Voice of Reason is one of the most detailed and persuasive cases for the Voice I’ve encountered to date. Megan Davis has explained why the Voice is needed from the ground up. The examples she explores, sometimes in granular detail, highlight the failure of past policies and the urgent need for a constitutionally enshrined Indigenous Voice to the Commonwealth Parliament.

Davis also brings out the creative and imaginative dimensions of the Voice – both in its conception and its constitutional function. She explains why the Voice is an Indigenous and Australian solution to the complex historical and political circumstances faced by Aboriginal people. She also documents the long, tortuous journey to the referendum – pointing out that since 2011, we have witnessed seven public processes and ten public reports on constitutional recognition. As she laments, “at each meeting, for each prime minister, we had to explain the process
from scratch.”

Like the official “Case for Voting Yes,” published online by the Australian Electoral Commission, and her recent publication with her UNSW colleague Professor George Williams – Everything You Need to Know About the Voice – Davis’s essay is there for every Australian to read and understand. Just how many voters will take up these or other opportunities to cast an informed vote in the referendum is difficult to estimate. But for anyone seeking to persuade family, friends or their local communities to vote Yes – or, as Davis colourfully put it in a recent interview on Late Night Live to join the road to “Yes town” – Voice of Reason is essential reading. As it stands, the need for persuasive arguments and positive stories that illustrate the practical advantages of the Voice and constitutional change grows more pressing by the day. 

On 26 June, the day Voice of Reason was published, Newspoll showed that support for the Voice had dropped below 50 per cent nationally, with only two states (New South Wales and Victoria) registering more Yes than No voters. By late July, only three months out from the referendum, the same poll showed a continuing downward trend across the nation: 41 per cent Yes; 48 per cent No; 11 per cent undecided; and not one state recording over 50 per cent support for the Yes case.

As Australia enters the most crucial period of the referendum campaign, the fear of failure is palpable. The bar to achieve success inches ever higher. Calls to abandon the referendum have come from historian Bain Attwood, journalists, and Coalition MPs who feign concern for the future of reconciliation even though they did little during nine years of Coalition government to legislate the Voice or put forward a viable alternative to the proposed constitutional amendment. They cry out for detail at the same time as they provide no detail themselves. They argue that the Voice is divisive as they do all in their power to sow confusion and discord. They speak of their attachment to the constitution and argue the Voice will divide Australia on the grounds of race, when they know full well that racism is embedded in the very constitution they claim to protect.

Like the Nationals, Dutton’s intention was always to scuttle the Voice. The only recognition he is willing to countenance is recognition on his own terms. Even more reason, then, not to abandon the referendum. After having achieved the momentous task of securing a referendum, turning back now would inevitably be seen as a de facto defeat, demoralise a generation of Indigenous leaders and hand an easy victory to the naysayers and scaremongers. In any case, Albanese has made it clear that he is not in office to mark time:

I’m not here to occupy the space. To change who is in the white car. I’m here to change the country. And there’s nowhere more important than changing the country than changing our nation’s constitution to recognise the fullness of our history. So I want this done for Indigenous Australians but I want it done for all Australians. We will feel better about ourselves if we get this done . . . Australia will be seen as a better nation as well by the rest of the world.

Albanese’s words echoed those of Gough Whitlam when he launched Labor’s election campaign at Blacktown Town Hall in December 1972: “All of us as Australians are diminished while the Aborigines are denied their rightful place in this nation.”
To a large extent, the referendum campaign has pivoted on ideas that reflect an aversion to all things “political.” In different ways – and there’s certainly no equivalence between Dutton’s anti-Canberra rhetoric and the Yes campaign’s desire to take the discussion away from the political arena into local communities – both sides seek to distance themselves from politics. Like Morrison before him, Dutton, who presumably wants to be prime minister and believes in the transformative capacity of parliament, regurgitates cheap anti-Canberra rhetoric at every opportunity. While Senator Jacinta Price, whose office, like that of every parliamentarian, would not function without access to the informed and hopefully fearless advice of public servants, does all she can to besmirch the Canberra “bureaucracy.” In any other workplace they would be sacked for damaging their employer’s reputation.

For the Yes campaign, there’s an obvious tightrope to walk: how to engage Labor and other members of parliament who have helped make the referendum a reality while repeatedly arguing that the referendum doesn’t belong to politicians but to the Australian people. Davis, for example, places her faith in the new politics that emerged in the last federal election, one in which the major parties struggled to secure a primary vote above 30 per cent, while Greens and progressively inclined independents won an ever-increasing proportion of seats in electorates that were previously Liberal strongholds. “The demographics have changed,” she argues, and “the politics have changed.” True. Yet she also seeks to distance the Yes campaign from politics, claiming, perhaps rightly, that the referendum needs to “engage Australians on a higher level than political cynicism. The heart and the head. People, not politicians.”

While the desire to “escape the political” seems to be the point on which all sides of politics agree, there is no escaping the fact that the referendum is an intensely political process. The very structure of a referendum, with its binary Yes and No alternatives, immediately implies that both cases have equal validity. No matter how misleading and vacuous the No-case arguments might be, they are validated merely by being seen as the alternative to the proposed constitutional amendment. Moreover, unlike the 1967 referendum, when there was no official No case, the 2023 referendum campaign is already captive to an adversarial political process. Like it or not, partisan politics has its paws all over the referendum. Even the Voice itself, if the referendum succeeds, will be tasked with managing the same political reality, and will obviously need to be conscious of its own political optics in such an intensely competitive and antagonistic political system.

