About 20 years ago, I noticed that far-left rhetorical attacks on Australia and Israel began to converge.

Australia Day—the country’s national holiday—was labelled “Invasion Day.” Australia was “occupied.” People who’d immigrated were called “settler-colonials” or just “colonists.” Indigenous Australians (their collective nouns kept changing) were “oppressed.” At first—catching it out of the corner of my eye, busy while life made other plans—I thought this was boiler-plate racism. Someone didn’t like the large number of immigrants from all over the world who’d come to the country after WWII.

I did a double take when I realised this was directed at everyone who’d pitched up since 1788, and it was emanating from (mostly) white academics and (mostly) indigenous Australians. I thought it alienating nonsense that would undermine public support for any proposed reforms to the country’s indigenous policies. On October 14 this year, when the Australian people had their say on one such proposal—as is required for any change to the Constitution—it became clear my instincts were right.

Australia’s indigenous advocates and activists (there are two native groups, Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders) didn’t use to sound like that. As part of wider civil rights campaigns, they’d developed a shared vision of Australian citizenship that identified common national goals, and which was genuinely persuasive.

The last time Australia had a referendum on indigenous issues—in 1967, when the Constitution was changed to remove two racist provisions—more than 90 per cent of the electorate voted YES. Then, voters were asked to approve changes to two provisions in the Constitution: section 51 (xxvi) and section 127.

Section 51 begins:

The Parliament shall, subject to this Constitution, have power to make laws for the peace, order, and good government of the Commonwealth with respect to:

The clauses that follow (referred to as “heads of power”) list the federal parliament’s legislative competencies. The amendment deleted the text in italics from subsection xxvi (known as the “race” power):

The people of any race, other than the aboriginal race in any State, for whom it is deemed necessary to make special laws.

Section 127 was removed entirely. Headed “Aborigines not to be counted in reckoning population,” it had read:

In reckoning the numbers of the people of the Commonwealth, or of a State or other part of the Commonwealth, aboriginal natives shall not be counted.

The Voice to Parliament

Australia is a proud constitutional bowerbird. A Westminster system with a bicameral parliament, the country also enshrines a federalism so intense it shocks many Americans. It’s possible for an individual state to vote (by referendum) to secede, for example, something that once happened. Australia also—when drafting constitutional arrangements in the late nineteenth century—copied the Swiss when it comes to changing its founding document.

Section 128 provides that the Constitution can only be amended by referendum. It also requires a “double majority”: a majority of the total population plus a majority in at least four of the six states. The two lightly populated territories also vote, but their ballots only go towards the national total.

The proposed amendment to the Constitution voted down on October 14 this year would have added the following Chapter and section:

Chapter IX Recognition of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples

129 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice

In recognition of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples as the First Peoples of Australia:

(1) there shall be a body, to be called the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice;

(2) the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice may make representations to the Parliament and the Executive Government of the Commonwealth on matters relating to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples;

(3) the Parliament shall, subject to this Constitution, have power to make laws with respect to matters relating to the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice, including its composition, functions, powers and procedures.

Australia has now had 45 referendums since Federation in 1901, for a meagre harvest of eight changes to its Constitution. The Voice to Parliament was voted down even more comprehensively than the proposed Republic was in 1999. It lost in every state and one of the country’s two territories. At time of writing (the count isn’t quite complete), under 40 per cent of Australians voted YES. If it were possible to kill it any deader, it’s difficult to see how.

Australia: An Odd Duck

If John Locke is the father of the US Constitution and John Stuart Mill and Adam Smith the fathers of British approaches to governance, then Australia’s dad is Jeremy Bentham, the bloke who described natural rights as “nonsense upon stilts.” He rejected the idea of natural or divinely given rights preceding the establishment of state authority, arguing that rights are creations of law, and without government there are none. Rights, in other words, come from states.

The contrast with John Locke is immediate and obvious: for Locke, individuals and their rights come first, and government comes afterwards. The state for Americans is a bottom-up creation where citizens transfer to it by social contract only so much authority as is strictly necessary for mutual benefit and protection.

