Australian Politics

"Yes" voters still cannot see that their country voted for equality

Janet Albrechtsen

“The story of the referendum matters and history matters.” So said Indigenous professor of law Megan Davis. It’s a terrible shame, then, that Davis and others interviewed by this newspaper last week have, a year on, still ignored why Australians voted against the voice.

History matters when it is accurately told. That is what John Roskam has done in his report Why Australians Voted to Be Equal, to be published on Friday.

The report sets out the results of the most comprehensive polls of Australians after last year’s constitutional ballot.

The Australians Speak survey, commissioned by the Institute of Public Affairs and Advance Australia, the two groups that spearheaded the No side, asked 3526 Australians a week after the referendum why they voted against the proposal to alter the federal Constitution to create a permanent Indigenous-only body.

The real story of the 2023 referendum is brimming not with emotion but data.

When asked to nominate any of eight reasons that best explained their decision to vote No, 70 per cent of Australians surveyed said the voice would divide Australia. Sixty-six per cent said there was not enough detail. Sixty per cent of Australians surveyed said the voice would make Australians unequal.

Last October’s referendum was a defining moment for the country. The vote against the voice was a rejection by a large swath of the country of identity politics, and an embrace of that fundamental civic value of equality over separatism.

Roskam notes that while there were more than 50 published polls before the referendum asking Australians how they might vote, only three comprehensive polls since the vote have asked Australians why they voted the way they did.

Analysis deliberately bereft of data is just waft. That’s what most Yes campaigners have offered since the referendum. Evidence would get in the way of them blaming the result on racism and ignorance, or on other equally spurious grounds – for example, claiming that Labor MPs and unions didn’t do enough to help, that infighting killed the voice and, even less credulously, that the voice failed because of insufficient money and time.

Are they serious? More than $50m was spent by the Yes campaign – a lot of it swiped from shareholders – to try to convince Australians. Hard data wouldn’t allow them to blame the loss on Peter Dutton either.

The publication of Roskam’s report and the Australians Speak survey by polling company Insightfully lays bare the real reason the voice failed.

While the poll shows that 60 per cent of Australians still support Indigenous recognition in the Constitution, entrenching inequality in the Constitution was a bridge too far.

Roskam is correct to conclude “the outcome of the voice referendum was the most decisive result of any significant political contest in Australian history”.

His analysis reveals that the thumping defeat of the 2023 referendum proposal surpassed defeats of earlier important referendum proposals – from conscription in 1916 (52 per cent against) to banning the Communist Party in 1951 (51 per cent against) to the republic referendum in 1999 (55 per cent against). Nor has any federal election contest since Federation attracted a 60 per cent voting bloc of Australians akin to the No vote last year.

While some previous referendum proposals attracted a higher No vote, as Roskam details, none of them had to counter a tidal wave of support from high-profile political, media, business, religious, education and arts elites as the Yes case did for the voice.

That made the No vote in favour of equality even more telling – even if it wasn’t surprising to Roskam. “The ‘seductive idea’ – that everyone is equal – is the foundation of the modern world and of liberal democracy,” he writes. “It is also an idea at the heart of Christianity. In his Epistle to the Galatians, Paul writes, ‘There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.’ ”

Under Roskam’s leadership, the IPA prosecuted the case for equality when the voice concept was first raised in 2015. The IPA’s message in its Race Has No Place research program was clear: “Changing the Constitution by dividing Australians according to race or ethnic background makes us all unequal.”

As Roskam writes in his soon-to-be-published report, “Nearly 10 years later (equality) was the reason a majority of Australians voted No.”

Those foolish enough to quip that “Roskam would say that, wouldn’t he” must deal with overwhelming evidence. As Roskam says, the Australians Speak data is confirmed in two other surveys done in the weeks after the October 14 referendum last year.

In a poll of 4200 people by the ANU Centre for Social Research and Methods immediately after the referendum vote, 66.1 per cent of respondents said dividing the country was a “very important” factor in deciding how they voted. ANU’s Australian Constitutional Referendum Study concluded: “The data suggests that Australians voted no because they didn’t want division and remain sceptical of rights for some Australians that are not held by others.”

