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ANGE:

From Schwartz Media, I’m Ange McCormack, this is 7am.

Audio excerpt -- Anthony Albanese:

“My fellow Australians. For many years, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people have advocated for constitutional recognition through a voice.”

ANGE:

Yesterday in front of cheering ‘Yes’ campaigners in Adelaide, Anthony Albanese announced the date that Australians will vote on the Voice to Parliament.

Audio excerpt -- Anthony Albanese:

“Today I announce that Referendum day will be the 14th of October.”

ANGE:

And this is the first referendum to happen in the age of social media and misinformation - making truth in reporting more important than ever.

Audio excerpt -- Anthony Albanese:

“We all get one vote and we all get an equal say. And if something is unclear to you or you haven't even had a chance to think about this yet, I encourage you, ask questions, because if you're unsure, it's easy to find out more.”

ANGE:

How this information reaches voters will be the responsibility of the media. So will it rise to the challenge? And what does fair reporting look like in a debate that is already so charged?

Audio excerpt -- Anthony Albanese:

“So in a spirit of generosity and optimism, vote yes.”

ANGE:

Today, Co-Chair of the ‘Yes’ campaign and Arrernte and Kalkadoon woman, Rachel Perkins, on the media’s failings so far, and why it has to do better before polling day.

It’s Thursday, August 31st.

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ANGE:

Rachel. The date has been announced for the referendum, so the campaign has officially kicked off, but it kind of feels like we've been in a campaign all year. I'm wondering, what do you think the next six weeks are going to look like?

RACHEL:

Well, strap yourselves in. It's going to get crazy. It has felt like we've been campaigning since the beginning of the year, since January, actually non-stop, but it's actually going to intensify. So, yeah, standby for some colourful headlines and commentary and appearances. It's going to be full on.

ANGE:

Yeah. And I'm also going to talk about the media coverage of the referendum because it has been intense already. Can you tell me what kind of impact the reporting and all the stories has had on you?

RACHEL:

You know, there's a lot of misinformation out there, and the misinformation then fuels social media that gets even more crazy. So, you know, last week we had people suggesting that somehow the current government had tricked or rigged the Australian Electoral Commission referendum voting process. That was incorrect obviously, we know that those regulations are legislated and have been around for the last 30 years. So it's not like they've been particularly rigged for this referendum, which is what had been suggested. But that fuels a whole lot of online conspiracy theorists, you know, saying that, you know, the odds are stacked against and, you know, it's a government conspiracy to, you know, push the yes vote by the current government.

How does it affect me? Well, I'm sort of used to it, you know. I grew up with it all my life. My dad was a public figure. He was attacked his whole life for his Aboriginality. And so it's no surprises to me, but it's still not nice, you know.

Audio excerpt -- CPAC:

“All weekend I’ve been here and you’ve been a great audience… yeah but Adolf Hitler also had a great audience.”

RACHEL:

Recently at the CPAC conference that Warren Mundine was the chair of, they hired a comedian for that conference and he got up and said:

Audio excerpt -- CPAC:

“But seriously - I'd like to acknowledge the traditional owners, violent black men.”

RACHEL:

you know, and those sorts of terrible generalisations, racial stereotypes.

Audio excerpt -- CPAC:

“I hope there are some real feminists in the audience who appreciate the part truth of that joke.”

RACHEL:

You know, that's disappointing and hurtful, I guess, and not great for young Aboriginal people to hear that sort of stuff in social media. You know, I have a thick skin when it comes to that stuff, but I'm sure many of my people don't, so it's not good.

ANGE:

And Rachel, you've been looking into depictions of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in the media going back quite a long way. Can you take me back to some early examples that you found particularly interesting?

RACHEL:

Yeah, well, there were always voices, whether they were journalists or people on the frontier who were active in that colonial period, who objected to what they saw around them in terms of the treatment of Aboriginal people. There were always those voices, but they were generally in the minority. And in the case of Carl Feilberg, who emigrated here and witnessed what was happening on the frontier in Queensland in the 1880s, he wrote extensively about the atrocious treatment of Aboriginal people by settlers and the native police who were active at that time. And he really campaigned. He wrote weekly articles and eventually those articles were compiled into essays called ‘The Way We Civilise.’ And it's a searing analysis that he presents of the first moments of colonisation into Aboriginal territory. And he writes it in such an honest, unflinching manner that his words still have impact today. His words bring me at least to tears about the ruthlessness and barbarity of what's going on on the frontier at that time. And that's why he's an exceptional journalist. He was hounded out of society. There's a story that is told about his child, his son, I think, who was ill at the time, and the local doctor refused to serve him and he couldn't get work. It took, you know, unimaginable courage for those journalists to stand up and examine what was truly going on and to bring it to the public's attention, because they were then publicly humiliated because of calling that stuff out. So back then, it took incredible guts for people to do that.

ANGE:

And you talked about courage and gutsiness there and being unflinchingly honest. Are we seeing, do you think, that level of truth in this campaign?

RACHEL:

Just this weekend, we saw a great example of gutsiness, I think, on the Insiders from Laura Tingle, who's one of the country's leading journalists, and she described the opposition leader's accusations that the AEC had rigged the voting process, and she described them very plainly as completely outrageous.

