Many people have expressed disappointment at the lethargy of the Australian Labor Party’s campaign for a YES vote in the coming referendum. This comes on top of some people, including outspoken First Nations activists, expressing disappointment in THE VOICE deal overall.

While the campaign has been lethargic, the proposal itself is also quite anaemic. It does give constitutional recognition to First Nations peoples as the original inhabitants and does provide a constitutional basis for an advisory body to the parliament and executive of First Nations people.

However, the constitution is a legal document whose real meaning is determined by the balance of forces in society – a balance of forces currently manifested in the ALP – LNP majority in parliament. Neither of these two parties have a credible record on the issue of the treatment of First Nations peoples.

But what could change the balance of forces between racist and genuinely humanist consciousnesses in Australia. Well, the current “No” campaign is clearly aimed at strengthening racist thinking. It uses every kind of racist stereotype. Some of its spokespersons claim that colonial settlement benefited Aboriginal peoples, somehow ignoring the genocide. Every fear is played upon: that land rights will take away land, that Australia Day will disappear.

They campaign that the constitutional recognition given to Aboriginal people divides Australian society by introducing a special category of citizens based on race, when in fact it is not a recognition of race but of past and continuing injustices, of theft of homelands, of genocide.

On the other hand, a vigorous anti-racist campaign, in this case for a YES vote in the referendum may have helped shift consciousness the other way. Only the ALP has the resources and the platform to wage a nation-wide and effective campaign against racism. It decided not to do this, but rather rely on the grass roots activities of mostly unorganised individuals in the communities.

Although some parts of The Greens did organise, a full-blooded campaign with the resources of the ALP has not taken place. This is the same kind of “small target” campaign Albanese successfully ran for the federal election, seeing another drop in the ALP’s primary vote but winning with the help of “the ALP is the lesser evil” preferences from the Greens and others. Perhaps, the idea is the same for this vote.

The tone of the YES campaign has been very lacklustre. It has stressed that all that is happening is that some Aboriginal people will be constitutionally guaranteed the right to give advice – which may or may not be accepted. In some ways, the tone has been to emphasise that this is a very minor change. However, defeating racism in Australia cannot be seen as a minor change: discrimination is deeply embedded.

For a large majority of Australians to truly understand the reality of the deep discrimination against First Nations peoples, it is necessary for the long-term consequences of conquest, occupation and genocide be understood. The genocidal policies of British colonialism, continued well after 1901, had to be justified by denying the humanity of this continent’s first inhabitants who did an outstanding job of surviving with humanity in one of the most difficult habitats for humans on earth, with no domesticable animals nor storable cereals.

This colonial denial of humanity, embodied in a myriad of dehumanising stereotypes, has been passed on through generations, until today. The same justifications, or variants of them, are used to justify the often less than Third World conditions that First Nations people still suffer in some parts of the country and the discrimination they suffer everywhere. Both the material and ideological legacies of this genocide live on. Past actions, especially radical and deep ones such genocide, leave deep legacies that require conscious efforts to eliminate.

Such a conscious effort can be nothing less than an all-out CAMPAIGN to re-teach and understand history and all its contemporary consequences. To achieve a resounding YES Vote and at the same time create the atmosphere to move on to bigger victories, such as real treaties or other negotiated settlements, including restorative material compensations or affirmative actions, a genuinely anti-racist political education campaign was needed. The reality of the genocide needed to brought vividly to the people, and its contemporary, shameful consequences.

Such a campaign would re-educate the people to the whole colonial project of racist conquest and also to the history of class, of land theft and squatocracy, of White Australia. But such a campaign would also need to confront the new, equally virulent “new” forms of racism – that against refugees, the “other” who are said to throw babies overboard; who must be turned back at sea no matter how dangerous to them; or jailed in isolated camps on isolated islands.

Racism, that is the denial of full humanity to fellow human beings, almost always emerges as a justification for the “other’s” oppression, exploitation, conquest or genocide. In colonial Australia, it was to justify the genocide needed to enable massive land theft and today to justify no act of compensation and continuing maltreatment of First Nations peoples. And the new anti-refugee racism is meant to justify ignoring the misery of the exploited two-thirds of the world living in impoverished colonies and neo-colonies. Campaigning against racism means exposing that relationship.

Neither of the two major parties of Australian capitalism – including the incumbent ALP – wish such a campaign.

Such a campaign could AWAKEN the people not only to the inhumanity of racism, but the injustice and irrationality of capitalism itself. A true, all out, anti-racist YES campaign threatens to awaken the people: better to hope for a slim victory based on current sentiments or even accept a loss, than have the people awaken.

Better the people stay half asleep accepting low horizons in their dreams. But that will bring catastrophe for all the people, such as has alright blighted First Nations people.

Down with passivity!