The BAC thanks the Australian people for their collective wisdom in rejecting the voice referendum.
This important vote resembles the Brexit vote, in which the British people decided to leave the European Union.
Like Brexit, our rejection of the voice flew in the face of hectoring and bullying by all public institutions.
These institutions included large sections of the mainstream media, especially public broadcasting (ABC, SBS, NITV), large corporations in general, educational authorities, major religions, and the multicultural lobby.
The ACT was the only constituency to vote for the voice. It should not escape our notice that Canberra is the home of the permanent government.
By that, we mean the public servants who advise politicians on immigration, indigenous, and multicultural policies. What Donald Trump might refer to as “The Swamp.”
An informed, sophisticated population should have expressed the greatest reservations about the voice.
Phillip Adams distilled the full viciousness of the Yes campaign. Adams has his own ABC platform as well as a column in the Murdoch press.
During the campaign, Adams repeated many Anglophobic lies claiming that Aborigines had been subjected to “diseases, massacres, and poisoning”.
He insisted that many were “beaten to death or driven off cliffs to save the cost of bullets”. He also claimed that aboriginals were enslaved and their women raped, and “babies were taken from the … arms of their grieving mothers”.
That was typical of the Yes campaign in general. Pre-packaged lines of hyperbole and inuendo endlessly repeated with Orwellian overtones.
There was no nuance, no concessions to different viewpoints. Just black-and-white absolute moral certainty, often based on falsehoods and half-truths.
For once, the Coalition parties rallied to the nation by opposing the referendum. They did so at the urging of Jacinta Nampijinpa Price and Nyunggai Warren Mundine.
The ABC conducted its postmortem immediately the result was clear, and continued the next day on the Insiders morning program on ABC TV.
Standard left-radical slurs were rolled out. The defeat was due in part to “misinformation” and the Yes campaign not presenting its case.
But mainly, the Australian people failed to get the Yes arguments. They were not good enough to grasp the obvious benefits of having a constitutionally-mandated voice to Parliament.
The fight is not yet won. Opposition leader Peter Dutton wants to hold another referendum to recognise indigenous Australians in a preamble to the Constitution.
The BAC agrees that constitutions should recognise their countries’ founding peoples. But that cannot ignore Australia’s Anglo explorers and pioneers who created the nation.
The BAC will continue to advocate in favour of truth and fairness regarding indigenous policy. At present we have twelve voice videos posted on YouTube and other social media platforms. These can be viewed at our YouTube channel at:
https://www.youtube.com/@britishaustraliancommunity2821
We also have an online book on the subject written for the BAC by Frank Salter and published by Quadrant Books. The PDF can be downloaded free at: https://quadrant.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/salter-book-pdf.pdf
Once again, I congratulate and thank the Australian people, and our BAC team for a fine effort.