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DANIEL:

From Schwartz Media. I'm Daniel James and this is The Fight for a Voice, a special series from 7am.

The “Yes” campaign set out to accomplish a rare feat in Australian politics: to win a majority of Australians and a majority of states – to win a referendum.

It’s a difficult task to begin with, and has only become more difficult as bipartisanship was lost and the polls turned.

But this is a grassroots campaign, with tens of thousands of volunteers, attempting to overcome the headwinds with face-to-face and door-to-door conversations.

So how was the campaign built? And can it really overcome the huge challenge in time for polling day?

This is episode three: Inside the case for ‘Yes’

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DANIEL:

So for the record, what's your name?

THOMAS:

Thomas Mayo. M A Y O.

DANIEL:

Yes. Yeah.

THOMAS:

Yeah.

DANIEL:

And what role have you got in the campaign for “Yes”? How how would you describe your role?

THOMAS:

I'm a director on the board for Australians for Indigenous Constitutional Recognition that runs the “Yes” campaign. And I'm a spokesperson for the “Yes” campaign.

DANIEL:

I’ve known Thomas Mayo since the release of his first book, which attempted to explain how the Uluru Statement from Heart came to be, the processes, the people and the outcome. Gradually, over time, he has become one of the central faces of the “Yes” campaign, a position he and others may not have seen coming, but it’s a turn of events he has embraced and thrown himself into.

Can you kind of give us sort of an indication of how the infrastructure around Yes23 was built? And what were some of the challenges in terms of engaging volunteers and building all the materials that you need to to get the message out there, including advertising campaigns?

THOMAS:

Well, it just took an incredible amount of hard work and sacrifice by a whole lot of people that believe in this. That is how the campaign has been built.

You know, in the early days there, when it was almost immediately dismissed back in 2017, there were no funds for or resources to to run a national campaign, to help Indigenous people understand, you know, the thinking and the logic and the history behind the consensus to seek a constitutionally enshrined voice, to get out there and help the rest of the country understand. I was probably maybe more of an optimist in others because I have worked on this full time for six years and I have seen the good will across all different types of Australian communities, rural, regional, remote.

Audio excerpt – Thomas Mayo:

“And learning that these dialogues would culminate in a sacred place in the heart of the country at Uluru. Now, as unionist comrades, I thought, here is an opportunity for us to build our power.”

THOMAS:

So I always knew that we could build this into the biggest movement for change that this country has ever seen.

Audio excerpt – Thomas Mayo:

“Power of consensus, something that we could fight for, to change that ineffectiveness that I felt in our activism.”

THOMAS:

And we are seeing that now. So it's been a wonderful transition from a few of us running around the country feeling like we were those loonies that were, you know, starting a movement. If you've ever seen that TED Talk, where the guy’s dancing on the hill, you know, alone and then a couple of people join in and the next thing you know, there's this whole hill covered and people doing the dance. You know, I felt like that lonely guy at times.

DANIEL:

You've been in the thick of the campaign now for months, really well before the official announcement of the campaign. Tell me what it's like for you right now. What's your sense of the campaign? How do you think it's going? What needs to be overcome if people are going to vote yes?

THOMAS:

So my feeling right now, since the commitment last year from the Albanese Government to go to this referendum and working furiously not just behind the scenes, but obviously from the front line and then seeing the great momentum we are getting in these final weeks. I'm feeling positive and I have a fire in my belly to work every day until this is done.

THOMAS:

We have over 35,000 volunteers.

Audio excerpt – Reporter:

“Thousands march voicing support for Yes.”

THOMAS:

We're holding over 700 campaign activities every week.

Audio excerpt – Reporter:

“And this, the first of a national series of rallies in Adelaide for the “Yes” campaign. A chorus for change bolstered in Sydney by rockstars and football royalty.”

DANIEL:

One thing is clear since the commencement of the formal campaign, it’s that the “Yes” side not only has corporate support and political support, but perhaps most importantly it has people power. People to door knock, cold call, organise events, hand leaflets out at train stations on frosty mornings.

It is the “Yes” campaign’s greatest asset, but will it be enough to arrest the continued slide in the polls.

Audio excerpt – Reporter 1:

“This marks the lowest level of support so far.”

Audio excerpt – Reporter 2:

“We've seen declining support for “Yes” and increasing support for “No” through the year.”

Audio excerpt – Reporter 3:

“Support for the voice to Parliament continues to dwindle just a week out from the referendum.”

DANIEL:

Whether the “Yes” campaign succeeds or not, won’t be from a lack of trying.

