You can feel it smouldering as the Voice referendum dies. The fake left is burning to label the no-vote. It will explode when it discovers that most Australians are more self-interested than altruistic during economic turmoil.
Whether you should call this racist is not going to matter. It will be labelled thus. In some cases, rightly.
Wokey is already warming us up for it:
And this is the context for what appears to be a point of agreement between the Yes and No camps: that division (of which they accuse each other) and polarisation are evils to be avoided. After all, however much the right in Australia mimics the Trump Republicans, everyone agrees the kind of polarisation on display in the United States is undesirable. Whatever the outcome of the referendum, we should avoid division.
Except, division and polarisation are contextual states. What if a substantial proportion of the population holds a genuinely malicious view? Is being polarised from them, wanting nothing to do with them, judging them for holding that view, automatically wrong? Should one instead embrace them in spite of their abhorrent views, dismissing those views as just banal political disagreement?
The latter is a kind of lie: it papers over real malice with avuncular “we’re all in this together” tissue, because division is so awful. But a No vote, signalling as it would that Australians like their colonial settler society in just the dispossessive, exclusionary and genocidal form it has been for 240 years, and have no interest in addressing the toxic disadvantage of First Peoples, would provide clarity about the kind of people we really are, however uncomfortable it may be. That clarity about our true nature is to be welcomed, and not obscured with lamentations of “division”, or blaming inept campaign strategists.
This series of straw men is just the tip of a firefront sweeping Australia’s way. But it is wrong, and the failure to understand why will cost the fake left dearly.
The referendum is failing not because folks are racist, the Yes campaign is weak, or the No campaign is strong.
It is failing owing to bad or malicious timing.
Anthony Albanese has (I suspect deliberately) timed the Voice to coincide with collapsing living standards mainly of his making.
Foisting Voice upon the polity at this moment is catastrophic politics. It is gaslighting and abandoning the majority of Australians, like a thousand trips to Hawaii over a million bushfires.
There is nothing surer in this world than such behaviour generating a response of anger. And that anger will be expressed via the most convenient conduit.
Which, sadly, is the Voice.
If, as seems inevitable, the fake left greets defeat with a wail of recrimination and labelling, the polity will recoil from it as if burned.
And Albo’s fake left regime will self-immolate as if governed by a fourth law of thermodynamics.