For Albanese and Labor, there’s a delicate task ahead. To what extent does the prime minister attempt to enter the fray? Is Albanese merely a facilitator of the debate? A leader who has done his bit by getting the referendum legislation through parliament and now hands it over to the Australian people? Or does he seek to lead? It’s already evident that the No campaign has a clear leader: Opposition Leader Peter Dutton, backed by Warren Mundine and Senator Jacinta Price. But who is the leader of the Yes campaign? While a long list of names come to mind – from Albanese and Linda Burney to Noel Pearson, Megan Davis, Rachel Perkins, Marcia Langton and Thomas Mayo – there is no clear answer. Given the nature of the Yes strategy, perhaps a community campaign requires a community of leaders, but in the cut and thrust of adversarial politics, the “courageous leader” Davis speaks of would seem essential.

More broadly, the issue is not whether the referendum campaign is “political,” but how its politics is conducted; how we, as voters, and politicians, as our representatives, engage in political discussion – whether inside or outside the parliament – and ensure that the spirit and character of the referendum debate improves the fabric of our democracy. After all, the Voice is an attempt to better inform the Commonwealth parliament on “matters relating to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples,” and to work with it constructively. There is little point in deriding politics and politicians when the Voice, or any future proposal for that matter, will rely on politicians for its efficacy.

To drive home the underlying urgency of the Voice, Davis draws perceptively on the history of invasion and dispossession to illustrate the marginal position in which Indigenous Australians find themselves today, especially in relation to the exercise of political power. Many of the progressive democratic reforms cherished by non-Indigenous Australians, often expressed through ideas such as the “fair go,” emerged under White Australia, at a time when Aboriginal people were rendered invisible and excluded from the glorious narrative of democratic advancement. Democracy and equality were ideas treasured by British Australians, but they were also exclusive because they applied only to whites. Equally, the land that became “the great Australian dream” was taken from Indigenous Australians without treaty, compensation or consent.

This raises one of the key challenges for the Yes campaign. The referendum implicitly asks the vast majority of Australians to recognise and understand a different historical experience to their own; to recognise that, for Indigenous Australians, the history of the last 235 years has been far removed from the stories of peaceful progress that have comforted white Australians for so long. In other words, the referendum asks Australians to do what Prime Minister Paul Keating suggested in his Redfern Park speech in 1992: to imagine that “we” had suffered the “murders . . . discrimination and exclusion.” “With some noble exceptions,” said Keating, “we failed to make the most basic human response . . . to ask how would I feel if this were done to me? As a consequence, we failed to see that what we were doing degraded all of us.” 

When Peter Dutton stokes fear and anxiety by claiming that a constitutionally enshrined Voice will see the “greatest change” to our system of government since Federation, he both wildly exaggerates the risks and fails spectacularly to demonstrate empathy. What of the changes forced on First Nations peoples by invasion and dispossession? What of the changes wrought by over two centuries of government policies designed to eradicate Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultures and dictate every aspect of their peoples’ lives? What of their long struggle for their rights? And what of their exclusion from the constitution?

In grave tones, Dutton warns Australians about a constitutional amendment that will genuinely and positively include Indigenous people in our constitution for the first time since 1901. He stresses the virtues of the constitution’s stability and continuity. As he and others so often remind us, the constitution has “served Australia well.” But who has it served well? And for whom has it provided “stability and continuity”?

Because of their exclusion from the nation’s founding document, Indigenous Australians understand the Australian constitution far better than other Australians. They do not have the luxury of ignorance.

Over the past fifty years, the presence of Indigenous culture and history has become more visible in Australia’s public culture; from Welcome to Country ceremonies, to place names, art, dance, music and literature, and the opening ceremonies of football finals, school assemblies and, since 2008, the opening of federal parliament after each federal election. For many Australians and certainly for visitors from overseas, this is the most distinctive aspect of Australian culture.

How long can Australians remain content to draw on this rich Indigenous knowledge and heritage as mere symbolism? Surely we have to give more; surely we need to demonstrate that we have listened to and heard Indigenous Australians by agreeing to establish what the Uluṟu Statement asked for: “the establishment of a First Nations Voice enshrined in the Constitution,” which, as Davis argues, will constitute a “dialogue for time immemorial between the First Nations and the Australian people.” This is the “constitutional moment” of reckoning that the coming referendum has placed before us.

In its tone and gracious request, the Uluṟu Statement from the Heart calls to mind previous invitations from Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples to their fellow citizens.

Among the thousands who walked across Sydney Harbour Bridge in May 2000, there were undoubtedly many reasons for attending. But the overwhelming expression of support for reconciliation would lodge permanently in the nation’s memory. So too would the simple act of walking, which became one of the most powerful metaphors employed by Indigenous leaders when seeking support from their fellow Australians. 

In October 1992, the Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation explained that the process of reconciliation “involves all of us walking together to find a better path to the future of this nation.” In May 2017, the final words of the Uluṟu Statement from the Heart invited Australians “to walk with us in a movement of the Australian people for a better future.”

I can only admire the optimism and determination of Davis and so many other Indigenous leaders, who continue to hold out their invitation to Australians to “walk” with them. As Davis argues, over the next three months, the Yes campaign needs to “explain to Australians why the Voice is needed.”

The coming referendum is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to make the Voice work to the betterment of Indigenous Australians and the entire nation.

Mark McKenna is one of Australia’s leading historians, based at the University of Sydney. He is the author of several prize-winning books, including From the Edge: Australia’s lost histories, Looking for Blackfellas’ Point and An Eye for Eternity: The life of Manning Clark, which won the Prime Minister’s Literary Award for non-fiction and the Victorian, New South Wales, Queensland and South Australian premiers’ awards.