One of the places Thomas has visited is the electorate of Kooyong, in Melbourne’s leafy eastern suburbs. It is the seat where a sitting Treasurer in a blue ribbon Liberal seat was deposed at the last federal election, a place where a grass roots, people centric campaign worked.

DANIEL:

To get a sense of whether a similar campaign for “Yes” would work in Teal seats like Kooyong I had a yarn with the person who invited Thomas there to speak to her constituents, Dr Monique Ryan, the Independent MP.

MONIQUE:

My name is Monique Ryan, I’m the Independent Federal Member for the seat of Kooyong in Victoria.

DANIEL:

Ryan has once again galvanised the movement of people, which led to her success at the May 2022 federal election, behind the “Yes” campaign.

MONIQUE:

We have 450 volunteers at this point, but we're having more and more every week. We've already knocked on more than 11,000 doors or put out over, I think 1100 corflutes already. So it's taken a real commitment, but people have told us they want us to do it and we felt that someone has to do it. It is a people powered movement which really reflects at least in my community the values of my community.

DANIEL:

What do you think the chances are of the Voice getting up?

MONIQUE:

I don't know what the chances of the Voice getting up at this point in time. I suspect that the polls that have been done don't reflect the whole population. I don't think that they’re capturing the young people and I think the young people are incredibly critical to this.

I think it's been extremely disappointing how the Voice has been politicised and the fact that we don't have bipartisan support for it in the Australian Parliament.

It was very clear early in the year that Mr. Dutton was a politician searching for a platform.

Audio excerpt – Peter Dutton:

“It should be very clear to Australians by now that the Prime Minister is dividing our country and the Liberal Party seeks to unite our country. We want to make sure we get the…”

MONIQUE:

and he was looking for means by which to take the government on.

Audio excerpt – Peter Dutton:

“We can get practical outcomes for Indigenous people on the ground. But there was a resounding no to the Prime Minister's Canberra voice.”

MONIQUE:

I don't believe that he's opposing the Voice because of any intrinsic values based decisions. I think this is a political decision that he’s made.

DANIEL:

Is the way the conversation is had just as instructive about who we are as the result?

MONIQUE:

I think the way the conversation is being had reflects society today. It reflects the extent to which it's fragmented and reflects the ways the ways in which we communicate with each other and how divisive they've become over time. But it would be a great, great shame if those things stop us from voting yes on October the 14th, because we will be a better, happier and more cohesive country if we vote yes. And I know which side of history I’d like to be on.

DANIEL:

It is the undecided voters that “Yes” campaigners believe can widen the narrow path towards victory.

It’s a challenge Mayo was acutely aware of at the time of our conversation.

THOMAS:

That's our great opportunity is reaching them first. Having that conversation, pointing out the truth of this that I told you about. And, and I believe I'm an optimist.

I was in Brisbane for that walk there. What really stood out, I think, was this brightening of the mood as more and more people rolled in and the numbers just exceeded all expectations.

Audio excerpt – Thomas Mayo:

“How we gonna vote?”

Audio excerpt – Rally:

“Yes!”

Audio excerpt – Thomas Mayo:

“How we gonna vote?”

Audio excerpt – Rally:

“Yes!”

Audio excerpt – Thomas Mayo:

“How we gonna vote?”

Audio excerpt – Rally:

“Yes!”

THOMAS:

The day before we were expecting 5000, we had, you know, at least 20,000 walking in Brisbane. People of all ages, people of many different backgrounds, you know, and from different demographics. Yeah, it was, it was a wonderful moment of unity.

DANIEL:

Throughout the campaign the conservative “No” side, with the aid of huge swathes of the media, have been very effective at muddying the waters around the Uluru Statement from the Heart, what it is and what it isn’t offering.

The scale of the debate, the trouble of changing the constitution has led many to equate the change itself as being some sort of re-writing of the constitution itself. Something that if not done carefully could have unintended consequences. It’s why the “more detail required” messaging from the “No” campaign initially resonated so strongly.

Audio excerpt – Peter Dutton:

“And Australians, I think, are reasonably saying if we're going to be asked to vote for constitutional change, which enshrines an arrangement, we should know what the arrangement is.”

DANIEL:

But the offering of the Uluru Statement is a humble one.

An offering that constitutional law experts from across the country say won’t have a negative impact on the nation's founding document.

Audio excerpt – Robert French:

“What goes before the Australian people in this referendum is the simple idea of a national advisory body incorporated into the Constitution as an act of recognition of our First peoples and thus of our own continental history and national identity.”

DANIEL:

The debate is big, what’s on the table is small.

