My name is Lily Maddon and I'm a proud Arunda Bunjelung Calcottin woman from Gadighal Country. The Daily oz acknowledges that this podcast is recorded on the lands of the Gadighl people and pays respect to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island and nations. We pay our respects to the first peoples of these countries, both past and present.
Good morning, Anne, Welcome to the Daily os It's Monday, the sixteenth of October. I'm Sam, I'm Zara.
Good evening.
We have breaking news tonight.
The referendum for the Voice to Parliament has been defeated.
Australia has overwhelmingly said no to the prospect of a constitutionally enshrined Indigenous voice to Parliament. It's a historic moment which some are celebrating.
The referendum has not been successful and I think that's good for our country.
This was a bad proposal and some are grieving.
For many, today is a day of sadness. When you aim high, sometimes you for sure.
In today's Deep Dive, Tom and Zara are going to discuss what led to this result and what it means going forward. But first the headlines.
Israel's military is preparing for what it describes as the next stages of its war with Hummas, which will likely include a ground invasion of northern parts of Gaza. Israel declared war after Hummas's October seven surprise attacks that have since killed one thousand, three hundred Israelis, wounding at least another three thousand. More than two two hundred people have
been killed in Gaza and eight thousand injured. Meanwhile, Foreign Minister Penny Wong has announced rescheduled repatriation flights for Australians after they were originally canceled due to safety concerns. There are one thousand, two hundred and thirty four Australians seeking repatriation. We will be bringing you a deep dive on this topic tomorrow.
The center right National Party, in coalition with fellow right wing Hardy Act, is set to take power in New Zealand following the weekend's election. The parties have been in opposition since twenty seventeen, and former and New Zealand CEO Christopher Luxen will become the next Prime minister.
The European Union has asked social media platform x to provide information about how it's complying with rules that it must not allow the spreading of dis and misinformation and hate speech. The request reportedly comes in the wake of the Israel Garza conflict. X must respond to the request by the eighteenth of October, and the response could lead to a broader investigation.
And today's good news, the University of Texas has made a breakthrough in breast cancer research. Scientists discovered the specific enzyme found in breast cancer believed to cause cancer associated mutations, that has the potential to also be used in new therapies to target and kill cancer cells. That is good news.
For today's deep dive, we're going to be unpacking all of the results of this weekend's referendum, and it was a massive weekend at that. To help understand what happened, I'm joined by tda's political journalist Tom Crowley. Tom, Welcome back to the podcast.
Good Mornings are There's a lot to unpack, the.
Sure is, so I think that the best place to start today is by understanding exactly what happened over the weekend and just unpacking. I guess as a starting point what the results were.
Yeah, So the result, as I'm sure many people have already heard was a resounding rejection of an indigenous voice to Parliament in Australia's constitution. So the referendum failed. It failed in every state. So my recall that for a referendum to succeed it needs a majority nationwide and a majority in at least four states. Well, it didn't get a majority in any state. Got closest in Victoria. It also won in the Act, but generally speaking it was
roundly rejected across the country. I think in terms of the voting patterns that we saw, it was the strongest yes vote in inner city areas, and then it got weaker as you moved to outer suburban areas and was particularly weak in rural areas, but then it was strong again in remote areas. So the strongest yes vote was in Melbourne, really all across suburban Melbourne. In Sydney there
was a bit of an east west divide. There were some areas of inner Brisbane, Adelaide, Perth and Canberra where there was yes vote, and as I mentioned, some remote communities in wa of Northern Territory in Queensland in particular, where there were strong yes votes in sections of the community with a high proportion of First Nations voters, but
apart from that, it was a very comprehensive story. We're looking roughly at a sixty to forty split in favor of No across the country, so a fairly comprehensive defeat for the referendum.
Many of us have never voted in a referendum before and thus would have woken up on Sunday morning not really knowing what happens now. You know, there's no playbook for how this plays out. So what happens next in terms of the voice where to from here?
