By Mark Kenny

A version of this article was originally published by The Canberra Times.

AS IT became obvious that the Voice referendum was doomed, advocates of its awkward hybridised model stayed the course, insisting it was now or never. They got both.

On the first anniversary of that heroic miscalculation, the long-term price is much clearer.

Who won? Certainly not Aboriginal Australians, nor the current government which has never fully recovered, nor even a fractured national soul.

Now stripped of major reform hopes in the foreseeable future, the once broadly popular project of meaningful recognition, has withered. The harsh electoral reality is that no constitutional change in this area will be plausible for a decade, maybe several.

No Labor leader is likely to risk it and the Coalition has never supported it.

The only word for the episode is setback. Australians have taken the No vote as a “mandate” for pulling out of welcomes to country, observed the respected leader, Patricia Anderson as the anniversary neared. Co-author of the formative Calma-Langton report, Tom Calma, spoke of a sense of “bewilderment” among Indigenous Australians at the outcome of the vote.

This is the observable cost of a vote that in the end, wasn’t even close - initially traumatic, then intergenerational in its demoralising effect.

Principal among the apologists for forging on without bipartisan backing was Anthony Albanese but he was hardly alone. Most in the Yes camp dismissed alternative approaches such as a legislated Voice or tightened wording, in favour of a pseudo-strategy that only makes sense if you can’t lose. 

This was catastrophically naive. Proponents underestimated how uncouth the debate would get. Ditto how ruthlessly their plan for a heightened national unity would be depicted as a grotesquely un-Australian pitch for special rights. Branded, of all things, divisive and racist.

If Indigenous leaders were not seized of Australia’s ahistorical coarseness and fearful referendum record, then it behoved the most experienced politicians to insist. Indeed, Albanese, as PM and as one of the longest serving MPs in the parliament, should have made his government’s sponsorship contingent on a model capable of attracting cross-party support.

Impossible? Co-Chair of the Uluru Dialogues, Professor Megan Davis has revealed she was open to calling off the referendum once polling showed it would fail.

Instead, all doubts were ignored as the government handed over the specifics to a grouping of Indigenous leaders who were entirely untried in staging nation-wide electoral campaigns.

In that act of delegation, arguably, there was too much heart, whereas in putting the actual case for constitutional change to unconvinced voters, too little.

The referendum did not merely need to overcome external criticism that it was an elite, cosmopolitan pre-occupation, it had to carry an internal penchant for valuing good intentions over hard-nosed strategy.  It was as if Indigenous leaders, the Albanese government and supporters of the Voice case – ie the broad centre-left – prioritised the gesture of holding the referendum over actually winning it.

This well-intentioned devotion also informed a misplaced sense of identity valorisation in which “whitefellas” behaved as if the campaign was not really theirs to run.

In fact, it had to be theirs if a non-indigenous majority was to be constructed. This proposal could not be conceived of narrowly as a discussion owned only by First Peoples because it was to be a decision of the entire population.

To prevail, therefore, the Voice needed the PM to speak powerfully from his heart about a stronger, fairer, and culturally richer nation. Every detail, every day, from every angle – including Australia’s unique opportunity to become the world’s greatest ancient-modern society. It never came.

In fact, advocacy from the government, including the Minister for Indigenous Australians, Linda Burney, was consistently mediocre.

Closer to the ground, a diffuse and pedestrian campaign ran adequately in the inner-cities, but in the suburbs and regions, voters knew little about why the Voice had to be in the Constitution, saw few signs, felt no buzz. These were the perfect conditions in which to run the effective anti-change slogan “if you don’t know, vote no”.

Albanese declared himself “all in” but in reality, his government stood back for months through 2022 and into 2023 as the unwieldy model was defined most forcefully by unscrupulous opponents.

A game-changing Yes campaign blitz was endlessly mooted but failed to materialise despite superior funds.

The model itself was the biggest problem. A non sequitur that felt like two separate questions, it exposed the project to enemy fire at its weakest point, enshrinement of the Voice in the Constitution: “A Proposed Law: to alter the Constitution to recognise the First Peoples of Australia by establishing an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice. Do you approve this proposed alteration?”

The who, what, and why, never crystallised in voter-land.

Had there been one proposal for constitutional recognition, and a second question on creating a Voice in the Constitution, it is possible, even likely, that the first would have got up – assuming it enjoyed Coalition support.

The idea was ruled out in an atmosphere where the campaign’s righteous success ran on true believers, not difficult questions.

As put, six in 10 Australians voted against it every state and even the NT. Only the ACT reversed those proportions, strangely validating Peter Dutton’s cheap gibe about the “Canberra Voice”.

If prime ministerial hubris had been a factor from the outset, deference and defensiveness had characterised the government’s outsourcing of the core campaign.

Critics such as Frank Brennan have argued that Labor and Uluru leaders put insufficient effort into cultivating political bipartisanship because Dutton’s April 2023 decision to oppose was not “inevitable”.

This is half right. In fact, as early as November 2022 the Coalition declared hostility when David Littleproud’s Nationals announced their campaign against. The tail was wagging the dog.

The Nats’ antipathy made it all but impossible for Dutton to follow the alternative urgings of a few “southern” moderates, had he ever been inclined (which he wasn’t). Such an unlikely progressive pivot by Dutton might have prompted hardliners to rebel and maybe even defect to the Nats imperilling his leadership. 

In other words, nearly a year before polling day in October 2023, the referendum would be forced to defy an iron law of Australian constitutional reform. 

From there, the “Canberra Voice” would follow the same descent as the “politicians’ republic” – skewered from the right by fear and division.

This was the year the Voice broke, and it was the period during which Labor should have reflected coldly on the republic failure of 1999 and the decades-long paralysis that followed.

The blunt rejection of the Uluru Agenda has deprived a new Labor Prime Minister of what would have been a nation-changing reform. And a signature personal achievement.

It was a failure of political judgement and practice, government commitment and respectful public discourse. It was also a significant media failure as outlets platformed misrepresentations and disinformation in the name of “balance”.

Most of all though, it was the tragic loss of an opportunity before Australia to become the only significant settler-society to have peacefully reached amicable terms with those it had murdered, dispossessed and marginalised. And worse.

Mark Kenny is the Director of the ANU Australian Studies Institute and host of the Democracy Sausage podcast.