Themes in Political Leaders’ Responses on the Night of the Voice to Parliament Referendum

The next session at the AANZCA 2024 conference has a strong focus on Indigenous Australians and the Voice to Parliament referendum, and starts with a paper by Lisa Waller, focussing on future visions for the post-referendum era. This explores in particular the speeches made on the night that the referendum results were announced: government speakers presented a limited agenda related to socioeconomic equality, while opposition speakers articulated a reactionary neo-assimilationist vision.

These speeches can be understood from a perspective of critical discourse analysis; these speeches occur in the context of mediatisation, as major televised statements immediately after the referendum results, and the occur against a much longer-term backdrop of settler-colonial nationhood that continually activates, circulates, and materialises settler sovereignty. The study transcribed and analysed these speeches against these contexts, and focussed especially on a number of key categories.

A key point relates to temporality and nationhood: the government’s Albanese and Burney move away rapidly from questions of Voice and treaty, celebrate Indigenous history, obliquely refer to the contested ground of colonial history and the need for truth-telling, and reassert Indigenous people’s rightful place in the nation; while the opposition’s Dutton and Price stridently dismiss or evade Australia’s Indigenous past and place Indigenous policy priorities last, emphasising settler priorities and occupation instead.

Meanwhile, there are also interesting b observations on voice and agency: the other, alternative no campaigner Lidia Thorpe was absent from the night, and her push for treaty did not get any hearing.

Overall, then, this marks a return to the dominant political approach centred on Indigenous disadvantage. A moment of hope became a moment of disagreement, and this entrenches existing divisions and inequalities.