The great silence that has enveloped our nation since last year’s referendum is lifting, as those who issued the invitation to walk together for a better future reemerge to confront its rejection.
It’s been a strange time. The quiet was so deafening it seemed to take on a form of its own; like the pall that descends on a dressing room after a heavy defeat, or the emptiness when a relationship fails.
What had seemed like a natural progression from land rights to native title to apology to true reconciliation hit a brick wall when the Australian people were asked to embed a consultation mechanism into the constitution.
On face value it seemed like a modest ask: not the formal treaty that has never been negotiated, just a simple guarantee that First Nations people would be genuinely heard on decisions that affected them.
But this week’s Guardian Essential report suggests that apart from the business-as-usual approach that has so abjectly failed to close the gap in Indigenous health and economic disadvantage, there is no fresh appetite for systemic reform.
While it’s easy to shrug off these results as lingering blowback from the racism, lies and false equivalence of last year’s campaign, the fact that about half of no voters started with a predisposition to yes suggests there are more complex factors at play.
Consistent feedback on the reasons for a no vote both before and after the referendum was that the Voice was divisive and would give First Nations people “rights and privileges” that other Australians didn’t enjoy.
Think about that: we have lost so much faith in government to listen to us (rather than impose its will from on high) that simply being heard is perceived as a form of “special treatment”.
Indeed, when asked how well government listens to different groups, it is only big businesses that are perceived to have any sort of voice.
I’ve been thinking about these results while reading The Unaccountability Machine by Dan Davies, who asks why so many organisations are black boxes devoid of anyone who will take responsibility for anything. (Spoiler: it’s by design.)
Davies draws on the work of an eccentric British polymath called Stafford Beer who advised both America’s United Steel and Chile’s socialist Allende government on applying “cybernetics” to their very different systems.
The essence of Beer’s model is that organisations have multiple layers of accountability from operations to resourcing, coordination to intelligence, to the overriding vision, all running in relation to each other, requiring ongoing feedback to keep themselves stable.
These feedback loops seem remarkably like the proposed multilayer representative body that First Nations leaders devised at Uluru, underpinned by a commitment to hear directly from those the system purports to serve.
It’s true that the no campaign sought to confuse the issue by demanding detail of how such a model would work, but this was an easy mark because the idea of being genuinely heard is such an exotic concept.
Beyond general elections where we are legally required to vote on who will lead us, most of us have lost our relationship with our system of government; or rather, Beer would argue government has designed itself to keep distant from us.
A final question shows that where avenues to give feedback do exist in our system, half of us have never even tried. Anything.
If there’s a silver lining to the voice defeat, it’s in the six million Australians who, despite these forces, still found it within themselves to vote yes. What’s interesting is these yes voters are much more inclined to participate in existing feedback loops.
It is here that people like Taiwan’s former digital rights minister Audrey Tang, the ex-student demonstrator who is in Australia this week to talk to government, civil society and technologists, are imagining new models of citizen connection through technology.
Taiwanese citizens have found their voice through open-source technology that allows them to design regulation, allocate budgets and participate in a national feedback loop where algorithms seek out and amplify points of connection, rather than the points of conflict that power Big Tech.
These initiatives have seen trust in government grow from single digit to a majority, civic engagement normalised and created a model of democratic resilience for a nation that exists in an ongoing state of strategic ambiguity.
The purpose of the system is what it does. Right now, our system disproportionately incarcerates First Nations people; it drives welfare recipients to suicide; it locks young people out of the housing market; it constantly pushes us to work harder in less secure jobs; it makes us all feel insignificant, invisible, expendable.
The truth at the heart of the failure of the voice was that we couldn’t share even a modicum of power with our First Nations people because deep down we didn’t feel like we had any to give.
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Audrey Tang will be speaking on Tuesday night in Sydney and at the National Press Club on Thursday
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Peter Lewis is an executive director of Essential, a progressive strategic communications and research company