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Australians vote No in referendum that promised change for First Nations people but couldn’t deliver

www.cnn.com Australians vote No in referendum that promised change for First Nations people but couldn't deliver | CNN

With a two-letter word, Australians have struck down the first attempt at constitutional change in 24 years, major media outlets reported, a move experts say will inflict lasting damage on First Nations people and suspend any hopes of modernizing the nation’s founding document.

Early results from the Australian Electoral Commission (AEC) suggested that most of the country’s 17.6 million registered voters had written No on their ballots, and CNN affiliates 9 News, Sky News and SBS all projected no path forward for the Yes campaign.

The proposal, to recognize Indigenous people in the constitution and create an Indigenous body to advise government on policies that affect them, needed a majority nationally and in four of six states to pass.

83 comments

Yup. Sounds like Australia. Proudly admitting they're racist, and afraid even of a symbolic gesture that has no actual power in the parliament. I'm just embarrassed that it is now official.
- I know many Germans who voted NO.
  
  Wow. Didnt know we had voting power in australia!
- Would you call making a devision of peoples based on race within a constitution racist?
After a definite disinformation campaign with a side of racist fear mongering...ffs. I'm embarrassed to be an Australian.
- Here in the European press, I read that many Aboriginals also opposed it. They want recognition, land transfers or compensation.
  
  To really reconcile over past wrongs, I get that. There needs to be something substantive and I think something like that will only be possible when most boomers are gone.
  
  We have similar debates over our colonial and enslaving past.
  
  The point is that this would have given them a path toward voicing those sorts of things, directly to the people who can actually do something about it.
  
  It could have been the start to a lot of great change, it was a simple easy thing to do
  
  Many is a bigger word than I would use. Some definitely did, but no group of people has a homogeneous opinion of what the right next actions on any big issue are, and it's kind of weird anyone would expect otherwise. Overall I got the impression that ATSI Australians supported the change, but others may not have felt it looked that way based on what they saw.
  
  only be possible when most boomers are gone.
  
  20 years ago I believed that might be true. Since then i have learnt to never rely on it being about age. Imcreased age can correlate with increased power and the reluctance to change the system to increase competition, but age isn't the cause of stagnant beliefs. In 50 years time there will still be a generation of old people afraid of social change and a bunch of younger people who are the same or just think change is not in their personal best interest, even though it's an entirely different set of people.
  
  We're all going to have to do a lot more than just keep waiting for the elderly to shuffle off the mortal coil if we want something different for the future.
  
  The numbers were about 80+% of First Nations people are for it.
  
  They may/do want recognition, land transfers or compensation, but voting No helped ensure they wouldn't get anything in the future.
  
  Over 63% of indigenous people voted in favour of the voice.
  
  You are repeating propoganda.
- It's humanity bro. Humans are the baddies.
- I would disagree i think you would be hard pressed to find a large amount of peole against an advisary body. You might see a very large pushback however if u wanted to make a devision based on race within the constitution.
This is a very sad day in Australia’s history. Many of us thought we were a more progressive nation than we are.
- As a POC, I am not surprised, but I was still optimistic because there was no way to vote "no" without looking like a racist cunt. Well turns out Australia has no problem with looking like a bunch of racist cunts.
  
  Try and tell them they're a bunch of racist cunts tho... Then you'll see hypocrisy too!
- We are more progressive. The trouble is the amendment was too vague and if anyone asked questions or suggested that they might vote no, they got called a racist and told to educate themselves.
  The Yes campaign ended up mostly using the argument that you should vote yes because conservative are telling you to say no.
  
  It's a toothless advisory body that could make (ignorable) representations to parliament about matters relating to the indigenous community. What else do you need to know?
Looking over the r/Australia comments on this referendum has been fascinating. Apparently acknowledging indigenous people in the constitution is giving them special privileges and it was a bad idea to launch this because the average Australian had no idea what this campaign was about as if googling it is so fucking hard. Sorry aboriginal people, but you made me have to use Google so you don't get any say now.
tfw all those jokes about Australians being racist is put to a national referendum and turn out to be true.
It's interesting to see the breakdown by electorate. Electorates close to Melbourne and Sydney cbds voted yes. The further out of vic and nsw, the more the no grows.

Qld, wa, NT and SA didn't have the same problem. Blanket no.

Tldr, the progressive part of the country that wants this is city focused. The rest of the country has a long way to go.
- This is true in the entire world.
- Electorates close to Melbourne and Sydney cbds voted yes.
  
  The centre of Sydney has one of the largest populations of ATSI people, not sure about Melbourne, but I wouldn't be surprised if it's true there too.
  
  I think it's easier to see people as people when you live closely with a lot of different variations on the base model.
  
  Jimmy Carr was on Joe Rogan (I know he's awful but it was a decent episode) recently and was talking about how Hitler worked out propaganda works best when the "other" feels alien, which is why he closed down clubs in the 30s. Seeing Jews as "one of us" through clubs and hospitality made the propaganda against them ineffective because they were just seen as one of the people and this Hitler guy was just a nut, the whole movie cabaret being about it.
  
