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.
From the article it seemed that a big criticism of the amendment was that it was too vague. There were people from different political beliefs and some aboriginals who didn’t like how vague it was, though the aboriginals wanted it to further.
That’s because it was a constitutional amendment.
The legislation (details) that would come out afterwards has been out for 6-7 months now.
The Yes campaign did a shit job of publicising it though. I’ve consistently heard that people were told to educate themselves which is generally a bad way of getting someone to agree with you when the opposition is all to happy to fill in the gaps with disinformation. The fact that we are still telling people why the wording was vague should be enough to tell you that the Yes campaign failed.
There’s quite a few things they did poorly, sure. Which is a shame, since they did everything else well.
I’m sorry. I did heaps of reading about this and I couldn’t find any details. If it was out they did a terrible job of making it available.
Did you check Wikipedia?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indigenous_Voice_to_Parliament
(It’s there, under “Structure and powers of the Voice”)
It even says in the Wikipedia article that they would design it after the referendum. They just had a couple of ideas about how it might work.
Now, that’s not what they said, as much as you wish it.