Mark Kenny | Brexit-like wave threatens Voice

The emphasis must be on persuasion, on pulling doubters into the "yes" camp through reason and reassurance, education and empathy.

In other words, there should be no Hillary Clinton-style "basket of deplorables" sentiment.

This is important tactically, because referendums are contested across the entire society. The stark lesson of Brexit is that a cosmopolitan consensus, however rational, can still be defeated by a subterranean tide of outsider resentment, the numerical power of which goes undetected.

But even more importantly, respectful dialogue is required for the sake of internal moral consistency. The Uluru Statement from the Heart is a generous, inclusive invitation to walk together - modern Australia with ancient Australia - towards a shared future.

It does not foment rancour but rather, builds on love. Love for country, love for what we all have in common, love for what has been built here and what is yet to be constructed. As Linda Burney has said, supporting it is an act of patriotism and national belief.

Win or lose, this is the way in which Uluru will eventually be viewed as the single most civilised manifestation of self-conscious national growth in the 235 years since the First Fleet.

What never entered my mind in those first months however, was the weird Trumpian inversion in which the "no" side has frontally attacked Voice advocates as racists whose secret goal is the creation of "apartheid" in Australia.

Such a proposition is beyond absurd but this has proved no impediment to its spread.

Pre-Trump, to wit before social media and subscription television had reached their current power, ridiculous statements contradicting observable fact, carried attendant risks for politicians.

When Barnaby Joyce claimed Labor's carbon price would lead to $100 roasts, he was pilloried.

When Malcom Fraser made his desperate claim that voters should hide their money under the bed if Labor won the 1983 election, Bob Hawke quipped "you can't keep your money under the bed - that's where the commies are!" Cue laughter. Game over.

But in the age of social media, functional truths (including deliberate lies) can be embedded in the public mind as effectively through repetition as through any evidentiary base.

This was brought home in the pandemic where some believed vaccines were more dangerous than COVID and others, that they were designed by Bill Gates for mind control through the 5G network.

Unscrupulous populists simply aren't fussy.

Peter Dutton received the uncritical support midweek of the once more sensible Nationals leader, David Littleproud, for the farcical claim that the Voice push was a factor in higher mortgage rates.

Rather than dismantling this pure nonsense, political commentators scored it like a game, predicting, almost with a hint of admiration, that it would cut through to some voters.

No wonder we're in trouble.

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At least when John Howard opposed multiculturalism in 1988 suggesting that Asian immigration was "too great", he was rebuked by senior figures in his own party. Having arrived at the startling insight that in today's fragmented media landscape, no claim is too incendiary, Dutton is feeding the resentment mill with ever more grist.

The effect of such non-leadership is palpable on Twitter where anyone who writes in favour of the Voice can expect an avalanche of abuse that runs on for days.

Most of it is personal but core themes are also discernible - racist Voice, dividing Australians, re-racialising, the gravy train of Aboriginal bureaucracy, elite Canberra Blacks, Apartheid.

With fewer people getting their news from impartial sources, such grievances flow in an accelerating cycle of repetition and enrichment.

The government and the leaders of the "yes" campaign are belatedly waking up to the tempo at which this post-truth war for the hearts and minds is being waged.

It is a new reality which Megan Davis - the first person to read out the Uluru Statement from the Heart in 2017 - is all too aware of.

A professor of constitutional law at UNSW, she has been tracking the social media discussion closely and told me the charge of racism was being overwhelmingly deployed by Voice opponents against Voice supporters.

That is my observation also.

Burney, too, now sees the battle confronting her. The Minister for Indigenous Australians gave a powerful speech on Wednesday observing that the "no" campaign was using division as its prime tool.

She said it was "making false claims including that providing advice to government would somehow impact the fundamental democratic principle of one vote, one value".

"Do not let the 'no' campaign get away with using Trump-style politics in Australia ... the proposed change is constitutionally sound and legally safe."

But what chance does substantive argument have amid this blizzard of bile? Davis's impressive Quarterly Essay "Voice of Reason: on recognition and renewal" comprehensively sets out the long and tawdry history of program failure in Indigenous affairs. She notes for example that the Uluru agenda emerged from the most comprehensive consultative process ever undertaken in Aboriginal Australia, that it expressly seeks constitutional enshrinement, and that its aim is less bureaucracy, not more. These are facts.

Everyone should read it, starting with Dutton and Littleproud. But we all know they won't, because as Davis says, they don't have to.

The very reason the Voice is needed.