Is that part of the challenge as well as just getting the message that this is actually a very simple, humble offering, that if it goes ahead, strengthens our democracy?

THOMAS:

Yeah, look, it is humble and it is modest, but what needs to be considered there is that it's modest, but it's going to be strong enough to make the changes that we need to see. That is to get better outcomes in housing, in health and education and employment for Indigenous peoples, to really provide a better future for our children. Because advice coming from the people that are most affected through representatives that they choose, not representatives that political parties choose, like the Country Liberal Party, you know, selected Senator Price, for example. And her loyalty is with her political party and whoever funds her campaigns.

We don't want politicians speaking for us. And so when we are able to choose representatives and those representatives are accountable to their communities, and those representatives understand their culture and the issues, because I live and breathe them every day, then that advice is going to be powerful in the sense that should politicians choose to ignore that advice and they can, it's an advisory body, but then the Australian people will see that that advice has come from those representatives and those communities and that if things get worse when that advice is ignored, then politicians will be judged in our democracy at elections.

DANIEL:

Coming up – how the misinformation campaign is affecting the people who’ve put their lives into “Yes”.

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DANIEL:

Referendums are hard to win, in even the most pristine of political environments. A reminder, of the 44 held since federation, only eight have been successful. It was why so much hinged on the position Peter Dutton took. When he decided to oppose it, and then mischaracterised it as a “Canberra voice” run by “Elites”, it wasn’t a surprise, but it was no less deflating. Not only for the prospective outcome of the referendum itself, but the way the debate would be conducted in the lead up to polling day.

It’s been heated, often hyperbolic and at times Trumpian and it has helped see support for the Voice slide from 70 percent to now lagging in almost every state around the country.

Did you expect I mean, once Peter Dutton and David Littleproud had committed both their respective parties to coming out against The Voice. Did you expect the debate to be as hostile and vitriolic as it has been today?

THOMAS:

Look, the level of the vitriol and the quantity of it has been shocking. I don't know if Australia has ever seen anything like this before in a campaign. It has been hurtful, it has been damaging, and we all handle these things different. So, you know, I have great concerns for my community, for fellow Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, but also those volunteers that are occasionally being attacked by, you know, people that are actually, I think, easily led to fear the lies, you know, on based these lies that the “No” campaign is spreading, then they're spreading them through, you know, duplicitous ways, you know, sponsoring Facebook pages that tell non-Indigenous Australians that, you know, they're going to lose something to while at the same time sponsoring pages that are telling Indigenous Australians that it's not enough and that they're going to lose something like their sovereignty or their land as well.

DANIEL:

The online and real world trolling has impacted most people wanting to engage in a meaningful dialogue on the referendum, not least of all Mayo himself.

THOMAS:

I don't know if you saw the ad in the Australian Financial Review or if you've seen the social media.

DANIEL:

In one instance, in an ad published in the Australian Financial Review, the paper, actual elites read, he was depicted as a child, in rags, begging for money from a rich white man – something the Nine newspapers had to apologise for printing.

All the way through the campaign, even before its official launch, the vitriol, racist or otherwise towards Mayo and others has been unrelenting, full of conspiracy theories, misinformation and racial stereotyping.

THOMAS:

Uh, people seem to think that I'm not even Indigenous, based on a poorly worded article some time ago by someone else. It really has been, you know, quite ridiculous the way that they try and discredit you. But, you know, I can only stand in my truth and stand up for my beliefs.

DANIEL:

The conservative attacks on the Voice as being constituted by “Elites” forget two things. It was First Nations people who were asked to undertake an extensive consultation process around constitutional recognition in 2015 by then Prime Minister Tony Abbott, now one of the “No” campaign’s most ardent culture warriors, albeit with selective amnesia.

Secondly, the Uluru Statement was and remains an offering from First Nations communities from all over the country. And so I wanted to talk to Megan Davis, someone who had been intimately involved in that whole process, to understand just how that criticism had come about, and how it was impacting the campaign.

MEGAN:

That deeply worries me as a public lawyer that what's happened here where even Dutton said no before seeing detail. I think it's really worrying that professional political parties and politicians can say no to things that they haven't actually seen and assessed.

There's a real alignment with that Trumpian playbook, in particular, the kind of attempts that they've made to try and just say, look, this is an elitist academic model, which is about the kind of smearing of people like myself and Marcia Langton and Noel Pearson and others who contributed to the process. I think it's really disrespectful to the agency of those men and women who participated in the dialogues and the hundreds and thousands of people who sit behind them in communities. But that's the playbook, right? You create this narrative that it's all “Elites” and it's all Canberra based, and that's all you have to do. That's it.