The poll commissioned by The Australian Population Research Institute in December last year of 3001 respondents found 53 per cent of people who voted No chose this reason: “We are one country, and no legal or political body should be defined on the basis of race or ethnicity.”

Roskam is right that before the October 14 ballot, “supporters of the voice never came to terms with the key argument against the voice which was its creation would overturn the principle of equality of citizenship and so would divide Australians”.

The senior fellow at the IPA told me this week that voice advocates refused to engage with real constitutional conservatives like him because they had no satisfactory response to concerns that “the voice created ‘separate Aboriginal rights’ and so divided Australians and overturned equality of citizenship”.

Some simply ignored it. Roskam points to law professors Davis and George Williams, who made no mention of equality in their 200-page book Everything You Need to Know About The Uluru Statement From the Heart.

Others advanced woefully unconvincing arguments. The constitutional expert group – chaired by Labor Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus and comprising six professors of law, a former High Court judge and Noel Pearson – claimed “the voice does not confer ‘rights’ much less ‘special rights’ on Indigenous people”.

You didn’t need a law degree to understand that a proposal to cement into the Constitution a body for Indigenous people only was a fundamental breach of the civic value that everyone have equal rights.

To their credit, says Roskam, former prime minister Malcolm Turnbull, former High Court chief justice Murray Gleeson and Father Frank Brennan had a serious crack at answering the voice’s fundamental flaw of infringing equality.

Turnbull said he would vote Yes despite his misgivings that the voice was inconsistent with his “republican and egalitarian principles” that all offices in a constitutional democracy should be open to every Australian.

Brennan was the most intellectually honest. Roskam says the Jesuit priest and law professor acknowledged the “concept of the voice does positively discriminate in favour of Indigenous Australians, that it does provide Indigenous Australians with special rights, and it does provide those special rights to Indigenous Australians by virtue of their group identity. For Brennan the voice is a measure necessary to address the disadvantage experienced by Indigenous Australians.”

Still, the resounding belief among grassroots Australians in unity and equality was a wake-up call to the vast number of religious leaders who supported the Yes side. With the Australians Speak poll revealing that 74 per cent of religious voters rejected the voice, “it’s clear,” writes Roskam, “that those religious organisations did not speak for their members”.

The Australians Speak data also buries the fallacy that bipartisan support would have ensured the voice won.

More than one-third of Labor voters – 37 per cent – rejected the voice. Eighty-two per cent of all respondents said Coalition opposition to the voice “made no difference” to how they voted on October 14. Similarly, 70 per cent said Labor’s support for the voice “made no difference”. As Roskam points out, some referendums (in 1937, 1967 and 1977) have failed with bipartisan support and one passed (in 1946) without bipartisanship. In any case, plenty of premiers openly supported the voice, along with other state and federal Liberal MPs.

As Roskam writes: “Yes advocates should not have been ‘shell-shocked’ by the power of words such as ‘equal’ and ‘equality’.”

Many of them, after all, had worked on the same-sex marriage postal survey in 2017 where the theme of “marriage equality” convinced 62 per cent of Australians to vote Yes. A similar number of Australians voted in favour of equal rights under the Constitution for Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians.

“To some it might have appeared that those who argued for ‘equality’ in 2017 were arguing against ‘equality’ in 2023.”

The Australians Speak poll contains other nuggets about the nation. Go read it.

The final word goes to Roskam: “At a time when social cohesion is under unprecedented strain and our way of life under assault, we chose unity over division. The referendum result should give Australians the confidence to speak freely about issues that for too long have been deemed off-limits.”

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/commentary/yes-voters-still-cannot-see-that-their-country-voted-for-equality/news-story/348cf474b61119dcb2c50b401a9de26e

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‘Must do better’: ABC boss David Anderson apologises to staff over racial slurs

One wonders whether slurs against whites -- as in critical race theory -- will be penalized

An independent review has found journalists at the public broadcaster were told their voices and appearances were “too Western Sydney” for broadcast, and that they would avoid redundancies because they were “diversity hires.”

Managing director David Anderson issued an apology to employees – both past and present – who experienced racism after the taxpayer-funded broadcaster released its independent racism review on Tuesday, 17 months after it was first announced.

He said anti-racism training will be rolled out at the ABC.

