Old Labor would have delivered the Voice

An underwhelming term of government, uninspiring leadership, inadequate policy and a poorly run campaign ultimately cost the referendum.

(No amount of vibe was going to be good enough to persuade many Australians requiring a discussion. Picture NCA NewsWire / Seb Haggett)

The referendum for an indigenous voice to parliament was defeated after a vote last Saturday. As the numbers came in highlighting a strong win for the ‘no’ vote, questions began coming in about the size of the margin, the quality of the marketing, the effectiveness of the campaign, and ultimately, the competence of the government who put forward the referendum.

While it was always going to be a difficult task to get a ‘yes’ for the Voice, that task was made more difficult by the choices of a disconnected Labor government. Bereft of transformative policy, and without charismatic leaders to promote their vapid legislative offerings, Labor callously trudged through the stark realities facing the livelihoods of many Australians, and ended up trampling the Voice in the process. Through its approach to governing and its disaccociation to the remit that forms the essence of its party, Albanese’s Labor was not able to deliver on the Voice.    

The images of Whitlam and Lingiari linger through the moribund legacy of the modern Labor Party, next to Bob Hawke’s Barunga appearance and Keating’s Redfern address, up in the trophy cabinet in the pool room at the party HQ next to the iconography of waning progressiveness from glory days gone by. Albanese wanted to dust off the old imagery of better days when his party was better and better people represented it, echoes of a time long ago when Labor represented the working class and Australia was a world leading progressive middle power.

The national conferences used to be packed with the muttering murmurs and raucousness of drunken trade unionists and flawed Labor MPs who wore their hearts on their sleeve. They were replaced with Amanda Rishworths and Richard Marleses, and the kinetic energy and healthy debate of the past was replaced with an engineered staleness, designed to obstruct and censor debate on things like AUKUS and the state of the middle east despite the strong wishes of members and branches.

Neoliberalism washed in over the unipolar world at the conclusion of the cold war and the beginning of Fukuyama’s “end of history” in the early 90s. Paul Keating had overseen and implemented neoliberal economic reforms in his time as treasurer and PM, but it was Howard who ensured that they would take shape. By the time Clintons NAFTA had driven the final stake of neoliberal reform into the US jobs market, Howard had all but set up Work Choices somewhere in the middle of a mining boom where most Australians had fallen asleep.

The Labor Party that emerged after the epoch of Howard, had all but changed forever. The Blairite model of centrist, neoliberal leadership had made its mark on a new breed of Labor politician in Canberra, but not so much its newly elected PM Kevin Rudd. The neoliberal system wanted Rudd to be more like Tony Blair, but as he broke with the script to offer leadership that met with our national interest and made the mistake to put a tax on mining giants, he faced the wrath of an apparatus geared entirely to extinguishing such resistance. The neo-Labor converts stepped in and removed him, all but ensuring the genetic alteration of the ALP.

So now, the transmogrification of the party of the workers is complete. The shrine of Medicare, the grotto of workers rights, and the chapel of free education, sit collecting dust out the back while the modern crop of front of house MPs play end-stage neoliberalism to a frustrated and desperate public audience. After the last of the Creans were silenced, the new class of Bowen, Marles and Albanese are now firmly in control, and the party they lead is no longer the party people thought they had voted for. As the Gouldian finch habitats are removed for habitats to house foreign military personnel in the NT, and land is cleared for the new coal and gas, as the cost of living is imposed on us by a corporate-facing neo-Labor-operated treasury, and the profits are ensured by its complicit treasurer – with its vapid and callously inadequate policy, how was this version of Labor ever thinking they could deliver the voice?

Albanese managed to walk around in his wide brim hat for moments of the fraught ‘yes’ campaign, riding the tattered threads of legacy woven by people who were better at his job than he was. Channeling the pool room memories as he mimicked the GOATs who walked before him, he clearly hadn’t done enough. Busy with trying to win government at all costs since taking the reins in 2019, he evidently lacked the connection to the issue that could inspire the nation to vote ‘yes’.

