After it was resoundingly rejected in Saturday’s referendum, the Voice will never be heard by white Australia. For the great many First Nations people who voted for it, theirs is an unhappy burden: How will they explain to their children and grandchildren why the rest of Australia took the decision that it did?
This set-back to reconciliation, however, is all of ours to share. It will be picked at and picked at, and fester long after the confections of the campaign are forgotten. Only with the passage of time will scholars and historians give the plebiscite its true context.
Of the many lessons of Saturday’s outcome, there is one which must be more urgently addressed. And that is our appetite for mistruths: Postal votes are a way for the Australian Electoral Commission to “rig the referendum”. Pencils are distributed at polling stations so votes can be changed. Since 1973, the Constitution has been invalid, so the referendum is invalid too.
“It’s becoming a more perilous world,” Evan Ekin-Smyth from the AEC told me. “We have seen the environment change out there, in the lack of trust in the system.”
Since 2019 the Commission has been doggedly responding to peddlers of conspiracy and mistruths; on occasions, those peddlers have been politicians. For a statutory body, this is a radically new approach.
In August, Peter Dutton and Tony Abbott thumped the tub with the preposterous claim, duly reported by the media, that the AEC disallowing crosses on ballot papers would “stack the deck” against the No vote.
“We respond no matter who the person is,” Ekin-Smyth said. “When ticks and crosses happened … I was on TV that night for every major broadcaster. It does not serve our interests to get into an argument with elected officials, but it’s in our interest to put the facts out there.”
A backyard hose against an inferno
The task is overwhelming. In the lead-up to the referendum, the AEC was being tagged in more than 100,000 social media posts a week.
It rebuffed claims the AEC was coercing Yes votes from dementia sufferers. When one bloke claimed “the fix is in” because his elderly mum (not on the roll) received a notice she had successfully voted, the AEC asked to see it: “We obviously don’t send every voter a letter to simply confirm they’ve voted.”
Elsewhere, you could only imagine the sigh emitted from the poor soul in Ekin-Smyth’s team assigned to respond to a claim ballot papers carried a secret “Rothchild & Freemasons” imprint. “It’s called the official mark,” they wrote, dryly. “It’s a requirement in the legislation.”
This new approach has found many plaudits. In reality, however, the commission is like a man standing with a backyard hose, waving it at an inferno.
“It’s getting worse,” Ekin-Smyth said. “[But] if we funded 50 people to be across social media all the time, people would accuse us of misusing taxpayer money.”
What’s more, the AEC can fight back only on questions of electoral integrity.
Last week, it was tagged in a photo of an absurd No campaign brochure which suggested the Voice would lead to financial restitution: “Genuine question @AusElectoralCom, are campaigns just allowed to lie on their material? Reparations?? Seriously!?”
But Ekin-Smyth’s team could not really respond: “Our job is the process not the topic.”
So, whose job is it?
Brexit’s sludge of disinformation
For three years, from the ABC’s London Bureau, I filed report after report on Brexit, on the negotiations with Brussels, and on the tedious votes in the Commons. Finally, I reported to Australia the debacle that was Boris Johnson’s final Brexit deal.
We now know two important things about Brexit.
First, the departure from the European Union cost the UK as much as 6 per cent of its overall economic value.
Second, we know that the 2016 Brexit referendum was polluted by a sludge of disinformation, much of which urged the UK to split from the continent.
It will never be known how many people were swayed by the lies. But bearing in mind the wafer-thin pro-Brexit majority — a margin of 1,269,501 in a country of 65 million people — it seems likely enough they made a material difference.
Moscow was partly to blame. For years, Russian deception campaigns injected a plume of lies into the British public debate. Spread by cable television station RT and a horde of internet bots, the disinformation amplified an already growing sense of chaos.
In the national debate which followed, Britain’s internal security agency MI5 maintained it had failed to identify evidence of “successful interference” in the referendum. But a parliamentary inquiry later found this was because the agency had never bent to the task of looking for it.
To suggest there had been no interference was “inconceivable”, the inquiry report said. After all, the Kremlin had felt comfortable dispatching hit squads onto British streets carrying nuclear and chemical weapons. Troll farms and internet bots spouting anti-EU fallacies was small beer.
The parliament asked a salient question: Which security agency is in charge of protecting the very institutions of democracy upon which the Westminster system relies? After a protracted inquiry, the answer it produced was: “No one.”
“The outrage isn’t if there is interference,” said one member of the intelligence committee that produced its report. “The outrage is no one wanted to know.”
The Albanese government is now attempting to address parts of the misinformation challenge. But its proposal to grant new powers to the communications watchdog is being treated with great wariness for its potential to curb legitimate political expression.
Loading
How was the Voice referendum protected?
In 2018, the Electoral Integrity Assurance Taskforce was established to “provide information and advice to the Electoral Commissioner on matters that may compromise the real or perceived integrity of federal electoral events, including referendums”.
Its constituents include the Australian Federal Police, the anti-money laundering agency AUSTRAC, the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation, the Australian Signals Directorate, and the Office of National Intelligence.
And what has the taskforce done to protect the Voice referendum? I asked every one of these agencies what specific advice and assistance they provided to the AEC in the run-up to the referendum, and what resources each had allocated to the task.
Not one of them would say.
Another participant is the Department of Communications which, to its credit, did respond to some questions. It had provided the taskforce with help concerning “digital platforms including dis/misinformation, and unsolicited communications [and] political advertising”.
The department also confessed it had been forced to do this additional work “within existing resources”.
It is almost guaranteed that would have been the position for the rest of them too: Well-meaning officials juggling competing priorities being dragged into taskforce meetings they really have no time for.
As far as the public is aware, the only known case of the taskforce actually having an impact concerned a Blacktown man who years ago sent millions of racist and homophobic spam emails to try to influence federal elections. A court found he was mentally unwell.
Sleepwalking towards the future
Meanwhile, a major cyber security report by global intelligence research organisation Recorded Future has revealed concerted efforts by far-right groups and an army of inauthentic bots to spread false information denigrating the Voice to Parliament.
In August, Meta shut down 9,000 Facebook and Instagram accounts run by a group linked to Chinese authorities, dubbed Spamouflage, that had been churning out spam convenient to Beijing. The group had also been toying with people’s perceptions of the Voice.
“We have definitely seen some actors trying to interfere in the Voice,” disinformation researcher Albert Zhang told me. “Some actors were amplifying both pro and anti-Voice sentiments … trying to sow discord and undermine public trust in the Australian government itself.”
It’s in response to this vulnerability that the AEC has been lobbying its partners on the integrity taskforce to do more. While it can continue putting out spot fires about the electoral process, someone needs to work on “inoculating the population against disinformation”, Ekin-Smyth said.
“We need a whole-of-government disinformation awareness campaign — we have been saying that for a little while. It does not seem to be on the agenda.”
I asked all seven partner agencies about their position on this. Not one of them answered.
It seems little has changed from two years ago, when our security officials displayed open confusion as to who was really in charge of the problem.
For now, it is Indigenous Australia which is reeling from the weekend’s vote and the lies which underpinned it.
But we all risk a dear price should we march on as we are, sleepwalking towards a future in which nothing at all can be trusted.