Most importantly, where the US favours liberty and rights over democracy and majorities, Australia favours democracy and majorities over liberty and rights. To this day, the country has no bill of rights, and what rights do exist (usually at the state level in a federal system) are simple acts of parliament that can be repealed by a subsequent government.

In other words, Australian legal and political culture is in some ways the anti-US: it doesn’t think rights drop fully formed from the sky. They must, to some degree, be earned—negotiated for with the wider polity.

Aware that Bentham’s approach to institutions tended to produce electorates that saw the nation-state as a vast public utility, Australians put immense care into designing the country’s institutional arrangements and electoral system. There is little beautiful rhetoric in the late nineteenth-century constitutional debates of its Framers—a notable contrast to the American equivalent. There is, however, astonishing attention to detail and a willingness to pinch good things from other countries and civilisations. An obsession with policy detail still forms a major part of Australian governance.

Onto this was bolted several Australian innovations: compulsory registration and compulsory voting; voting on Saturdays; an incorruptible system of postal votes; equal-sized constituencies whose redistricting was managed by an impartial electoral authority; preferential voting (“instant run-off” and “alternative vote” to Americans and Brits) blended with what is now called Single Transferable Vote; a secret ballot where—unlike the Roman and related systems—electors did not bring their pre-filled ballot to the polling station, but a state official gave them an unmarked, pre-printed one before they entered the voting booth.

One effect of the ideological shift I noticed twenty years ago was the acceptability of arguments for exclusions and advantages based on minority ethnic ancestry

This extraordinary regime began to emerge around 1860 and was complete by 1924. Even many Australians do not appreciate the extent to which it is a logistical marvel, more so given it was developed and perfected in a country with huge distances, heavy reliance on transport by bullock trains or pony and trap, and, for some of the period, no telegraph. It is the foundation of what economists call Australia’s “high state capacity”—roughly, the ability to get shit done—and is not easy to reproduce. This is not only because it is hard but because it involves thinking about politics in a different way, chiefly by rejecting US and EU “rights-talk” and Lockean social contract theory.

Voting in referendums is also compulsory. Australians vote a lot. Elections—always held on a Saturday—are beautiful, carnivalesque celebrations of democracy. Australians stream out of their houses, buy snacks and drinks (including the famous “democracy sausage”) at polling places (often primary schools), collect glossy how-to-vote cards—advisory only—from booth-workers who stand outside and represent different political parties, and then vote in a spirit of general bonhomie.

Nonetheless, this is a country that takes democracy very seriously, despite light-hearted photos of people voting in budgie-smugglers and bikinis flashing around the world after every poll.

Growing the Blob

Because it has no bill of rights, Australian governance has not been undermined by civil or human rights jurisprudence. There is, in Christopher Caldwell’s terms, no “law that ate the Constitution.” This means the Executive government…executes.

Unlike the situation elsewhere, in Australia a piece of legislation (Caldwell aims his ire at various US civil rights enactments) is not enough. A hostile parliament will simply repeal it or abrogate the international convention on which it is based. Australia has abrogated the Refugee Convention, for example, one of the reasons its immigration policy is so successful.

To grow an Australian administrative state blob (in UK, EU, or US terms) requires constitutional amendment. Something needs to be put into the country’s founding document that can’t be removed, around which a bureaucracy can accrete. The Voice was just that sort of proposal. The Australian people saw it for what it was, and rejected it.

The Voice’s stated aim was to remedy the serious and ongoing disadvantage experienced by Australia’s indigenous people, something about which Australians are sensitive given their country’s extraordinary prosperity. When first proposed in September last year, YES polled between 60 and 70 per cent. Labor PM Anthony Albanese thought he was onto a winner: voting against it would be like Americans voting against motherhood and apple pie.