Instead of having the difficult conversations on the suburban fringes and rural areas where the discussion was needed, the campaign focused on preaching to the choirs, singing to the inner-city populations who needed no convincing. Without adequately covering culturally and linguistically diverse communities, and the rural areas that lay beyond, the campaign was doomed to implode in the city streets. With ‘yes’ polling comfortably in the sixties on its launch, the campaign seemed to shrink every time anyone from this government opened their mouths, finally settling in the depths of the forties on polling day.

As time moves on, more questions will be asked about the effectiveness of the ‘yes’ campaign. (Source: @KosSamaras Twitter)

Seeking to make uneasy pacts with the subjective and insincere corporate press, Albanese’s lack of charisma and confidence was compounded by bad faith interviewers who asked divisive and wedging questions, and the pundits who chopped up his delivery in subjective op-eds. Instead of going to war on the concentrated press that sabotaged his every effort before, during and after the election, Albanese mumbled his way through viral clips featuring disingenuous lines of inquiry from the likes of Natalie Barr and Ben Fordham.

Labor’s allegiance with a contrarian corporate sector who waits for a viable right-wing coalition it can support to return, limited the way his party could engage with the issue. Instead of a simple and powerful national gesture of red sand between a sincere PM and the Aboriginal people, Albanese stood next to people like Alan Joyce to promote the voice. Drinking the kool aid at black tie Business Council of Australia dinners, and swanning around in Rio Tinto high-vis and tuxedos while Jennifer Westacott chewed his ear off at fancy drinks, did not look good to the struggling general population of Australia. Every time a vapid corporate elite came down from Elysium to support the Voice, a culturally and linguistically diverse neighbourhood struggling to buy fresh fruit and vegetables turned their telly off and heard the droning tinnitus from a politically uninspiring and moribund policy platform placed down by a party that now appears no better than the last one.

Uninspiring Labor party policy platforms were an inhibitor for the healthy growth of the Voice as an idea in the population. Everywhere you look there is evidence of a small target opposition who spent more time shadowing a right-wing government and obsessing about cosplaying legislation than thinking and devising the kind of unique and thoughtful policy that is urgently needed. No economic reforms, changes to negative gearing, capital gains or measures to mitigate corporate profits. No environmental measures to stop new coal and gas on a dying planet. Not a whimper on the need to break up the media concentration that compares with China and Egypt. Nothing to address the foreign owned corporate monopolies, duopolies, tetrarchies, titans and leviathans who rapaciously pollute for profit, and profit from overpricing marginalised everyday Australians. No quarter for aid to the poorest under and hovering around the poverty line, or helping the one-in-six children going without. No resistance to a foreign takeover of our strategic policy. No ideas to govern a country, or deliver and inspire such a referendum.

Instead of looking to tie in the plight of a struggling and marginalised working class with the aims and objectives of First Nations people, the government who is currently doing its best to ignore this crucial issue, had to promote the voice with both humanitarian hands behind its back and its golden tongue sticking out of its mouth. Rather than joining the nation together across race, religion and class to deliver a transformative national rejuvenation that brought all Australians together, the campaign focused on easy wins and left vacuums for the ‘no’ campaign to fill rent free, allowing for a further division in an increasingly divided nation.

Perhaps Paul Keating or Gough Whitlam, or even Kevin Rudd, could’ve done the job, but this iteration of the Labor party hasn’t got the faintest clue how to deliver something like the Voice. From the moment it started the campaign, the Labor government muffled and mumbled the referendum towards certain defeat, thanks to a dire combination of insincerity, lack of engagement, and poor strategy that involved appeasing bad faith actors in the press and corporate world. With the government nervously eager to move on and a PM who has sheepishly gone to ground on the issue, who is left to close this gap now, when the people on the other side were the ones saying ‘no’ all along?