To be shocked that Australia voted NO on this referendum?

[koalaknickers]

"The Voice to Parliament was proposed in the Uluru Statement from the Heart, a 2017 document crafted by Indigenous leaders that set out a roadmap for reconciliation with wider Australia.

Australia's Indigenous citizens, who make up 3.8% of the country's 26 million population, have inhabited the land for about 60,000 years but are not mentioned in the constitution and are, by most socio-economic measures, the most disadvantaged people in the country."

Australia rejects Indigenous referendum in setback for reconciliation (msn.com)

I have family out there. I just assumed that they would have voted YES. I hope they did. Perhaps I should ask them.

I'm also Australian and find the "oh gee, so unclear" claim to be complete bullshit.

It was a fear-driven No campaign full of the usual racist drivel and lies

https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2023/oct/12/indigenous-voice-to-parliament-referendum-misinformation-fact-checked

Legally a change to the constitution requires a referendum.
Australian posters have told us this a few times on the thread.

This post and your others are excellent.

You seem to be making out they have all been banished from society,

Well, they were!

The White Australia policy was only stopped in 1973 and things did not magically become better overnight. They still faced racism. Attitudes had not changed across the board. Why would they? People had grown up seeing them as second class citizens and some would have preferred to keep their free/cheap labour as it was.

Rising up from the wreckage of their lives, mourning their stolen children and land and still facing racism, would have made it very difficult for them to end up in comparable lives with the whites who had got rich off their backs.

I have been reading everyone's posts with interest and I don't claim to know all the answers. It was good to read more about the workings of Australian politics and the nuances of what has just happened here.

I am also noting that in 2020 the then Prime Minister claimed Australian slavery had not happened! It is very revealing about what Aboriginal people are facing with these attitudes.

I agree that after everything that has been done to the Aboriginals' society, there is no easy way to fix it. In fact, it's impossible for everything to go back the way it was. Many of their spiritual sites have gone forever. The travesties that were carried out are still within living memory and healing is going to take a long time.

I am not claiming to know the answers, but I thought that voting YES might have been a step in the right direction.

I really do believe they are owed a debt.

EDITED: changed "are going" to "have gone".

The whole atmosphere of Australia is really different to the UK.

The first time I went there I was glad I visited Malaysia on the way back. Otherwise, I wouldn’t have felt like I had been on holiday at all.

Maybe I’m take-as-you-find-me, selfish, crude and vulgar. I don’t think so though.

Complete communities wiped out by gunfire, herded off cliffs, burned alive and poisonings by the use of strychnine which is widely regarded as one of the most excruciating ways to die.

"The argument that all this happened under Britain’s rule is not true. All of these images are from after 1901 when Australia became a nation. The neck chains were used well up until the 1960’s and only used on our people.

Neck chains were used while Aboriginal men were marched from their homelands into prisons, concentration camps known as missions and lock hospitals or forced into slavery. Women were also forced into slavery as domestic servants.

Many of the following images contain images of Aboriginal men and children in chains who were often chained up by the neck and sent to Aboriginal concentration camps.

The oppression continues today as well. In recent years, the United Nations have handed down multiple scathing reports on Australia’s lack of effort when it comes to improving the shocking rates of suicide, incarceration, health and education. Australia doesn’t even bother responding to these reports any more. There is no pressure for them to do so. They have created the perfect strangle hold on our existence as they try to force us to assimilate into their toxic and destructive society.

And just when you think Australia could do no worse… today, they even choose the date of British invasion (Jan 26) to celebrate ‘Australia Day’. And that is why hundreds of thousands of us hit the streets each year in protest."

Australia's brutal treatment of Aboriginal people (welcometocountry.org)

EDITED: Added quotation marks as taken from a website.

"Writer Chris Owen who Authored the book, Every Mothers Son Is Guilty: Policing the Kimberley Frontier of Western Australia feels there is a lot more that needs to be done in order for all Australians to learn about Australia’s brutal past. He has recently decided that he will be working on another book the outlines even more Aboriginal history from the rest of Western Australia.

