Australians have resoundingly rejected a proposal to recognise Aboriginal people in its constitution and establish a body to advise parliament on Indigenous issues.
Saturday’s voice to parliament referendum failed, with the defeat clear shortly after polls closed.
It was to put them in the constitution as the original inhabitants of Australia and give them the right to a mostly powerless advisory body to the Commonwealth government called “the Voice”.
It was a pretty conservative idea but unfortunately the conservative opposition leader is the arch-racist piece of shit who will never win a real election, but in his desperation to make a name for himself he campaigned against the referendum, and referendums traditionally only succeed with bipartisan support. So now all that’s really been accomplished is to disenfranchise our indigenous population even more.
I know it’s a lot more nuanced than this but the idea of history being like “yes these people were unarguably here first” and government going “nah we created this place” is so fucking ridiculous.
deleted by creator
That’s not far from how it is here - but I’d say it’s more dishonest politicians tokenistically acknowledging Country (such a performative exercise) and capitalising common nouns in that way. Nobody’s really saying “we created this place”, more that we have this culture of falling over ourselves to recognise Traditional Owners while not actually doing much to address Indigenous disadvantage. Referenda are seen as a big deal and usually fail, especially where they’re not led by those who care about the movement, AND are completely transparent about what the result will mean. This referendum was led by the governing party of Australia as an election commitment, and what would result was neither well thought out nor explained adequately. Australia voted not to support the vague word of hand-wringing do-gooders we don’t trust.
That’s a lot of hate you assume was caused by the opposition. Australia voted them out big time a few months ago so that’s a lot of reach.
It was the yes campaign that did it to themselves. They needed to have CLEAR impact statements about what it will do before they put it to the public. Their campaign created its own vague outcome and stink of virtue signalling. Not good enough. Especially considering what happened in WA weeks before announcement.