“On behalf of everyone at the ABC, I am sorry for any and all racist behaviour and past harms experienced by our Indigenous and CALD (culturally and linguistically diverse) employees, either currently or formerly employed,” Mr Anderson said on Tuesday.

“We all need to do better for our colleagues on our commitment to zero tolerance for racism in our workplace.”

The ABC has accepted in principle 15 recommendations including that all staff read the report, the ABC commit to being proactively anti-racist, improve diverse representation at management level and better understand lived experiences by staff to help with storytelling and create culturally-safe support systems.

Another recommendation is to improve the ABC’s response to public attacks including on social media and that a staff member immediately reports an attack to a centralised and independent team.

Mr Anderson announced a racism review on May 21 last year following the fallout involving former Indigenous ABC host Stan Grant, a Wiradjuri, Dharawal and Gurrawin man, who said he had been subject to “sickening behaviour” over his coverage prior to King Charles III’s coronation.

Grant said at the time he felt unsupported by his employer.

“No one at the ABC — whose producers invited me onto their coronation coverage as a guest — has uttered one word of public support.

“Not one ABC executive has publicly refuted the lies written or spoken about me.”

Mr Anderson apologised to Grant over the matter.

The 171-page report titled Listen Loudly, Act Strongly, led by Indigenous lawyer Terri Janke, a Wuthathi, Yadhaighana and Meriam woman, included 120 participants – both past and present ABC staff including Indigenous and CALD employees – and revealed a “lack of shared understanding of racism among ABC Leadership”.

The report also found: “People who are First Nations and CALD expressed not feeling valued in the workplace, and tokenised.

“There is a cultural issue throughout the organisation that allows racism to exist and persist at the ABC, which has caused widespread distrust in these systems among First Nations and CALD staff.”

One participant told the review that they were told: “how much of you is Aboriginal? Don’t worry. You don’t look it’.”

The ABC will launch an internal campaign to help boost awareness of racism and create a new position, First Nations Strategy director, to join the ABC’s leadership team who will report to Mr Anderson and help implement the 15 recommendations in the report.

The ABC’s head of Indigenous, diversity and inclusion Kelly Williams will do this role until a new managing director replaces outgoing boss Mr Anderson.

A recruitment process will then begin.

Mr Anderson also said: “For anyone who thinks it is OK to display or practise racist behaviour, or who thinks they can make people feel belittled based on their identity, we will call you out and remove you from this organisation.

“You are not welcome here.

“We are a workplace that values respect, and we expect it.”

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/business/media/must-do-better-abc-boss-david-anderson-apologises-to-staff-over-racial-slurs/news-story/59a83d6ef56b427835cc1d50d5cabad9

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The chattering climate class and their war on coal

Electricity is slippery stuff, in that it can be difficult to properly grasp what it is or how to quantify it.

We can blame the school system. Teachers who were taught social politics at University must somehow teach mathematics and physics.

There is a reason for everything in the world and that reason usually comes down to physics until politics gets mixed in. This is a problem. In politics, the same big lie can be repeated many times, as loudly as possible, until people accept it as truth or give up trying to argue the toss.

Readers will be familiar with the nameplate rating on wind farms and solar plants. It lists the rated output under ideal circumstances, measured in watts. If a heater has 1,000W we all understand it is telling us the output at one instant in time. Consumption is a different thing and is measured in watts/hour. Reversing this, we can understand we are seeing a generator’s nameplate watts as the size of the generator and watt hours as how much it provides.

Mr Bowen claims wind and solar are clean, green, and cheap.

An interesting idea making its way around the energy conversation at present is that there is no such thing as baseload energy. The lie is perpetrated by the political system which is, at present, intending to destroy the concept (and existence) of baseload energy. Baseload is created by heavy generators that operate all day, every day, and are typically cheap. The disadvantage of this structure is that baseload plants usually take time to reach full production. Then, they need to run for extended periods of time to be economically viable. Coal and nuclear are the only two types feasible for most of the Australian market.

Gas and diesel plants can provide electricity but they are expensive when operated in this way. Peaking power is where gas comes to the fore. It can be fired up quickly and make electricity rapidly. This is ideal for peaks when people come home from their day and want heating or cooling and to cook. Gas can cover this surge very happily. Diesel is lovely stuff and great in remote locations where there is no access to the grid or if the grid fails. It might not be pretty, but it delivers when needed.