He is also posting some of his research from W.A and elsewhere across Australia on social media. Some of his posts have been shared several hundred times. In his most recent post, he highlights a diary entry from a young British Settler (Emily Caroline Creaghe) who was passing through Queensland gulf country in 1883. During her stay at Lorne Hills station, she detailed how the station owner (Jack Watson) had around 40 sets of Aboriginal ears nailed around the walls of the homestead"

It’s disturbing how she can write about the weather in one sentence and trophy killings in the next sentence. From her tone, it sounds like she is more disturbed by the weather than the owner of the station where she was staying.

Most of what Chris has posted is information that can be found online. All it takes is a little digging and you will discover the truth about brutal crimes against humanity that took place during Australia’s colonisation.

It seems that Australian’s have a real fear of this truth and so they should. To this day, there has been no justice for these crimes. Some descendants of these killers still occupy the same lands where their forefathers committed these crimes. The world needs to know about Australia’s history that happened at a time when International laws were in place."

Queensland man had 40 sets of Aboriginal ears nailed to walls (welcometocountry.org)

Just as a little side-note, the term Aboriginal, while historical is outdated. Whilst always lumped together in the ‘white’ intent of Aboriginal, Torres Strait Islanders generally don’t identify as Aboriginal. Therefore, to be correct you would need to say Aboriginals and Torres Strait Islanders. This then became a mouthful and a half, so the term Indigenous was used as it covers both groups. Lately, First Nations has become popular but with stats we still report data in terms of ‘Indigenous’. On an individual basis, you identify an individual as their country/land/group name, example ‘Linda, a Gamilaroi woman, is 46yo’. So, for those using the term Aboriginal, either add in the Torres or swap to one of the other two terms if wanting to be correct.

What on earth made you think the majority of the population would ever vote for something like this?

There was one area where the Yes vote won, the wealthy privileged and very expensive capital. The fact that the political class were in favour of yes but the population weren’t tells me that those in office so not represent their voters. The solution is for the population to vote for people who share their views and will represent them properly. It doesn’t mean there is anything wrong with the electorate.

The OP asked why people would vote this way, and many people have pointed out that there are serious issues, from a law and constitutional POV, that might make people disinclined to have voted yes.

If the OP simply intended to dismiss those answers there was zero point in posting.

Your comment really is an excellent example of what those concerns entail, it was not just a vote about "recognizing" indigenous people, it was potentially about changing the constitutional basis of lawmaking in the country. That's a serious thing, and whether it will even achieve the desired effect will depend on how it is implemented. Mistakes on this kind of thing can destabilize whole governments. Ethnic divisions, once constitutionalized, become concretized in a way that may have unexpected effects, even potentially really negative effects for the people it is meant to help.

That people think it is a good idea to virtue signal with the constitution without working out the details of proposed changes is basically the answer to the OPs question.

PS - are you suggesting that you think that people whose ancestors hail from the UK should have more rights than those whose claim to citizenship is more recent??!!

and many people have pointed out that there are serious issues, from a law and constitutional POV

I don't see that here, can you briefly explain what these serious legal and constitutional issues would be in recognising that indigenous people exist and that there should be an advisory group?

There are a lot of news items about things which happen in Britain, all the time. I never comment on them because I don't live there so don't feel qualified to discuss them. However, it does surprise me how MNers who don't live in a country feel they need to give their (quite frankly unwanted) view. There is nothing wrong btw with passing a randon comment, but this arguing about rights and wrongs of a decision made in a country posters don't live in and which doesn't affect them at all is pointless. "Having family out there" isn't enough.

I would add arguing about the rights and wrong of a decision that happens in a country they do not live in, does not effect them and where the posters both demonstrably and repeatedly do not understand the political procedural issues at play vis a vis how referenda actually work is pointless.

TBH alot of the comments feel very colonial in themselves- look at those awful racist backward people who did something we don't 'get'. How awful and uncivilised of them.

