Whatever the outcome of the Voice referendum,the campaign has exposed how polarised this country remains on its most emblematic issue:to what extent,if any,modern Australia should make amends for the manner of 18th-century colonisation and 20th-century federation. For all the arguments over the Indigenous Voice to parliament,doesn’t the debate essentially boil down to a fundamental point of divergence over whether non-Indigenous Australia should say sorry,and what form that apology should take?
Illustration:Dionne Gain.
The tragedy of this moment is that an opportunity to bring the country closer together has ended up being so fraying. Doubtless the blame game will go on for years,if not decades. But for the No camp to claim that Anthony Albanese and the authors of the Uluru Statement from the Heart have wilfully sought to divide the country by inserting race into the Constitution is politically mendacious and historically illiterate. It has fuelled the suspicion that for sloganeers such as Peter Dutton,wedge politics remains the main party trick.
For years now,I have bemoaned the Americanisation of Australian politics,and the mimicry of the Republican right. So it was especially worrying to hear Dutton claim that the process was “”,and to bring into question the integrity of the Australian Electoral Commission. But while the comparisons being drawn with Trumpism are entirely valid – I have made them – the tactics owe more to Richard Nixon.
Nixon’s famed Southern strategy was based on stoking white anxieties about black advance and predicated on the false notion that racial politics was a zero-sum game. His aides used to speak of “positive polarisation”,and the political dividends to be accrued from disunion. His then-communications director Pat Buchanan,who later ran for the presidency himself,even advised his boss:“If we tear the country in half,we can pick up the bigger half.”
That same divide-and-rule calculus won’t work for Dutton. Surely he must know that opposing the. But the manner of his campaign,with its exaggerated claims and reckless insinuations about the unreliability of the ballot,suggest he is primarily an oppositional politician rather than a potential national leader.
Surely Opposition Leader Peter Dutton knows that opposing the Voice makes it even harder for the Liberals to turn those all-important teal seats blue.Kate Geraghty
To dwell on the blatant signs of Americanisation,however,lets homegrown Australian politics too easily off the hook. Polarisation was the direction of travel here long before Trump descended his golden escalator. The vibe of 21st-century Australian politics was set not in September 2000,with the feel-good glow of Cathy Freeman’s “400 metres of reconciliation” at the Sydney Olympics,but rather by the terror attacks of September 2001,which turned the Tampa affair just weeks beforehand into something altogether more seminal. The debate over whether to say “sorry”,and the history wars that went with it,divided this country throughout the Howard years. Indeed,the country’s second-longest serving prime minister had a masterly understanding of political seismology,and precisely where Australia’s faultlines lay.
We could also reach back further,of course,to the emergence of Pauline Hanson in the mid-1990s,and the impact she had on fracturing the cross-party consensus on immigration and multiculturalism,and in drawing the Liberal Party further to the right.
Certainly,since the turn of the century,events with the potential to promote national unity have often had a polar effect. The Black Saturday bushfires in 2009 did not end the climate wars. Perversely,they intensified thereafter,with burnt forests becoming blackened battlefields of cultural combat. During the COVID-19 pandemic,internal border closures made Australia feel more like a state-nation than a nation-state. Even something as seemingly politically benign as the death of Steve Irwin in 2006 became dichotomising,as arguments raged over whether he personified or parodied Australia.
One only has to peruse the list of recent recipients of the Australian of the Year award. Adam Goodes,Rosie Batty and Grace Tame. Rather than being figures of near-universal acclaim,all were targeted in hate campaigns.
Gestures of reconciliation have hardly been unifying. When Kevin Rudd delivered his national apology to the stolen generations,the speech from the then opposition leader Brendan Nelson,in which he spoke of “too many Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders people living lives of existential aimlessness”,ignited from First Nations people in the public gallery of parliament. Peter Dutton staged a boycott.
Clearly,we are not talking here of chronic polarisation along American lines,where Red and Blue America are in a state of cold civil war. Nor is Australian disunion as marked as the divisions in post-Brexit Britain,where the economic impact of leaving the European Union is felt every day. In Australia,moreover,the combined effect of compulsory and preferential voting offer a double safeguard,and mean that elections are usually a fight for the moderate middle. Besides,Labor wields power across mainland Australia. Save for Tasmania,the entire country is red.
However,the divisiveness of this referendum will be felt for years to come,and polarisation is a path from which it is notoriously hard to turn back. Were you “Yes” or were you “No” will be the key marker of political identity? Alas,it will also continue to be Australia’s great continental divide.
Nick Bryant is the author ofThe Rise and Fall of Australia:How a Great Nation Lost Its Way.
Peter Hartcher is on leave.
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