Why Did Australia Fail Its First Nations Citizens?

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First Nations Australians deserved so much better than this. 

The overwhelming, country-wide rejection of their recognition in the constitution was the inevitable end to a campaign of misinformation, conspiracy theories and racism that deliberately sought to divide a nation with Trump-style political smears. Many Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander citizens will struggle to recover from the bruising fight for their basic rights.

This was an opportunity to start reckoning with the country’s violent history — where white settlers fought frontier wars with the original inhabitants and successive governments displaced Indigenous people from their land, took children from their families and entrenched generations of disadvantage that persist to this day. Non-Indigenous Australians should reflect on why they couldn’t take this one small step. The federal government must take stock of its failure.

So where does Australia go from here? 

First Nations leaders have called for a week of silence to grieve, thanking the millions of Australians who supported them and asking all citizens to reflect on “the role of racism and prejudice against Indigenous people in this result.” Votes are still being counted, but the referendum was defeated, with 40% for, and 60% against.

It is a bitter irony, that “people who have only been on this continent for 235 years would refuse to recognize those whose home this land has been for 60,000 and more years is beyond reason,” Indigenous leaders noted in a statement shared on social media. “It was never in the gift of these newcomers to refuse recognition to the true owners of Australia.”

The symbolism of the referendum’s failure has raised eyebrows across the globe. The New York Times described the outcome as “crushing Indigenous hopes,” while the Singapore-owned Straits Times noted it would be a setback for Australia’s standing in the Pacific at a time when some countries were looking to China and away from the West.  

Nations with a similar colonial past, including New Zealand — which entered into the Treaty of Waitangi with Māori in 1840, and Canada, which began what it calls its modern treaty era in 1973 — have long recognized Indigenous citizens in their constitutions, though the uncodified nature of those documents mean they can be amended by a simple act of parliament. In Asia, Taiwan has had constitutionally enshrined Indigenous representation in parliament since 1972. The governments of Finland, Norway and Sweden developed a convention with the First Nations Saami people in 2017 that provides the Saami with their own parliament in each country. Bolivia has reserved parliamentary seats for First Nations peoples.

Australia’s rejection of the rights of Indigenous citizens in the most public, hurtful way shows the world a very different country to the relaxed sun, sand and surf vibe governments of all stripes love to promote overseas. Education is the nation’s fourth-biggest export, but the experience of foreign students is so often marred by racism. Many in neighboring countries across Asia are now asking: Is this really the place we want to send our kids to study in?

Those campaigning against the referendum said the idea of creating a representative body of First Nations Australians to advise the parliament on issues relevant to their community was divisive. They said it would create a special class of citizens who were more equal than others and that the advisory body would slow government decision-making and result in a tidal wave of legal challenges. None of this is true.

Beyond that false narrative, there were more close-to-home issues that resonated with the public. Why was the government devoted to a referendum for a group that makes up just 3% of the population when the country was dealing with significant cost of living concerns? Couldn’t the money spent on the “Yes” campaign have been devoted to alleviating the suffering of all Australians? Indeed, a poll published in the Daily Telegraph newspaper on Friday rated the Voice to Parliament 17th on voters’ concerns, way below housing and interest rates. 

Any campaign — no matter how worthy — cannot win if it is divorced from the lived reality of voters. Indigenous Australians never asked us to go beyond that. The inflation pressures bearing down on Australians were impacting them, too. The further into the countryside you go, the worse the disadvantage gets.

When he took power in May last year, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said he was committed to implementing the Uluru Statement from the Heart in full — that meant the Voice to Parliament, a treaty with First Nations people and a truth commission like that held in post-apartheid South Africa. He’s failed at the first hurdle. The referendum was doomed the moment Opposition Leader Peter Dutton decided to campaign against it — without bipartisan support the “Yes” vote was never going to resonate outside urban centers. It was too easy to dismiss it as the concern of inner-city elites, of identity politics gone too far. So why did Albanese persist with this strategy, one that lost key demographics including migrant voters and those in rural and lower socio-economic areas? 

The federal parliament will sit in the capital, Canberra, on Monday. The opposition will make much of their victory. And First Nations citizens will regroup. The entrenched disadvantage that the government advisory body would have worked on is as acute as it has ever been: Indigenous Australians are the most incarcerated population on the planet, their children have twice the mortality rate of non-Indigenous kids and adults have an eight-year gap in life expectancy.

The great Black, gay writer James Baldwin said: “If any white man in the world says give me liberty or give me death, the entire white world applauds. When a black man says exactly the same thing word for word, he is judged a criminal and treated like one.” Watching the outcome of the Voice referendum, his words seem truer than ever.

More From Bloomberg Opinion:

• First Nations Vote Comes Down to Love Against War: Teela Reid

• More Bloodshed Will Never Resolve Israel-Palestine: Ruth Pollard

• A First Nations Reckoning Is Rising in Australia: Teela Reid

This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.

Ruth Pollard is a Bloomberg Opinion editor. Previously she was South and Southeast Asia government team leader at Bloomberg News and Middle East correspondent for the Sydney Morning Herald.

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