You realize it’s the whole world saying this, not just British people. On my social media, a lot of the people talking about how racist Australia is are Australian!

Social media is not the whole world.

This reads a bit like ‘how dare people not vote in the way, I think they should. I’m so morally virtuous and those who disagree with me are morally defective in someways.’

Could be the tagline of mn ;

With lashings of “look at these brutish colonials and my superior ability to google documentaries!”

Not to mention the obtuse failure to take on the repeated points that referenda in Australia, regardless of topic, do not succeed without bipartisan support; that only eight of 45 have ever passed; that plenty of Indigenous people were against ithis one; and that the YES case made a complete bollocks of presenting their case in any sort of detail. But apparently we’re supposed to vote for changes to our constitution without knowing what they are, and trust politicians who say “Trust me!” or else we’re nasty bigots who hate Indigenous people.

And now we have Peter Dutton (opposition leader) backing away from his promise that he'd hold a second referendum when he and the Liberal party get in Government.
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2023/oct/16/peter-dutton-second-referendum-australian-indigenous-voice-to-parliament-poll

This is an excellent but undermentioned point. The Australian Capital Territory was the only one of the states and territories to vote yes. Talk about the ‘Canberra Bubble’!

For those that don’t know, that is like the UK asking the referendum question - do you support the formation of a group to advise government of policy made up only of people who can trace their ancestry back to the Domesday Book? Yes or No.

And the only constituency to vote ‘yes’ is Islington.

Canberra has a well educated and well paid population primarily employed by the public sector. If a referendum was held on the subject ‘Is Canberra representative of Australia as a whole’, I think we can guarantee another no vote.

This has already been outlined quite a lot on the thread, but just to name few:

The number one issue is that governance structures are complicated and work together in synergies. If you add a whole new element, the idea that you would somehow leave it to later, to even talk about how it would be consituted, is just incredibly foolish.

There is a strong tendency do this in legislation in recent years, and people make this argument that it is just about "recognition" or support and it will all come out in the wash because after all we all want things to work out right. But it very often ends up with bad policy that has bad effects. If the people proposing this weren't prepared to do the work to show what kind of body they were proposing, with some significant detail, there is no reason anyone should have trusted them to do the work later.

There is nothing to say, either, that once this was constitutionalized, it would be accomplished through legislation, rather than through some other means.

In particular, it would have been important to define what is meant by "advisory" body. This could mean what is in the end a totally ineffective waste of money and air, all the way through to a body that has some kind of ability to propose policy, to some kind of veto power, who knows?

The other element that is going to be very concerning to many is the institutionalization of ethnicity as defining how much, or what kind of influence, people have on government policy. That's a pretty direct over-turning of the principles western democracies have worked under. The same principles, by the way, that said that actually, it was illegitimate to restrict voting by racial group.

And to take that thought a little further, it's not only directly concerning that it might mean you now have some citizens with more avenues than others, it's concerning because you have set a precedent that political rights, at the constitutional level, can be tied to ethnicity. Constitutions are long term documents, meant to last hundreds of years. Where could a precedent like that take people in 200 years? What if the public mood changed, could other group's right be defined based on things like ethnicity, or how long their ancestors had been there?

With those kinds of considerations at stake, it's pretty natural that in order to vote yes, people would want some clear information about what they were voting for.

You have to wonder on what basis people think it would convince anyone to say, "aw, no, we don't need to have any clear outline of what this would look like or how it would function." If they believe it's a good idea with substance they should be keen to talk about those things.

For anyone interesting in the 'No' perspective articulated by legendary Indigenous rights activist - and founder of the Tent Embassy in Canberra - here is a fascinating interview he gave a week before the vote. https://overland.org.au/2023/10/the-use-and-abuse-of-history-in-the-voice-referendum-debate-an-interview-with-professor-gary-foley/

The interview was tweeted by John Pilger, who wrote, produced and presented the devastating documentary 'Utopia' in 2013. 'A 'yes' vote is said to be 'on the right side of history'? But is it? And what does it really mean?'