator, Indigenous people remain two to three times worse off than non-Indigenous Australians. They have lower access to education, higher unemployment rates, less income, worse health and astronomically higher incarceration rates. Being dramatically underrepresented in decision-making bodies, they also lack the tools to change any of these.

The Uluru Statement from the Heart

The road towards the referendum started over a decade ago, with discussions held by the Expert Panel on Constitutional Recognition of Indigenous Australians, which concluded that constitutional recognition was the way to go. But the call for a referendum was delayed, likely due to insufficient public support.

In 2016, a Referendum Council concluded that constitutional reform should proceed and include a declaration of recognition, a ban on racial discrimination and the institution of a ‘First Nations Voice to Parliament’ that would be consulted, on a nonbinding basis, on issues relevant to Indigenous people.

In 2017, the First Nations Dialogues issued the Uluru Statement from the Heart, which called for the Voice, a truth commission and a treaty. The Voice was viewed as the first step, meant to open up a conversation and enable further progress.

Then-Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull, of the centre-right Liberal Party, rejected the Uluru Statement. But in 2018 another committee was set up and tasked with investigating options for constitutional change – and again, it endorsed a constitutionally enshrined Voice to Parliament. The Labor opposition promised to submit the proposal to a referendum if it won the next election.

Political change: potential and limitations

Things started to move after the May 2022 election, in which the Liberal/National coalition got its lowest vote in decades, failing to secure a fourth consecutive term. In his victory speech, Labor’s incoming prime minister, Anthony Albanese, promised to deliver progress on long-stalled policies to address Indigenous rights, specifically committing to acting on the Uluru Statement and holding a referendum to enshrine the Voice in the constitution.

The proposed constitutional amendment and text of the ballot question were made public in March 2023 and approved by parliament in June. The government also endorsed a set of principles of representation, transparency and accountability that would be used to design the Voice. It was made clear that, as the name implied, this new body would give a voice to Indigenous people but not have decision-making authority or veto power, nor would it manage money or deliver services. Any further decision on its composition, functions, powers and procedures would be in the hands of parliament.

Foreshadowing what was to come, the Liberal and National opposition parties submitted dissenting reports: the Liberals proposed numerous changes to the referendum bill and the Nationals rejected the proposal entirely.

By siding with the No campaign, possibly to try to recover some of the ground lost in the last election, the opposition doomed the constitutional amendment. With the threshold for approval so high, referendums are infrequent in Australia: there hadn’t been one for almost 25 years. And successful ones are rarer still: the last carried was held almost a half century ago. No referendum has ever won a majority without the two main parties’ support.

By late 2022 the large initial lead of the Yes side had vanished, and by mid-2023 the No side was consistently ahead. It remained so throughout the campaign.

For and against

In compliance with the legal requirement to distribute an official pamphlet presenting the case for both sides, members of parliament who’d voted for and against the amendment bill drafted and approved a text containing their side’s arguments. This meant that disinformation was inserted into the process from the start: as shown by an independent fact-checking initiative, several claims in the No pamphlet were either false or misleading.

The Yes campaign included groups such as Australians for Indigenous Constitutional Recognition, From the Heart, The Uluru Dialogue, Uphold and Recognise and Yes23. In parliament, they were supported by a non-partisan group, Parliamentary Friends of the Uluru Statement, including members of the Labor and Liberal parties and some independents.

The Yes campaign focused its messaging on fairness, reconciliation and healing, seeking to sell the idea that Australia would be made better by the recognition of a space for Indigenous people to have a say in national politics.

Indigenous people overwhelmingly supported the proposal, although some opposed it – because they thought it didn’t go far enough, saw it as whitewash or hoped not to see relationships they’d painstakingly developed sidelined.

The No campaign encompassed several groups including Advance, Australians for Unity – the merger of two groups, Recognise a Better Way and Fair Australia – and the Blak Sovereign Movement. Crucially, some of these groups were founded by Indigenous Australians, and the No campaign committee had some Indigenous members. Contrarian right-wing Indigenous voices were disproportionately boosted by supportive media.

Different organisations in the No camp fulfilled different roles. Advance, a conservative lobby group, went after young progressives with its ‘Not Enough’ campaign, suggesting that the Voice wasn’t what Indigenous Australians wanted and would do nothing to solve their problems. The Blak Sovereign Movement questioned the timing, arguing that before establishing the Voice it was necessary to negotiate a treaty.

A fierce battle raged on social media as well as in traditional media, where ownership is highly concentrated in a few hands. Disinformation and racial abuse were rife and overwhelmingly mobilised in support of the No campaign, with right-wing commentators joined by outright trolls.

The Australian Electoral Commission ran a voter education campaign and Yes campaigners and social media users worked to fact-check claims and debunk conspiracy theories. But none of this sufficed.

Two much-repeated claims were that the Voice would divide Australians and that it would enshrine privileges for Indigenous people. Campaigners for No peddled a zero-sum idea: that non-Indigenous people would lose if Indigenous people won. For instance, they falsely claimed that people would lose their farms or Indigenous people would charge them to access beaches.

Another fear-stoking argument was that the Voice was only the beginning – after they secured this, Indigenous people would go for more, until they took everything from the rest. The Voice could embolden them. It could, for example, open up a conversation about land rights. This may have been a genuine fear for Australia’s powerful extractive industries, explaining why the right-wing think tanks that have consistently opposed climate policy also lobbied against the Voice.

Having sowed disinformation and confusion, the No campaign went on and told voters that, if in doubt, they should play it safe and vote no.

What next?

It worked. Regions with high proportions of Indigenous people overwhelmingly voted yes, but a clear majority of Australians said no. People are now more divided and polarised than they were when the referendum was proposed.

The result could bring even greater backlash. Emboldened, some opposition members of parliament have since withdrawn their previously stated support for a treaty and suggested rolling back practices they now present as inadmissible concessions to identity politics. This could be a harbinger for the opposition pinning its comeback hopes on a culture war strategy.

The referendum defeat has dealt a hard blow to hopes of challenging the exclusion of Indigenous Australians, but it doesn’t quite mean game over. A specific proposal has been defeated, but there’s plenty left to advocate for. Progress on the wider reconciliation agenda, including other forms of recognition and redress, could still be possible, particularly at state and local levels. The Uluru Statement from the Heart remains the compass, and civil society will keep urging politicians and the public to follow its path.