Well, it doesn't happen, is the simple answer, and that's the way the Prime Minister certainly is talking about it. So certainly there is no constitutional change. Obviously, because the referendum has been rejected. The Constitution stays exactly as it was. It will not be changed to recognize First Nations people, and it won't be changed to add a voice. Parliament could and Parliament's always had the ability to legislate a voice in normal laws, something that could be added and
removed at any time. But that's certainly something Parliament could do. It doesn't seem that will happen. The Prime Minister's been very clear. He spoke on Saturday night and said that the Australian people have rejected the idea of a voice and that he's not going to seek to pass it under normal laws.
It's now up to all of us to come together and find a different way to the same reconciled destination.
So for now it's it seems that the idea of the voice ended on the weekend. In some way. Of course, the government has committed to continue to try to close the gap, to work on new ways to achieve First Nations policies. The Prime Minister said on Saturday night he would continue to try to listen in whatever way possible.
Now government will continue to seek better outcomes for Indigenous Australians and their children and the generations to come.
The Opposition leader Peter Dutton struck a similar tone.
I will do my utmost to lead with courage and to do what is right to implement the practical solutions required to improve outcomes and close the gap.
So I'm sure that in the coming years there will be perhaps even in the coming months, more conversation about new ways of achieving First Nations policies. But as far as a voice in our political system. That idea will go no further, I think than last weekend in terms of the way forward for First Nations people and First Nations leaders, I think that's a more complicated question. Of course. The idea of the voice came from First Nations leaders.
As we said a lot in the last few weeks, this was an idea that came from a document called the ULARU Statement from the Heart, a statement made in twenty seventeen by about two hundred and fifty First Nations leaders. For the people who authored that statement and who have been pushing for a voice, this is clearly an extremely disappointing result, and I suspect for many a very personal rejection.
And I'm sure there will be more conversations had in the First Nation's community to come about what the way forward looks like, what is the way to redress historic disadvantage, what is the way to achieve justice to close the gaps. Those conversations will, no doubt happen, But for now, the First Nations people who have been leading the charge for a voice have declared a week of mourning, and they've said that they won't talk for a week about why
this result happened, what it meant, what comes next? That they will be flying Aboriginal and tires straight island of flags half masts and encouraging other people to do the same, and taking that time to mourn the result and reflect on what was clearly a very significant disappointment for people who spent many years campaigning for a voice, and no doubt for many people in the first nation's community, taken as a personal rejection and a very sad moment Tom.
In the minutes after the referendum was declared as having failed, there was already a raft of analysis that was published by every media commentator in the country. What are some of these views about why the No campaign succeeded in the way that it did.
Yeah, it's a really big question, Sarah, and I think it's one that we're going to be discussing and debating for a very long time, and we'll probably never agree on exactly why the result was the way that it was, and we'll also never know, right. I think that's important
to say here. We ask Australians to go into the booth and write the words yes or no. We don't ask them to write a paragraph explaining their reasoning We will never know for sure why the public made the decision that it did, and so we need to take any sort of interpretation with a grain of salt. The first thing to say, though, is that the no case usually wins.
Right.
Referendums usually fail. We've had forty five now in our history, and eight have succeeded. And in part I think that is because it is easier to run a no campaign than a yes campaign. Just sort of structurally, I think of it almost a bit like a courtroom. In a courtroom, you have the prosecution trying to prove that someone is guilty. The defense doesn't have to prove that they are innocent. They just have to create doubt. They just have to create doubt and guilt. It's the same thing with a
yes and a no campaign, right. The ES campaign has to convince you to support an idea. The no campaign doesn't need you to support them. They just need to create doubt about the idea. And in a sense, that is an easier task, and it's one that the no campaign I think did very effectively. To me, probably the most effective line in the entire referendum debate was this line about detail, and it was something that Peter Dutton said for really for eighteen months he said it really consistently.
You know, there's not enough detail, we don't know how this thing's going to work, and you know, offering no comment about the merits of the line. But it was a very effective bit of political messaging because it was simple, it was sharp. People heard it. It created again that doubt and confusion and I think then by contrast, the Prime Minister's answer to that question was a bit of a mouthful. The Prime Minister was saying, well, a lot of the details will be worked out in legislation. We
don't have a full version of it. We do have these principles.
You know.
