Inside the voice campaigns: how muddled messages and voter confusion led to a crushing defeat
On Saturday evening, in a nondescript office in North Sydney, Yes23 campaigners and their supporters – 80 or so people – gathered to watch Australians reject the Indigenous voice to parliament.
It had been a dry campaign, but people permitted themselves a tipple and something to eat. Nobody at the private wake was surprised as the results came in. Before the result had even been confirmed, Marcia Langton had declared reconciliation was “dead”.
People watched intently as Tanya Hosch, a board member of Yes23, articulated her “huge disappointment” on the ABC’s live broadcast and reasoned that the task now was to mobilise the millions of Australians who had voted yes.
“We are going to have to bring that together and maintain that, because that is going to be the strength of what enables us to move forward in a way that is constructive, and actually means that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people do start to live like equals in their own country,” she said.
Televisions in North Sydney were switched to the ABC broadcast and to the live call of the results on Sky News, but someone pulled the plug on Sky when the network cut to a break just as Dean Parkin started speaking from the public function in Ashfield.
People watched Anthony Albanese acknowledge the defeat from parliament house. There were speeches. Danny Gilbert a lawyer, company director and philanthropist and one of the co-chairs of the board, thanked people for their effort and commitment.
Knowing you are going to lose a campaign never quite prepares you for experiencing it, and this wasn’t just a campaign. This was a request from the original inhabitants of the continent to restructure conversations between Indigenous people and government – a request grounded in the history of dispossession and silencing.
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The rebuff felt savage. This was a big opportunity to lose. Tears flowed. The mourning was visceral and deep. But later in the night, when some of the group kicked on after the North Sydney wake, resilience had returned to the fore. The mourning was laced with defiance.
The voice was dead. Time to regroup. Time to consider what next.
Muddled messaging
Organisations that would spearhead the “no” campaign were marshalling from August 2022. Janet Albrechtson, a columnist for The Australian, has put together a fascinating account of how the naysayers came together. Ginger groups. Lawyers. Thinktank types. John Roskam, a former executive director at the Institute of Public Affairs. According to Albrechtson’s timeline, Advance Australia – one of the main groups leading the charge – resolved by September last year to run the no campaign. The advocacy group began “recruiting support” from members in December and was undertaking field research by early January.
The no camp shifted in shape and tack over the campaign, but always went out of its way to claim underdog status. Warren Mundine’s group, Recognise A Better Way, was the first to lay claim to “official” no campaign status, pulling together a motley crew, including controversial former Labor minister Gary Johns, former Nationals deputy PM John Anderson, and Country Liberal senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price, a Warlpiri woman and former deputy mayor of Alice Springs.
Nampijinpa Price would later split off, linking up with Advance – the group for which she’d formerly been a spokesperson – to front a no campaign they called Fair Australia.
Fair and Recognise worked alongside each other for a period – in tandem, if not in total harmony – before Mundine rolled his campaign into Advance’s and became co-leader publicly alongside Nampijinpa Price. Various confected outrages, including criticism they hadn’t been granted tax-deductible gift status, came from this chopping and changing – Mundine had complained about, but had not applied for, DGR status for Recognise A Better Way. That status was granted and listed in the May 2023 budget papers, but Mundine withdrew the application as the two campaigns merged. The merged entity, Australians for Unity, would be quickly granted DGR status once the paperwork was actually lodged and the no campaign resolved its forward direction.
Advance is not officially attached to the Liberal party, despite numerous crossovers in staff and goals. Initially coming to prominence for its spectacular failure to keep Tony Abbott in Warringah against the challenge of Zali Steggall in 2019, and a series of bizarre stunts and controversial billboards in 2022, some Liberal sources questioned “why we’re playing around with them”. Despite the federal Coalition’s official stance to oppose the voice, many Liberal staffers declined to hand out flyers or stand at pre-poll booths for the no side.
There are some in the yes campaign who believe the referendum was lost at the point where Peter Dutton returned to work in January 2023 with a list of 15 questions about the voice to parliament. The previous November, the Nationals had decided to oppose the proposal. Nampijinpa Price expressed her opposition to the voice standing alongside the Nationals leader, David Littleproud.
Nampijinpa Price rehearsed one of the key tropes the no side would promulgate successfully during the campaign, contending the voice would “divide us along lines of race”. In his letter to Albanese that was sent to the media at the same time, Dutton landed a second significant trope of the no campaign – where is the detail? In time the messaging would ramp up to socalled “elites” versus the outer-suburbs.
At this point, Dutton had not locked