Audio excerpt -- David Speers:

“Does it head into the realm of attacking what is a highly respected independent election authority in Australia?”

Audio excerpt -- Laura Tingle:

“Yeah, well exactly, it’s completely outrageous, I mean…”

RACHEL:

Which they are. But for a journalist like her to go on record and give her view about how outrageous that proposition was that Dutton had made puts her at great risk because the ABC and journalists at the ABC are under attack for their reporting. So I admire a journalist who will call things for what they are.

And right now in Australia, they are particularly important as the country moves towards amending its most important legal document, the Constitution.

ANGE:

Coming up after the break - how the Yes case plans to win the referendum.

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ANGE:

I'm keen to talk about the idea of truth and balance and how it's key to journalism and for all the stories we do, not just for the Voice. But balance is often weaponised. You know, climate change deniers argue that they should be listened to because of balance, despite, you know, being factually incorrect, for example. How has balance come into play, in your view, in coverage of the Voice?

RACHEL:

It's a good question because we see that a lot of journalists are under significant pressure to give balance to their stories. But let me take, for example, the question of balance in relation to Indigenous support for the Voice. So what we know is that over a very reliable years-long study done by Reconciliation Australia, which is a very reputable source, we know that 80% or more of Indigenous people have consistently over years supported this concept of constitutional recognition. Now that is a large majority of indigenous people. And of course it's based on surveys, but that survey has consistently given those results so we can say that it's reliable. However, the media often gives more attention to the minority of Indigenous people who don't support it, and often that's because those Indigenous people are saying headline-grabbing things which attract media attention of course, naturally, or the media is focusing on conflict to make the stories more interesting. So I would argue that, okay, well, if 80% of Indigenous people support this, perhaps it's reasonable to have, you know, your coverage of 80% of Indigenous voices speaking in support of this rather than the much smaller percentage of Indigenous people saying no, that they don't support it. But of course that's me being completely naive, right? That's never going to happen. The media is always going to go for conflict.

ANGE:

So, Rachel, truth is inherently linked to the Voice, right? It's actually, you know, where the Uluru Statement wants us to end up - Voice treaty truth, so we can't get to truth without the Voice. But as we've been talking about here, we also can't get to the voice without truth and truth telling. It kind of makes me wonder about the order then, of voice, treaty, truth. Can you explain why voice is the most important first step?

RACHEL:

Yeah, look, that's absolutely right. In the Uluru Statement, the sequencing of voice treaty, truth or voice, Makarrata process and truth telling was chosen very deliberately. And we've looked at other countries when we formulated the thinking around the Uluru Statement. We're not looking at what happens in Australia in a vacuum. We've looked at processes in Aotearoa, in Canada, South Africa, other jurisdictions and looked at the way those first peoples have dealt with the State. And we have seen that process of truth telling sometimes where they come first, what we've seen is people pour their hearts out, you know, go on record. There's a big process of talking about what's happened, but then actually there's no structural change as a result. And so sometimes these processes of truth telling make people feel good, but actually, how is change affected then? And so that’s why, in the Uluru Statement from the Heart, truth-telling comes last.

I mean, we have had, you have to keep in mind a 30-year process of reconciliation that has led up to this point. There's been a lot of activity in the community and really right now we have on the table, a very decisive conclusion to that process, which is the recognition of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in Australia's highest document that provides recognition, but also a practical mechanism by which Indigenous people will be heard when laws and policies are made about us. So that's the sort of end process of 30 years of reconciliation. This is what Indigenous people have asked for in the majority. And so we're asking Australians, after 30 years of reconciliation, after more than 250 years almost of colonisation, to finally recognise the first people and 65,000 years of our presence on this continent. So that's what's being asked at this moment. That's why I'm giving all of my time to this cause, because I think it's the most important thing that will happen in my lifetime.

ANGE:

Rachel, we have six weeks until polling day and the Yes campaign looks like it's going to have to gain a lot of votes in that time. What is your team focusing on now? How do you think you'll win this?

RACHEL:

Through conversations with the Australian people. And we have at the moment probably about 30,000 volunteers who are active every day. But, in some ways the press is almost gaslighting us to lose.

But we are going to win this and we're going to win it through the conversations we have with everyday Australians to cut through the misinformation, to cut through the fear and smear campaign that the No case is running. And when we do have those conversations, what we're seeing is that people say, “Oh, is that all it is? Oh yeah, that seems totally reasonable.” And they move to Yes. So, you might not read it in the newspapers, but it's happening in the suburbs across Australia right now. And that is how we will win this campaign.

ANGE:

Rachel, thanks so much for your time today.

RACHEL:

Pleasure.

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ANGE:

Also in the news today,

Inflation eased in Australia last month. According to the ABS index, inflation recorded an annual rise of 4.9 per cent in July, down from 5.4 per cent in June.

However, inflation on the prices of housing and rent remains high.

And,

The Australian Electoral Commissioner has claimed concerns around how to fill out the referendum ballot paper are a “non-issue”.

Tom Rogers urged Australians to avoid misinformation about how to vote, and said voting is as simple as writing “yes” or “no” on the ballot paper.

I’m Ange McCormack, this is 7am - we’ll be back again tomorrow.

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