Peter Dutton and his Liberal colleagues are urging the Australian people to deny First Nations people recognition in the Constitution as the original occupants of the land. If they succeed, it will be a time of great sorrow for our country and its Indigenous people.
Dutton’s Liberals will claim their policy is to support constitutional recognition of First Nations people, just not in this referendum. How much longer do Liberals expect the descendants of the original inhabitants of the continent to wait?
To his dying days, Bob Hawke expressed as his greatest regret his failure to achieve constitutional recognition of the continent’s original inhabitants.
We the people left it to the High Court to end the absurd notion of terra annulus – that despite First Nations people having occupied the Australian continent for some 60,000 years, nobody lived here before Captain Cook set foot on the land.
Even when the High Court did what the political class wouldn’t, Paul Keating needed all his guile and perseverance to push the Native Title Act though the Australian Senate against the trenchant opposition of the Liberal and National parties.
The Coalition’s decision to just say no to the referendum on the Voice would ordinarily sound its death knell. No referendum in which a no case was mounted by a major political party has succeeded.
But this time might be different; it is possible that Dutton’s belligerence will drive undecided voters into the yes camp. After all, Dutton recently presided over the first loss of a byelection by a federal opposition to a government in more than a century.
And he has failed to persuade several state Liberal leaders to his cause of opposing the referendum, including their sole premier, Tasmania’s Jeremy Rockliff, who will campaign for the yes case alongside prime minister Albanese.
In the lead-up to their party-room meeting, senior Liberals were alluding to a change of a few words in the referendum question, relating to executive government, being sufficient to get them across the line in support of a yes vote. But the Dutton-led party room decided it was much simpler to just say no.
If Dutton had a sound record on promoting harmony, he might have been able to mount an argument that he had given the referendum thorough consideration and reluctantly came down on the side of opposing it.
But Dutton walked out on the Apology in 2008. He inserted himself into the Victorian state election of 2018 by claiming Melburnians wouldn’t go out to dinner for fear of being attacked by African gangs.
Equally absurd was Dutton’s claim that legislation to facilitate the medical evacuation of sick asylum seekers from Manus Island and Nauru would cause Australians to be “kicked off” public hospital waiting lists.
And Dutton alienated Australian Chinese voters in the 2022 federal election by warning that Australia should prepare for war with China.
Dutton and his Queensland Liberal colleagues won’t counter the threat from One Nation in the state’s regional seats by mimicking One Nation policies.
But in the hope of out-manoeuvring One Nation, the Liberal leadership has created grave risks of re-election for the remnants of the moderates, including frontbenchers Paul Fletcher and Julian Leeser.
Also at risk from Teal, Green and Labor candidates are Alex Hawke and Michael Sukkar, and up to five backbenchers in Melbourne and Adelaide.
Perhaps Dutton’s Liberals are relying on a change in the sentiment that was evident in the Aston byelection, where voters did not blame the Albanese government for rising interest rates and living costs.
At some stage such a change might happen, but the Reserve Bank Board’s decision last Tuesday to pause the cash rate signals its reluctance to go hard with further rate hikes.
Young voters enduring the rental crisis might consider punishing Labor, but they are unlikely to view the Liberals as the solution, instead turning in even greater numbers to the Greens.
Arguing about the wording of the referendum question is straight out of the conservative playbook. Step one: demand ever more detail. Step two: if lots of detail is provided, say “if you don’t understand it don’t vote for it.”
Dutton’s manoeuvre is best understood as an attempt to keep the Parliamentary Liberal Party together, even if it is ultimately at the party’s expense. Already Tasmanian MP Bridget Archer has spoken out and more are sure to follow as the referendum campaign heats up.
Returning to the Hawke era, in the late-1980s the Liberal Party ran a series of advertisements with the tag line: “The answer is Liberal.” Hawke’s response was: “If the answer is Liberal, it must have been a silly bloody question.”
More than 30 years later, with their bloody-minded opposition for opposition’s sake, Dutton’s Liberals are inviting the same response.
Craig Emerson is managing director of Emerson Economics. He is director of the APEC Study Centre at RMIT University, a visiting fellow at the ANU and adjunct professor at Victoria University’s College of Business.