  I think you're right. Melbourne is an amazing melting pot of people, so it's difficult to be not emphatic towards a cause that would improve their QOL
  
  There are very few in inner city Melbourne.
A toxic mix of the social heritage of brutal colonialism, domestic racism, and the trolling money from China and Russia.
- Follow the money.....fossil.fuel and other mining extraction companies would lose if the first nations took more control of parts of land
Marketing, image, and ads are everything with these kinds of things. Seems like the "Yes" campaign fucked that up.
- From the article it seemed that a big criticism of the amendment was that it was too vague. There were people from different political beliefs and some aboriginals who didn't like how vague it was, though the aboriginals wanted it to further.
  
  That's because it was a constitutional amendment.
  
  The legislation (details) that would come out afterwards has been out for 6-7 months now.
This is the best summary I could come up with:

Supporters of the Yes vote had hailed it as an opportunity to accept the outreached hand of First Nations people and to work with them to solve problems in their most remote communities – higher rates of suicide, domestic violence, children in out-of-home care and incarceration.

Constitutional experts, Australians of the Year, eminent retired judges, companies large and small, universities, sporting legends, netballers, footballers, reality stars and Hollywood actors flagged their endorsement.

Aussie music legend John Farnham gifted a song considered to be the unofficial Australian anthem to a Yes advertisement with a stirring message of national unity.

Kevin Argus, a marketing expert from Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT), told CNN the Yes campaign was a “case study in how not to message change on matters of social importance.”

Argus said only the No campaign had used simple messaging, maximized the reach of personal profiles, and acted decisively to combat challenges to their arguments with clear and repeatable slogans.

Maree Teesson, director of the Matilda Center for Research in Mental Health and Substance Use at the University of Sydney, told CNN the Voice to Parliament had offered self-determination to Indigenous communities, an ability to have a say over what happens in their lives.

The original article contains 945 words, the summary contains 204 words. Saved 78%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
So, what does a right way to accomodate indigenous groups look like? Has any country accomplished it?

What rights or opportunities are these groups lacking?
- A good way to start would be making sure they have adequate political representation. Shutting them out of the politically. When you don't get a groups voice in when making decisions that can lead to consequences. Big issues that aboriginals face in extremely high unemployment, decaying infrastructure and high incarceration rates.
  
  Do they not get a vote? And all i hear is the negative statistics, never what people think should be done to address them. Are employers discriminating?
  
  Does any of it stem from them wanting to live more primitively? Are they turning down education opportunities, or are they not available to them?
Every news article I see anymore makes me lose a little more faith in humanity. I don’t have much left…
- good for you, you still have some. I have zero faith. Now I'm just waiting for ELE or aliens to wipe us out.
Relying on scared white supremacists to not be white supremacists is foolish.
This is a very deceptive headline a majority of australians support the idea of a reccomandary body for indiginouse peoples (the voice what was proposed). However, the reason i beleive it failed is because it would have direcrly made a devision of race within our constitution. I would define any devision of race regardless of purpose as textbook racism but i seem to get a lot of pushback from such an idea. I think the thing that ultumatly caused it to fail was not the concept but the unesaasary implementation within the constitution.
- The thing is though, Indigenous Australians ARE distinct from other races in Australia. They are indigenous, and they have been colonised. They have strong justifications to seek the right to determine their own future in this country.
  
  They have a vote like everyone else. Im all for the concept of the voice itself just not within the constitution.
- You keep replying to people rephrasing the same dumb lie. No, the majority of Australians clearly don't support an advisory body, as demonstrated by the vote being discussed. The fake nuance you try to apply to the vote is transparent and it's fooling no one. A majority of Australians are racist against the native population, and that's painfully obvious to anyone who's spent time there. A beautiful country, but the racism is absolutely blatant. You just refuse to acknowledge that.
  
  Are you saying the 11th most ethnic and culturaly diverse nation in the world is blatantly racist? Im not sure if ur a CCP shitposting bot ur just think that australians not voting for a racial divide in the constitution is racisist. We must fight the racial divide with another racial divide sounds like doublethink to me. Its a bold statemwnt to go and call an entire nation racist one i would hope u can back (and no the vote for the voice does not count that was about wether its in the constitution nothing more nothing less).
Yeah that tracks.
Australia is just US without the introspection.
- Australia is way more racist than the US. And more right-wing.
  
  The US just doesn't have compulsory voting, which means a minority of nutjobs can dictate politics. And even then, Trump lost.
  
  Australia has compulsory voting and voted this way lol.
  
  US is going through a labour organising revolution right now. While unions are left in the cold and experience dwindling power in Aus, even with the Labor party in power.
I love democracy
As an aside for people reading the comments here, and I'm not going to comment on people's comments correcting them because this isn't the place ( and it says it in the article as well)

I was told recently, that we should not be using the word Aboriginal. I know this will cause an onslaught of people saying "what do they want to be called now?! " but when you think about the word "Aboriginal" and other words like it, it's not very friendly. "abhorrent", "abnormal", etc. Aboriginal means not original.

We should be saying "indigenous peoples" as it encompasses all and is more accurate. I've been told First Nations is also acceptable.
- You raise an important point, though "Aboriginal" doesn't mean "not original". It's derived from the Latin "ab origine", meaning "from the beginning".
  
  Uhh... So it means the opposite of what that person thinks it does? lol.
  
  Damn haha. TIL
  
  I'm just going to stay away from it

83 comments