Laura Tingle on the Voice debate

Sam Hawley: Hi, I'm Sam Hawley, coming to you from Gadigal Land. This is ABC News Daily. In a few days time, Australia will hold the first referendum to change the constitution in more than 20 years. It's a significant moment, but the debate leading up to it has been divisive and confusing. Today. Chief political correspondent for the ABC's 7.30 program, Laura Tingle, with her analysis of the bitterness of the campaign and the scars that will be left once it's all over.

Sam Hawley: Laura You've described the debate around the Voice as a spectacular failure of hypocrisy, of opportunism. Tell me why.

Laura Tingle: Well, this is a reflection on, shall we say, the non-core arguments about the yes and no case. It's about the fact that you've got a lot of people in the debate saying things at fairly wild variance with their previous positions. And I think also joining up a lot of issues that aren't actually related to the question at hand in a way which has really distorted the discussion, I think, for a lot of people. And I think that is probably well illustrated by the fact that for a lot of people, the question that has come up now that's the really decisive one for them is the idea that this referendum will divide us on the basis of race and, you know, if you know anything at all about the Constitution, you just be perplexed about how you could come up with that conclusion. I think given, you know, the various elements of the Constitution and of what is proposed in this referendum. Question.

Sam Hawley: Laura just explain that further.

Laura Tingle: Well, I suppose I'm just thinking, Sam, that, you know, race has always actually been a contentious issue around the Constitution. It was a well established construct. When the Constitution was drawn up, it still reflected in the power that the parliament has to make special laws with respect to the people of any race. And until 1967, the only people who were excluded from that power, strangely enough, were Aboriginal people. So the constitution has gone from excluding Aboriginal people to falling silent about them altogether.

Sam Hawley: Mhm. All right. So let's unpack this further. And to do that, let's start with a book you've been reading by the journalist David Marr. It's called Killing for Country. Tell me about it.

Laura Tingle: Killing for Country is David Marr's research. When he discovered that his I think it was his great great great grandfather was a member of the native police. Now, this is a group that a lot of Australians don't know about, but it was this sort of strange arm of the Queensland Government, but acting outside the law with essentially a brief to go around and kill Aboriginal people, systematically going out and clearing the country of Aboriginal people as the absolutely huge demand for new pasture at the height of the wool boom sort of spread right up through New South Wales and Queensland.

David Marr: What I've written is a narrative history of the native police through the eyes of a family that backed it, directed it and served in it. And in this way, by cutting a path, as you say, a swathe through that history, it's possible to see the landscape much more clearly than in some of the very, very fine historical studies. This is the narrative. This is the story.

Sam Hawley: Good books are a really hard to put down, but this one was hard to keep reading for you.

Laura Tingle: Well, it was. I mean, the stories that he tells are just horrendous and it's sort of horrendous in its own right that he accumulated these from the public record. It wasn't just people out in the bush. Often the police would come in to a station where the local Indigenous people were working happily with the settlers and would just would just kill all the people there. To the horror of the of the settlers, one particular guy coming into Maryborough and shooting two Aboriginal people basically at point blank range. And the relevance of the book to the current debate goes to, I think it's that the mindset and the rationale that David Marr documents, as well as the actual atrocities which do give you cause for pause about sort of the arguments that we hear now, some of which I've got to say personally I find really mystifying like that Indigenous people are getting a better deal than non-Indigenous people. I sort of think the historical record does sort of suggest that that's not the case. You know.

David Marr: I've spent four and a half years in this history writing this story of what went on, and I look at the referendum debate and I think these wars haven't finished. This is just another round. It's just going on. And how long does it go on for? Does it go on forever?

Sam Hawley: You had this book by David Marr on your mind when you went to the Press Club last week to listen to the former Chief Justice of the High Court, Robert French.

Laura Tingle: Well, Robert French has intervened, if you like, in this current discussion a few times to basically say, look, that he doesn't think that there is any constitutional risk in the questions that are being posed. He thinks it's a perfectly safe and reasonable proposition. But I suppose in his speech on Friday, he also did sort of address this moral question of our general humanity, if you like. He says it does not require a black armband view of history.

Robert French: To conclude that colonisation did not bring unalloyed benefits to our first peoples. Nor does it require rocket science logic to conclude that we live today with the cross-generational effects of that collision. Our Constitution, as it stands, passes over these things in silence.

Laura Tingle: I think this is one of the things that is sort of tricky that are we dealing with the past or the future or both in this question? I think there's hostility to people thinking that they're being blamed for stuff that happened in the past. Also, the fact that there's been so much discussion about the structure of the Voice. And I think what has been lost, particularly in recent months, is the discussion about what is the significance of recognising first people in the Constitution. It's not a question of giving them new rights, but it is a recognition of the fact that we're one of the few countries on earth that doesn't recognise that there were people here when we got here.