It was a longer answer and I think it wasn't again just in terms of political messaging and understanding that a lot of voters will only hear, you know, the very high level messages from the ES and the No
campaigns about what this is about. I think that that was very effective from a long way back and creating confusion and you could see that in the opinion polls, and that's where I think is the most important place to look, because if you go back a year ago, sixty four percent of Australians said that they were planning to support a voice that's well and truly enough for
this referendum to have succeeded. And I think the best place to look to see this is the opinion polls, right because a year ago you had sixty four percent of Australians saying yes, I planned to support a voice and we've ended up at about forty And so the question of how was the referendum lost is how we got from sixty four for yes to forty fo yes.
And I think that was a story of confusion and detail that was it was about the time that Peter Dutton started talking in that way and started moving towards a no campaign that those numbers started to shift. And so I think that that's why I view that as the key factor. There are there are a lot of factors here, clearly also, you know there were It's worth acknowledging this really directly that there were elements of really
horrible racism in the campaign. As tda's Daniel Oserto reported last week, calls from First Nations people to the national hotline that deals with issues of racism and abuse and trauma doubled this year. There was clearly a very significant spike in racism, and that is obviously a part of this debate that's going to be I think the most troubling to many people and a really difficult thing to
come to terms with. But again, I think when you look at the fact that sixty four percent of people a year ago said they were willing to support this thing, were willing to support this sort of general gesture towards a voice for First Nations people, but then were convinced in the political fray to change their minds. To me, that's really where the referendum was one and lost.
And of course we know that no referendum has ever been one without bipartisan support. So the minute that we saw the opposition come out and support the no case, the task for Anthony Albanesi became significantly harder. Absolutely so, Tom, if we take a step back, what does the result mean for the future of this country.
I think it's going to take us time to be able to answer that question properly. Zara, I think clearly, in the short term for the large number of First Nations people who have spent years advocating for a voice, this is very painful setback that that language of the Week of Mourning that we heard on the weekend suggests, you know how painful this is for people who've put their hearts into pushing this idea, who've seen it as a way to begin to close the gaps and address
Indigenous disadvantage. This will feel a very personal rejection and a very personal loss for a lot of First Nations people, and it's going to take some time for all of us, I think, to grapple with that over the longer term, though. I think this is one thing the Prime Minister said a bit was that at least we have spent a year or more than a year talking about Indigenous disadvantage, talking about the status quo. And this is something that I've said a lot as well in our reporting, that
everybody agrees that the status quo is broken. They might have different ways to emphasize it or different ways of talking about it, but pretty much everybody agrees that when it comes to outcomes for First Nations people in this country,
something's got to change. That momentum, I don't think will go anywhere, and I think anybody who cares about these issues wants to see change that is going to continue, and it's going to continue with new generations coming through into leadership as well, and I think at TDA we're often we're talking mostly to young people. Were very aware
of how young people think. This is another one of those many examples that we can point to in our politics at the moment where the views of young people, who all evidence suggests very clearly voted yes on the weekend.
The views of young people don't necessarily align with the rest of the views of the rest of Australia, and that might mean that we don't get the change that young people might have voted for now well, but it doesn't mean that it's over because you know, ultimately young people win the battle of time, and as this generation I think gets older, gets into positions of leadership, these
conversations won't go away. These issues will be returned to and the level of enthusiasm that we saw from you know, I mean forty sixty is a resounding result, but it's still millions of people voting either way, and so I think it's and millions of people I think on both sides who agreed that the status quo when it comes
to first nation's issues needs to change. So you know, at some point clearly First Nations leaders at the moment, you will need that time to mourn, and I don't think we can expect them to be immediately offering us answers for where to go next. I think in a sense that's up to all of us. But these issues won't go away. We'll be back here again, and I think we'll keep talking about these gaps until they close.
Tom thank you so much for jumping on today and indeed for your excellent reporting over the last couple of weeks. We are very lucky to have you.
Thanks Sarah.
If you need support with any of the themes raised in this episode, you can call one three Yarn. They can connect you with an Aboriginal or Torus Straight Islander Crisis supporter twenty four hours a day.
Thanks for listening to this episode of The Daily OS and for listening to our Special Voice series over the last week. If you learn something from this episode and you're listening on Apple Podcasts, we'd love you to rate and review it now. It takes a couple of seconds and it really does help us get the word out there. Just go to our show page and tap on the write a review button. We'll be back tomorrow. Until then, have a good start to the week,