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 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.