Sam Hawley: And Robert French, he's concerned, isn't he, by the view from the no side of the campaign that you know the slogan "Vote no if you don't know".

Laura Tingle: He was comparing it with the the sort of spirit of the founding fathers, if you like, and the leap of faith that they ultimately took with federation and the Constitution. He says the Australian spirit evoked by the don't know slogan is a poor shadow of the spirit which drew up our Constitution.

Robert French: It invites us to a resentful and inquiring passivity. Australians, whether they vote yes or no, are better than that.

Sam Hawley: Laura I want to discuss further with you how this debate on the Voice has unfolded, because it's been in some ways very confronting, difficult to watch. You say it's exposed an ugly racism.

Laura Tingle: Well, it has. I mean, I don't think everybody who has or will vote no is doing so for racist reasons. There is a scepticism about the fact we don't know enough about the structure of the Voice for a lot of people. They wanted more details on that. But without a doubt there has also been some really appalling, very racist, very unpleasant discussion in all of this, particularly on social media, crazy claims about how people's backyards were going to be stolen, all these sorts of things, I suppose, in a lot of it. And people report this from the frontline, you know, that there is this hostility to Indigenous people among a lot of Australians, a resentment, this view that somehow they have done better or that they deserve everything, they get really confronting stuff, which is shocking. I think when we look at what's happening as a yes and no proposition, we do have reason to confront the way the media can or can't cover these debates anymore in a reasonably rational fashion.

Sam Hawley: And as you mentioned before, the messaging itself can be confusing from past and present leaders, can't it? It's hard to gauge sometimes what they want, what they're arguing.

Laura Tingle: Well, absolutely. I mean, I quoted in a column I wrote on the weekend both John Howard and Tony Abbott, you know, where they're saying how important recognition is. Now, it's been subsequently said, oh, but they never liked the Voice. Well, that might be the case. But this isn't just about the Voice. I mean, as Justice French says, the Voice is an articulation or is an act of recognition. So, you know, you can't really separate the two things out. And the question is, what is so frightening about saying there should be an, you know, an advisory committee which has no powers other than to exist?

Sam Hawley: Robert French, he quoted John Howard from 2007 when he said at the time that we needed to find room in national life to formally recognise the distinctiveness of Indigenous identity and culture.

John Howard: And the right of Indigenous people to preserve that heritage. The crisis of Indigenous, social and cultural disintegration requires a stronger affirmation of Indigenous identity and culture as a source of dignity, self-esteem and pride.

Sam Hawley: And now he is an opponent of the Voice itself.

Laura Tingle: And he's saying, maintain the rage, whatever that means. You know, these these phrases that are sort of let off into the into the atmosphere and you're going, I don't know what that means, but it's you know, it's triggering people for some reason. This is the sort of confusing bit that you actually see, particularly on the no side, people arguing against positions they themselves have held. You've had Peter Dutton saying that, you know, he would hold a second referendum, then he wouldn't have a second referendum. It's created a lot of uncertainty in people's minds about somehow if we don't vote this time around, there'll be an opportunity to look at it again in some more acceptable form. Next time. And I don't think political reality suggests that will happen.

Sam Hawley: And Laura whether we vote yes or no. What's the lasting impact of all of this, do you think?

Laura Tingle: I think if we vote no, I think, you know, it does just basically put the issue of Indigenous affairs and what our view is of Indigenous people a long way back. And you can already see, you know, the unfortunate outcomes in a way, Sam, in the fact that people are sort of saying that they now resent just basic things like acknowledgement of country. So if there's a yes vote one, everybody will be incredibly shocked. I think it would be the bottom line and hopefully we could move on and just get on with life. And, you know, there'd be a debate about the Voice, which is a debate for the parliament about what it will actually do. But I think either way, we are all going to be a bit scarred by this, by the fact that it has been so ugly and that we have been apparently unable to really resolve our differences on this issue.

Sam Hawley: Laura Tingle is 7.30 Chief Political Correspondent. The ABC has collated all opinion polling. It puts the Yes vote at an average of 41.2%, well behind no at 58.8%. That means support for constitutional change is lower than for the failed republic referendum in 1999. If you want to follow all the results live on Referendum night, then tune into NewsRadio from 6 p.m. Eastern Daylight Savings Time. You can find it on the ABC Listen app. This episode was produced by Laura Corrigan, Bridget Fitzgerald, Nell Whitehead and Anna John, who also did the mix. Our supervising producer is David Coady. I'm Sam Hawley. ABC News Daily will be back again tomorrow. Thanks for listening.