DANIEL:

There's kind of an existential threat during this campaign from the referendum that goes simply beyond the “Yes” or “No” question itself, isn't there?

MEGAN:

100%. Many will be asking over the next couple of weeks about the impact of this upon the electoral integrity of Australia. I think that's a really important question to be, you know, to be discussed and debated now.

And in particular just in this day and age, the failure to have that brochure, the plant pamphlet that's gone out to every letterbox fact checked. I mean, it's extraordinary in 2023 that it's not fact checked, and that that you allow misinformation to just be with that, with an AEC stamp to be delivered to every single letterbox across the continent.

And um I think the misinformation and disinformation has really taken a hit on our “Yes's". There’s been a softening of that support as the kind of really ridiculous lies and scenarios has been allowed to… well as you know I blame a lot of the mainstream media for this because they’ve just been passive conduits of it.

DANIEL:

How are you feeling about the prospects of the “Yes” campaign being successful? And if it is, what will Australia look like the day after? And if it's not, what will Australia look like if this goes down?

MEGAN:

I think that the day after the referendum, you know, it's it's a new day for Australia. You know, there's been formal recognition of First Nations peoples as the First peoples of this continent. That's an extraordinary development for our people and the well-being and the feeling of belonging and inclusiveness within that Australian system. And it will be an exciting time for our people because especially those who never get to talk much, the ones that, oh, never get to talk to media and things like that, they actually will will have a voice like we start working towards the process that enables our people to design it, you know, and then put that design into Parliament and our mob know what, what our legislation looks like when you put it into Parliament. It's a long road after that. But geez, what, what bloody hope and optimism and everyone will be elated. It will be such an incredible feeling to be that kind of inclusive country that that that provided this voice to the Parliament and then the day after, if it doesn't succeed, is effectively an endorsement of the status quo. That’s what you wake up to business as usual.

DANIEL:

No matter how steep the uphill climb to victory in Saturday’s referendum, the only thing to do is keep forging the path forward, no matter how narrow it may be. Mayo has been traversing the country for months and will continue to do so until Australia makes its decision. He is all in.

The day we met he was to head straight off to the airport where he would fly to Perth. But I wanted to ask him, before he left, if he’s afraid of failure – what would happen if Australia votes no?

THOMAS:

Well, actually, I was just thinking that's what I should have also said, is the contrast, you know, the contrast between “Yes” and “No”. “Yes” makes it possible, “Yes” tries something different where nothing has worked to close the gap before. “Yes” establishes a voice in a way that is guaranteed, because we understand that every voice Indigenous people have established before that has made progress for our people has been silenced. And when we don't have a voice, we go backwards. So, “Yes” makes it possible because we are learning those lessons and we are trying something different. Whereas “No” is the status quo. And the status quo is no good for anyone, not for Australians, that, you know, the whole world sees that we have proportionately the most incarcerated people on the planet, that our Indigenous Australians have twice more than twice the rate of suicide that have a life expectancy of almost ten years less. You know, “No” is accepting that as how we do things. “No” is accepting that these are actual statistics in some areas are getting worse. So, you know, “No” is just status quo and and not good enough, whereas “Yes” makes it possible.

DANIEL:

And how would you feel on October 15th if you woke up and it's been defeated? Trying to get some emotion from ya here sorry brother. From my perspective, I would be I'm going to be fucking hugely deflated. Right. I don't have I don't have as much skin in the game as you do. And I'm not going around the countryside. I'm not putting my life on hold like you are. How would it feel if you were to wake up in fucking hell?

THOMAS:

When you first asked that question, I was thinking, How would I feel if we win? Not how will I feel if we lose? I'm not contemplating losing. This is too important.

There comes a point, I think, for all of us where we need to decide to believe in ourselves, believe in our families, believe in our community, believe in this country. And this is that moment. And I am choosing to believe that we can do this. And I'm imagining I don't know if this is out there, but I'm imagining sitting on my couch that night. But I don't think I will be, I think I'll be somewhere where I'll be doing, have a vote somewhere, wherever the campaign sends me. But I will be just over the moon that we have set this country on the course to what the vision ultimately is here, a stronger, more reconciled nation, but a nation that does not have this gap anymore. That's what I want to see.

DANIEL:

The stakes are high.

THOMAS:

Yeah.

DANIEL:

Thanks, brother.

THOMAS:

Thank you.

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DANIEL:

Tomorrow on The Fight for a Voice, we go inside the Conservative case against the Voice; where did it come from? Who benefits? And what does it mean for the nature of political debate in this country? I’m Daniel James, I’ll see ya tomorrow.

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