With a two-letter word, Australians have struck down the first attempt at constitutional change in 24 years, major media outlets reported, a move experts say will inflict lasting damage on First Nations people and suspend any hopes of modernizing the nation’s founding document.
Early results from the Australian Electoral Commission (AEC) suggested that most of the country’s 17.6 million registered voters had written No on their ballots, and CNN affiliates 9 News, Sky News and SBS all projected no path forward for the Yes campaign.
The proposal, to recognize Indigenous people in the constitution and create an Indigenous body to advise government on policies that affect them, needed a majority nationally and in four of six states to pass.
The point is that this would have given them a path toward voicing those sorts of things, directly to the people who can actually do something about it.
It could have been the start to a lot of great change, it was a simple easy thing to do
Sure, I understand the idea and it would have been good if it passed.
But they can still voice their opinions, we have free speech, and change in the future is still possible.
Who is “we” that has free speech, because that isn’t exactly what Australia has.
Australia does not have free speech and you are delusional to believe that.
And… Oh wait never mind.
As others have stated, we explicitly don’t have free speech in Australia.
We also don’t have any laws requiring political campaigns to be truthful. And as we saw, the day after the vote was done. All the leaders of the “No” campaign flat out abandoned indigenous people and explicitly said they wouldn’t be fronting a new referendum for recognition in the constitution without the voice. A promise they made repeatedly.
The leader of the opposition who spearheaded the no campaign has been called a fascist by his peers. And once commented that if elected he would do away with parliament and elections if he could.