In the whole clean grid argument, those words should be enshrined…

‘When it is needed.’

Coal, nuclear, gas, and diesel will deliver when needed. Reliability has been ignored by the chattering classes who have created the current disaster of high prices and brownouts that continue to destroy various industries.

Perhaps that is the whole point of ‘renewable’ energy.

I put that in quotes because the best figures I can find are that they only return seven-tenths of the power used to build them.

Every wind tower is a hallmark to coal-fired power being able to carry inefficient freeloaders. Freeloaders because renewable technologies can never produce energy when it is needed, only when it wishes.

Solar and wind dump themselves on the energy market, making it impossible for reliable supplies to remain economic. If they had to obey the same bidding rules, they would never survive.

Let’s compare the costs of wind, solar, and nuclear. To do this we can look at the Shepherds Flat Wind Farm, Topaz Solar Farm, and Barakah Nuclear Power Plant.

We can skittle the first anti-nuclear claim about taking too long to build. Barakah was completed within eight years. The global average for modern nuclear plant construction (globally) is between seven and eight years. Sadly in Australia we have a less than helpful public service that thrives on inefficiency that might drag out this timeline.

The nameplate ratings on these plants were 845MW for Shepherds Flat, 550MW for Topaz and 5,600MW for Barakah. Nuclear can appear expensive if you compare build cost against the nameplate rating but not markedly. Shepherds Flat cost $2 billion, Topaz $2.5 billion, and Barakah $24.4 billion. Comparing build cost to nameplate rating, Shepherds Flat cost 42 cents/MW, Topaz 22 cents/MW, and Barakah 23 cents/MW.

Looking at the size per dollar, nuclear is almost as good as solar and better than wind. The issue already demonstrated is not size as much as provision. That nameplate value is giving you one second of use. One second later, you are going to need that much again. This means the Watt/Hrs is crucial.

This is where wind and solar fail massively. The watts produced are not as important as the Watt Hours provided to the market. Assuming a generous 25-year life span for Shepherds Flat, 30 years for Topaz, and a mean-spirited 60 years for Barakah (when it is likely to still be running 100 years after it started), I calculated the GWh per annum compared to the Build Price over the life of the project. That is Build Price divided by annual GWh times lifespan. Shepherds Flat was $40,000, Topaz $75,000 and Barakah $9,300. On this measure, nuclear is significantly cheaper, but the price of firming wind and solar is not added to their totals. So that you can have power on those hot still days of summer when the wind doesn’t blow or the cold nights of winter when the sun is not shining you will need either nuclear or coal to provide you with the electricity you need.

We can discuss batteries some other time, but the new super battery has been coming about as long as perpetual motion and flying cars. Lithium ion batteries are old tech that has been developed to a point of maturity where there is little left to squeeze out of them and without mountains we are not going to get enough pumped hydro no matter how economically bad that model is.

If I magically had the power I would build more coal-fired stations, only because nuclear will need time to be made legal and that cannot be predicted. Nuclear however beats wind and solar to bits as far as costs and output and reliability are concerned.

https://www.spectator.com.au/2024/10/the-chattering-climate-class-and-their-war-on-coal/

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Lying far-Left union

Queensland’s largest union has launched a “Mediscare” style campaign claiming - with no evidence - the LNP are attempting to privatise health services.

The Queensland Nurses and Midwives Union in an election eve ad blitz has called for voters to “put the LNP last” as the party was planning to “privatise health services” – despite having no evidence.

The union bases its claim on comments made by opposition health spokeswoman Ros Bates, where she voiced support for an existing $100m government scheme to use private hospitals to treat public patients in a bid to treat Queenslanders closer to where they live.

The union ad is reminiscent of the 2016 Federal Labor scare campaign claiming a Coalition government would privatise Medicare.

The launch of the campaign has rocked the first official day of the Queensland election and has generated a significant reaction from our readers.

https://www.couriermail.com.au/news/queensland/qld-politics/what-you-said-about-mediscare-campaign-that-rocked-first-day-of-qld-election-battle/news-story/b6861edb540fc762f2bbe6a06d5ec148