The “Indigenous Voice” referendum campaign is collapsing around the ears of the “Yes” side — and they’re shrieking blame at everyone but themselves. For months — ever since PM Anthony Albanese unveiled the referendum question — the poll momentum has been steadily downward. The last polls indicated Victoria as the lone Mainland state where the Yes vote was ahead.
How can this be? After all, the Yes campaign has the backing of tens of millions of corporate funding for slick advertising campaigns, and a slew of celebrities, politicians, sports stars and big business leaders, all shouting their support. The No campaign only has a shoestring, grass-roots campaign, spearheaded by two conservative Aboriginal Australians.
Well, there’s your answer, really.
But it’s not an answer the Yes campaign wants to hear. Easier to just screech, “deplorables!” at everyone else.
Key voice to parliament architects have accused the media of “driving sentiment” towards a no vote while conceding their own messaging needs to be positive.
Numerous polls in recent months have shown declining support for a yes vote at the upcoming referendum and advocates Megan Davis and Noel Pearson are among those to criticise the mainstream media’s coverage of the debate […]
“All (people) are hearing is Albo, Jacinta, Dutton, politician, politician, politician,” she said.
The Australian
Which is a blatant lie, of course. We’re hearing every day from the likes of Davis and Pearson themselves, not to mention Yes campaign leader Thomas Mayo, lawyer Teela Reid, academic Marcia Langton, and many more.
Their only problem seems to be that we’re paying attention to what they say.
A key architect of the Indigenous Voice to Parliament thinks Australia is obligated to return ‘stolen cultural land’ and ‘compensate’ First Nations people.
Marcia Langton has republished her ‘Welcome to Country Handbook’ with new details pertaining to the upcoming referendum […]
The prominent anthropologist and geographer is the latest in a string of government advisors on the ‘Yes’ side of the referendum who have publicly discussed compensation and land being returned to traditional owners, after Thomas Mayo and Teela Reid made similar representations.
The fact that the Yes side keep changing their story about what they really want from a “Voice” probably doesn’t help their cause. Mayo, for instance, walked back on his previous demands for reparations, a treaty, and for home-owning Australians to pay a “rent” to Aborigines. But, along comes Marcia Langton to reiterate that, no, they really mean all that.
Professor Langton quoted Mr Mayo, a fellow member of the Referendum Working Group.
She said: ‘The view among most Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people is well expressed by delegate Thomas Mayo’ […]
He listed ‘all the things we imagine when we demand’ a Voice, including ‘reparations, land back, abolishing harmful colonial institutions’.
Mr Mayo said a ‘guaranteed representative body’ was ‘needed [to]… properly pursue the rent that is owed and an abolishment of systems that harm us’ […]
In January this year, Ms Reid demanded ‘every Aboriginal elder in NSW should be living rent-free’.
These are their own words, not the words of “politicians in Canberra”. They can hardly complain when Australians take them as seriously as a referendum demands.
And Langton might want to stop threatening Australians with a good time in retaliation for voting No.
She recently noted that if the referendum were to fail […] She will not speak at conferences, and she can’t imagine there will be too many of her peers who would be willing to perform Welcome to Country ceremonies.
MSN
As a final note, while I still doubt that Albanese will chicken out of holding the referendum at all, there’s still a bit of such chatter in the wind.
Prominent Indigenous leader Noel Pearson has dismissed calls to delay the date of the constitutional referendum on the proposed Indigenous voice to parliament.
The Australian
At least he didn’t call anyone Marama Davidson’s favourite word, this time.
Still, it seems unlikely Albanese will call off the referendum. Doing so will politically damage him almost as much, perhaps even more, than an outright defeat.
But if the polling is to be believed, “Mr 32%” is in for a hiding, whether he goes ahead or not.
