Content warning: First Nations readers are advised this piece discusses the Voice to Parliament referendum and colonial violence.
“Different racial regimes encode and reproduce the unequal relationship into which Europeans coerced the populations concerned.”
– Patrick Wolfe, ‘Settler colonialism and the elimination of the native’
If the Voice to Parliament referendum taught us anything, it was that the process of constitutional amendment inevitably provoked a paternalistic vote. It was the greatest irony to have all voting-age citizens decide the political, historical, psychological, and generational fate of First Nations peoples. This had been the effect of so-called Australia’s intentionally conservative constitution — change is incremental to prevent fracturing its dependence on mythology: terra nullius.
On either side of the Yes and No positions, a prevailing sense of white guilt sought absolution. By extension, people of colour (POC) either sought Indigenous solidarity, or sided with racist beliefs. While it is necessary to remember that white supremacy underpins conservative Australian-nationalism, it seems equally, if not more necessary, to realise the role of POC in either perpetuating or resisting such racism. Perhaps it seems paradoxical that POC may agree with racist ideas, but POC-endorsed conservatism, ironically, legitimises settler-colonialism among the communities it has always sought to oppress.
Itsekiri writer Nels Abbey coined the term “racism laundering”, being “a process in which the skin colour of an ethnic minority appears to facilitate policies, practices, and narratives that would otherwise be condemned as bigoted.” In the context of the Voice referendum, racism laundering describes the use of First Nations figures to advance paternalistic stances — granting campaigns a sense of moral impunity, protected by claims of Indigenous self-representation. The conservative No campaign conformed to this model by using Jacinta Nampijinpa Price and Nyunggai Warren Mundine as figureheads to argue that the Voice would “divide” Australia by granting constitutional “racial privileges” to First Nations peoples. This was sensationalised as an existential threat to the rights of POC, particularly of refugee background, who have fled political oppressions. For capitalists, this reinvigorated fears of private-property repatriation not seen since Mabo. Ironically, this rhetoric falsely implies that the constitution was created in a vacuum. As if Australia’s federation did not legally depend on terra nullius, nor was it motivated by the perceived existential threat of non-European immigration as “a matter of life and death to the purity of [Australia’s] race and the future of [the] nation”.
The framework of racism laundering allows us to criticise this campaign as an attempt to separate non-Indigenous conservatives from settler-colonial values. Genuine white supremacy sought absolution through the presence of Mundine and Price, to reconcile racism with First Nations authorities. The scepticism-inducing arguments of “if you don’t know, vote No” and the supposed “racial divisions” to ensue were direct attacks on ill-informed communities who had little awareness of the constitution’s function, history, nor the point of the referendum itself. This campaign capitalised on the absence of common historical knowledge about the Frontier Wars; Indigenous genocide, and the lie that white privilege in Australia no longer exists.
As the Blak Sovereign Movement argued, the Yes23 campaign was not innocent of racism laundering either. Historian Gary Foley’s index, “The Noel Pearson Dossier” brings attention to Pearson’s engagement in racism laundering and political conservatism despite being the predominant Yes23 figurehead. Financing of Yes23 by corporations including BHP and Rio Tinto also aroused suspicion, given their destruction of lands and sacred sites such as Juukan Gorge, and those in the Pilbara. As BPU President Keiran Stewart-Assheton has argued, the Yes campaign refused to reckon with the racism embedded within the constitution, instead focussing on assuaging white guilt. This progressive No critique, however, was shadowed by the conservative No campaign — the latter being responsible for the coercion of POC en masse through strategies of misinformation and culture-war rhetoric.
Western Sydney encompasses arguably the most ethnoculturally diverse electorates in Australia. Since the referendum, the Centre for Western Sydney has published research analysing Sydney electorates’ outcomes. For half of Western Sydney’s electorates, the Yes vote bettered the national average, despite nonetheless recording predominant No outcomes. This is important to consider as Western Sydney had been made a national spectacle regarding voting predictability, frequently characterised by the predominant No outcomes during 2017’s same-sex marriage plebiscite. In this context, it is essential to deconstruct the effectiveness of the conservative No campaign on Western Sydney’s POC communities of relatively low socio-economic status.
Independent MP for Fowler Dai Le claimed that cost-of-living pressures were of main concern to her electorate, an ethnoculturally diverse constituency particularly representative of Western Sydney’s Vietnamese community. Her apolitical stance, which sought to reorient public focus from the referendum onto socio-economic issues, did little to educate her diverse electorate on the stakes of constitutional alteration for First Nations communities. Le’s rejection of responsibility particularly strained Vietnamese-Australian campaigners to bridge the gap between language barriers, and lacking political and historical education. What Le represented to the Vietnamese community, and Australia at large, was an unwillingness to reckon with the decolonisation of immigrant-dense suburbs through education and community involvement. As historian Gary Foley writes in his book “Native Title is Not Land Rights!”, the Battle of Dien Bien Phu — in which the Vietnamese emancipated themselves from French settler-colonialism — “had an impact on the Aboriginal community in Redfern” particularly in anticipation of the Aboriginal Tent Embassy. To question Dai Le’s words to The Conversation — “I love this line, ‘we are one, but we are many’” — do we Vietnamese-Australians not owe liberational solidarity to First Nations peoples, as they found in us?
Liverpool City Council Mayor Ned Mannoun defensively took to Ben Fordham’s 2GB program in response to Waleed Aly who explained that electorates featuring greater levels of educational attainment were more Yes leaning compared to No leaning electorates. This was sensationalised by Newscorp as a classist remark, framing Aly to have suggested Western Sydney’s generally lower attainments of tertiary education represent an innate political backwardness. However, Aly was actually explaining a simple statistical correlation. This attack on Aly’s ill-perceived remark allowed a continual perpetuation of racism laundering, as Mannoun furthered the myth that First Nations’ constitutional enshrinement would privilege certain ethnic groups at the exclusion of others. His opinion shadowed the presence of dissenting voices in Western Sydney’s POC communities.
The conservative rhetoric Mannoun indulges thus separates POC social disadvantage from that of First Nations peoples, misconceiving an opportunity of liberational solidarity as racial antagonism. Indeed, POC have been encouraged to believe in a sense of colonial-exceptionalism and to thus enter into a contradictory ideological alliance with white conservatism. As POC have contemplated issues of class while ignoring the equally necessary dimension of race, they have been distracted from the endurance of an underlying white-nationalism ethos that defines the conservative No campaign.
