Was the Voice Australia’s Meech Lake?
The debate was framed as a metropolitan elite interested in its own issues in opposition to wide swathes of the middle and working classes in rebellion against being dictated to by that elite.
Last month’s referendum in Australia proposing to create an “Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice to Parliament” and entrench it in the Constitution was painful for a political scientist to watch. This has little to do with the result (about 60% of Australian voters rejected it) and everything to do with what the referendum demonstrated about both Australian politics and the state of politics across the advanced democracies.
The debate surrounding the referendum, and the vote itself, contributed little new to the study of politics. Everything about the process was easily predictable beforehand. The Labor government of Anthony Albanese proposed a significant change to the country, one meant to shake the country from its torpor, what the Australian Left has criticized as the country’s mediocrity since Donald Horne wrote The Lucky Country in 1964. It invoked the successful 1967 constitutional referendum that removed parts of the Constitution that discriminated against Aboriginals (the census was required to ignore their very existence), and thought that the Voice to Parliament would have the same wide support that the 1967 proposal enjoyed. The opposition Liberal/National Coalition toyed with support for the proposal, and some members of the Liberal leadership left the front bench to campaign for it, but the Liberals ultimately came out against it, and campaigned against the referendum primarily on racialist grounds, When Albanese first announced the referendum, the Voice to Parliament seemed to have strong support, but that support dwindled as October 14 neared, and none of the six Australian states wound up supporting it.
As soon as opposition leader Peter Dutton came out against the Voice, numerous commentators began to compare the Voice referendum to the United Kingdom’s Brexit referendum of 2016. In both cases, the debate was cast as one of a metropolitan elite interested in its own issues in opposition to wide swathes of the middle and working classes in rebellion against being dictated to by that elite, and voting in defiance of perceived accusations of racism. However, the patterns at play here dated far back beyond 2016. When we consider the dimensions of government in opposition to “outsiders,” public exclusion from what were debates among government officials and intellectuals, public surprise at final constitutional proposals that were set in stone when released, and resentment against being told that opposition was amount to rejecting large parts of the country itself, the Voice to Parliament referendum felt like a replay of two failed constitutional amendment proposals in Canada from the early 1990s, the Meech Lake Accord and the Charlottetown Accord.
Meech Lake emerged from the 1982 patriation of the Canadian constitution, which gave Canada full control over amending its constitution by eliminating the role of the United Kingdom Parliament, and entrenched a Charter of Rights and Freedoms. The French-speaking province of Quebec rejected the overall package, arguing that the changes unilaterally reduced the powers of its National Assembly, hindered its efforts to protect the French language, and denied the existence of the Quebecois as one of Canada’s two founding peoples. In 1985, the Quebec government issued a proposal for reconciling Quebec to the patriated constitution, and in 1987, Ottawa and the ten provinces negotiated the Meech Lake Accord, which would have amended the Constitution in several places and acknowledged Quebec as a “distinct society within Canada” on the grounds of its linguistic makeup. There was little public discussion of the ongoing negotiations, and while academics had been dissecting Quebec’s proposals in detail, with a certain degree of sympathy, the agreement took the broader public by surprise. Layered on top of this were warnings that the Accord was a fait accompli, a seamless web that could not be changed, and necessary for Quebec not to seek independence from Canada. The simplest, but powerful argument against Meech Lake was that it served as a loaded gun pointed at Canadians outside Quebec, as questioning any aspect of the Accord amounted to rejection of Quebec, and ultimately Canadian unity. After Meech Lake foundered in the face of a strong populist reaction, the Charlottetown Accord of 1992 attempted to make the same changes (plus recognize the inherent right of the First Nations to self-government), but it was another agreement negotiated behind closed doors and 55% of Canadian voters rejected it in a referendum. This was an early edge of the 21st century populist movement, and was an early instance of the public strongly rejecting a proposal from political and intellectual elites that the public considered not just irrelevant to the country’s needs, but condescending in its presentation.
When Albanese announced on election night in 2022 that his new government would put The Voice to Parliament to a referendum that would entrench it in the Constitution, few Australians were familiar with the proposal, though it had received some discussion after the release of the Uluru Statement from the Heart, which served as the basis for the referendum proposal, mostly in the context of Malcolm Turnbull’s Coalition government rejecting the Statement. In fact, the Voice debate dated to 2010, when the Labor government of Julia Gillard appointed the Expert Panel on Constitutional Recognition of Indigenous Australians. The panel reported in 2012, calling for the explicit recognition of indigenous Australians in the constitution. This was followed by the creation of the Referendum Council in 2015 to develop a specific proposal for an amendment entrenching this recognition. In 2017, the Council issued its report, which called for a statement recognizing Aboriginal possession of Australia prior to British settlement in 1788, alongside the creation of “an Indigenous voice to be heard by Parliament, and the right to be consulted on legislation and policy that affect Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.” This was followed by the First Nations National Constitutional Convention later in 2017, which led to the Statement from the Heart, which called for the entrenchment of the Voice as a representative body and”truth-telling” via a Truth and Reconciliation Commission similar to those convened in South Africa and Canada. While Turnbull’s Coalition government rejected the proposal, claiming that a constitutional amendment was too difficult to do given the referendum requirement, the Labor opposition promised a referendum if it came to office.
At this point, the die was cast. Labor had committed itself not only to a referendum, but to the Statement from the Heart framework. The exact size and composition of the Voice, and the manner in which its members would be elected or appointed, were left undefined, and the whole project was left as defined in 2017, without specifics, and shrouded by emotional language such as voice, from the heart, and truth-telling, all rooted in post-modernist concepts of power and domination that the broader electorate would not understand, and found a little threatening.
Maach Lake and Charlottetown left the Canadian political system worse off, less able to deal with constitutional issues and prone to polarization over the next three decades. The issue of Quebec’s role in Canadian federalism remains unresolved, and the constitution has effectively become unamendable. Likewise, the Voice referendum has increased polarization in Australia, and probably set back the entire process of Aboriginal reconciliation.
References:
https://www.referendumcouncil.org.au/resources/discussion-paper.html
https://catalogue.nla.gov.au/catalog/5448964
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/ajph.12889
https://aiatsis.gov.au/explore/1967-referendum
https://www.jstor.org/stable/3551222
http://www.revparl.ca/english/issue.asp?art=831¶m=131
https://www.ubcpress.ca/insiders-and-outsiders
https://quillette.com/2023/10/31/brexit-and-the-voice-two-ill-conceived-referenda-2/
https://ap.org.au/2023/10/06/is-the-voice-australias-brexit/
https://australia.ipa.org.au/the-voice-referendum-as-australias-brexit-moment/