However, as time passed, support drained away. Some of this was Albanese’s (and Labor’s) fault: they took control of the campaign and micromanaged it to suit themselves, most notably by abandoning any idea of a constitutional convention or bipartisan parliamentary process. Bipartisan support is necessary but not sufficient for an Australian referendum to pass. Albanese also refused to disclose the architecture for the Voice: that is, set out how it would function post-referendum.

Lawyers often argue that Parliament can be trusted to establish something like this after in-principle approval at the ballot box. You can point to provisions in many constitutions which give legislatures power to enact on numerous subjects without spelling out what relevant laws will say. But we live in a time when trust in politicians is low. In 1967’s referendum—among other things—the Australian people gave the federal government greater legislative scope in an area known to be difficult. Those generous days, alas, are gone.

As public support fell, the YES campaign—in a pattern that will be familiar to those who remember 2016 in the UK—also began to reek of both condescension and victimhood. It seemed to believe anyone not convinced was a cretin. This petulance has become worse since the poll, giving off proper Continuity-Remain, only-racists-voted-Leave fumes. There’s even been talk of Russian disinformation, forgetting that by the end of the campaign, YES construed every argument against the Voice as not merely wrong but deliberate duplicity.

The Australian Settlement v. Decolonisation

One effect of the ideological shift I noticed twenty years ago was the acceptability of arguments for exclusions and advantages based on minority ethnic ancestry, first among academics and then among the activists academics sought to influence.

This required adopting a tendentious definition of racism that blinds people to injustices against any group seen as dominant. Dividing the world into simplistic categories of oppressors and oppressed, of whites and people of colour, of colonisers and colonised, decolonisation concludes that discrimination is justified on behalf of the marginalised. True to its left-progressive roots, it also claims the state can simply allocate good outcomes from above without those on the receiving end adopting successful life strategies.

This imported ideology ran smack-dab into the intensely democratic and egalitarian Australian settlement and its distinctive electoral and constitutional arrangements. To the Great Australian Public, the Voice looked like a plan to confer political powers on people based on their race. In 1967, Australians showed a strong desire to remove race from the Constitution. In 2023, they were asked to reinsert it in the form of a body where the qualification for membership was something other than Australian citizenship.

Aware that this was NO’s strongest argument, YES tried to rebut it by pointing out that there is only one human race, which means distinctions based on race can’t exist. The distinction, YES claimed, is one only of ancestry, and refers to “inherent rights Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples hold as the original inhabitants of the Australian continent.”

Lawyers call this sort of argument “trivially true.” No, biological race does not exist among humans. We are not genetically distinct enough. Chimpanzees possess biological race (biologists use the term “subspecies”). However, Aboriginal ancestry in even tiny amounts stands out in a genetic test. The YES claim that the Voice wouldn’t be chosen by voters distinguished from the rest of the electorate by race looked like legerdemain. Descent from the First Peoples of Australia (a real thing) was being used to draw distinctions between groups in the same way that nineteenth-century racists drew distinctions based on race (not a real thing).

It also led to a situation where those who voted against a proposed law intended to distinguish between groups of Australians based on ancestry and cultural practice were accused of racism. I am not that old, and I can remember when dividing a country’s population into ethnic groups and applying different rules to them on that basis was the sine qua non of racial prejudice.

A week before Australia’s referendum, the world and his wife witnessed not only Hamas’s atrocities but also the way decolonising academics and organisations responded. “What did y’all think decolonization meant? vibes? papers? essays? losers.” I doubt this had any effect on Australia’s referendum outcome: polling support for the Voice had already cratered.

Yet, after the referendum, YES not only stigmatised NO voters as racist and ignorant but intensified its “decolonial” rhetoric. There was no violence, but I did wonder what would happen to vocal NO voters if YES had won at the polls, or if the result had been close. This is why I think Australia not only dodged a bullet for itself but has done the world a favour. An entire country rejected the idea that historically disadvantaged people are entitled to extra civil rights over and above those held by those they consider their oppressors.

Australia said NO: perhaps there is life in the old liberal democratic dog yet.