Author's note: I wrote this on 9 October, in the week leading up to the Voice poll on 14 October.
Australians are being asked to alter their birth certificate with very little information. I know, I know the trolls have been making this point for a long time and it’s time to move past it, but that doesn’t mean it’s not true. If you watch Netflix you’ll see how deeply people feel about family ties. I watched a TV show about a doctor who inseminated hundreds of women without their consent with his own sperm, the children of those procedures – carried out in a fertility clinic in Indiana – are rightly outraged by the liberties the physician took with their paternity, making himself a kind of divine vessel in the process of ruining other people’s idea of who they are. In the case of the Voice it strikes me that part of the problem arises from a similar place linked to the very identity of voters. A legislated Voice is like a passport, you can even let yours expire and then reapply for another one. But in order to do so you need a birth certificate at least. The Voice vote is like asking someone to change details on their birth certificate.
What?
If you had to alter your birth certificate to change the name of your father, how would that make you feel. Would you feel as though you’d been lied to, cheated, deceived? Or would you simply say “So what?” and move on blithely? I don’t know about you but this seems like a big deal.
The problem for Albanese and his ministers is that if you start describing how the Voice will work you’re going to get bogged down in distracting detail. I understand completely their need to keep the debate limited to “Yes” and “No”. When the Australian Electoral Commission (AEC) was forced by the media to get involved in the short-lived “Tick” and “Cross” debate they simply refused to be drawn out on the matter, saying again and again (and again in ads) that voters are being asked to simply write “Yes” or “No’ on the ballot paper. The AEC understands that even to talk publicly about the confusion created was to continue sowing confusion, so they aborted the juggernaut as quickly as possible and the media obediently moved on.
That’s not to say that everyone moved on, by no means. Many people out there in La La Land believe that they’re being conned and that they’re having the wool pulled down over their eyes. But we don’t need to worry about the fringes. It’s the middle we’re concerned about, the majority 80 percent who count.
Even given this section of the population there are many diverse viewpoints in play, and it’s within this cohort that the arguments about detail will continue to be important right up to polling day. I’m writing this on 9 Oct so polling day is still in the future, but according to opinion polls the Voice is looking unlikely as a going concern. Not to say that opinion polls are all that important, we know that people routinely lie to pollsters for various reasons, but still the impetus seems at the moment to be behind the “No” position. Given that the most likely reason people will have for voting “No” is the lack of detail – it’s an issue unaligned with any particular political position, after all – I think that the lead-up to 14 Oct has been mishandled by the government. It seems to me that having Nathan Cleary come out in favour of the Voice is the Voice’s “jump-the-shark” moment, the moment when you hear the wind whistling through the eaves just before the tornado hits. I fear for the Voice. It sounds like a lost cause to me.
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