It has been over a week now since the Voice Referendum, and it has been interesting watching the reactions of those who hoped for a YES victory seeing such a victory as a slap down against racism. A majority of the reactions I have seen manifest feelings of frustration, sadness, defeat or cynicism. How could “Australia” – i.e., the 60 plus percent – vote NO? Is Australia that racist?

Some, in exasperation, rhetorically cry out that they might emigrate to somewhere less racist. These emotions, I think, are misplaced and will result in a misidentification of the challenge democratic humanists face in Australia.

We must remember both the immediate and longer-term past historical context.

First, in the immediate past, over the last 40 years, the conservative vote has not seriously waned. The two party-preferred vote has always hovered around a 50-50 divide. This more-or-less 50-50 divide has been maintained despite the steady and clear journey by the Australian Labor Party (ALP) from the centre to the right, involving also the disappearance of its socialist Left.  If we take the Green vote as representing a solid generally progressive vote – even if some of it a liberal progressive vote – it is not much more than 10 percent of the population.

In other words, for the last 40 years, Australian political life – especially electoral life – has been dominated by conservative parties, who have consolidated the dominance also of a conservative social and economic agenda amongst the population and overall very low expectations of progressive change and social improvement on all fronts.

This conservative lowering of expectations has been very strong in the realm of anti-racism. The Australian ruling class’s “natural” party – the Liberal National Party (LNP) – escalated agitation under John Howard with his contemptible lies about “babies overboard”.

This racist agitation – stereotyping non-white people from the Global South as barbarian – delivered votes for Howard. Stopping the boats carrying these ‘Others’ seeking refuge was adopted by the ALP which pioneered offshore processing.

First Nations people are the “Other” within Australia. The two racisms mutually reinforce each other.

For 40 years, this outlook has dominated mass political consciousness with very minimal organised movement to change the people’s thinking. The 60 plus percent vote for NO should not be unexpected in this context.

Second, the longer-term ideological legacy of Australia’s settler colonial past embeds an inevitably dehumanising perspective towards First Nations people – that is, a racist perspective – for as long as the moral illegitimacy of the original conquest by Great Britain is not fully accepted.  

A string of symbolisms have come about from pressure: Kevin Rudd’s Sorry statement and especially the prevalence now of Acknowledgement of Country at so many events and by so many institutions. But this Acknowledgement of Country remains symbolism without a praxis that gives it power.

Tens of thousands of Acknowledgements of Country come to very little while governments take no serious moves to stop Deaths in Custody or to end the monstrous gap in available resources for First Nations people and everybody else. Real policy measures on these fronts would deepen the impact of all the symbolism.

So, in the meantime, in this situation with only empty symbolism, the sentiment will remain that there is no big urgency in changing anything – i.e. First Nations people both having liberation as well as equality. In the end, the Referendum itself becomes a part of this anaemic symbolism, and being as such can only reflect the current majority consciousness.

In these circumstances, there is no basis for not expecting this result, and thus no basis for being disheartened. It simply confirms the challenge that there is work to do building upon the 40 percent YES vote. There is no doubt that there is enormous potential to do this if we understand the challenge properly and if, indeed, there is a commitment by at least some people to do it.

The Contradiction: Democratic Humanist Sentiment in Australia

While a progressive vote – mainly in the form of voting for the social democratic Greens – has improved, it has not grown so quickly as to truly challenge the electoral status quo. The neo-liberal, pro-imperialist ALP’s primary vote declines, but they know the Greens vote can go nowhere else.

The far-left socialist parties have yet to win a hearing among the broader working class. However, there is other evidence of a persistent democratic humanist sentiment in society that stands at odds with the dingy, mealy-mouthed, forever spun conservatism of the LNP and ALP.

For a long-time now, there has been a pattern of spontaneous mass mobilisations exhibiting this democratic humanist sentiment. 40,000 people gathered at the Opera House in 1990 to hear Nelson Mandela. In 1999, tens of thousands demonstrated in support of East Timorese liberation, while even showing their support for Indonesia’s pro-democracy students. 250,000 people marched across the Sydney Harbour in 2000 while in 2003, hundreds and hundreds of thousands protested around Australia against the Iraq War.

While street protests have not reached the hundreds of thousands again since 2003, demonstrations in the tens of thousands have happened around Global Warming and the environment as well as Black Lives Matters, including when First Nation people have been killed by police. Invasion Day also sees big mobilisations.

Most recently, demonstrations in solidarity with a Free Palestine have also been in their thousands. Strikes, despite a much weaker and small union movement nationally, have started taking place again involving wharfies, construction workers, nurses, teachers, rail workers and others.

These kinds of sentiments in the past were channelled in an organised way through the socialist left of the ALP, the Communist Party of Australia (CPA) and, to a modest extent, by the Democratic Socialist Party (DSP) in the 1980s and 1990s. In the past, these sentiments became attached to either social democratic (often self-identifying as socialist) or clear socialist or communist ideas.

By the early 2000s, there was no more significant socialist left in the ALP and trade unions, the CPA had undergone liquidation, fragmentation and was weaker, while the DSP had suffered a debilitating internal political struggle which ended its dynamism. While the democratic, humanist sentiment still was clearly there among the people, the links with socialist and social democratic tradition, ideology and organisation had shrivelled.

The sentiment repeatedly re-appears, but cannot build momentum.

Searching for a Concrete Strategy

The question where to now after the NO victory in the Referendum is part of a general question: how to deepen and mobilise this sentiment? How can all those who voted YES as an anti-racist statement be not just a reflection of sentiment, of feelings, but become a force for change?

There are a number of elements that need to be considered.

Between 1983 and today, with the decline of the social democratic and socialist political currents, in all arenas, knowledge of Australian and world history is weaker. Familiarity with progressive ideas is weaker. Conversely, superstition-based explanations (conspiracy theories) of how the world works are stronger, as well as a kind of “switching off” and seeking distraction. Either superstitions explain things, or nothing does, and the solution is distraction. Distraction – consume, travel, consume more.

But the democratic humanist sentiment is still out there. Explaining history – for example the history of the genocide of First Nation peoples and the violent conquest by British colonialists – is an immediate task. Interpreting history and spreading the best analysis of why it all happened is equally an immediate task. From the history, we get the explanation of the situation today and thus can begin the discussion of solutions: essentially socialist solutions.

Organise to explain and raise awareness, transform sentiment to ideology, organisation and commitment.

Building organisations that can win people to explanations of our situation that allow solutions to be seen and strategies for struggle to be understood is an absolutely essential, unavoidable task. There is no way around it: explain through writing, meetings, speeches, forums and through the slogans, demands and statements of commitment manifested in demonstrations. No way around it.

But let us be very aware of a specific feature of our time: urgency.

Building activist organisations of explanation or political education cannot be just a first phase to be followed only later by the frontal struggle for change. There is an urgency now. If the current culture of low expectations on all fronts is not disturbed, the moral-cultural degeneration may go too far.

More materially, time is running out for saving the habitat. Time might run out in the race to prevent war with its contemporary prospects for the use of more than one kind of weapon of mass destruction: nuclear, chemical, biological.

And, then even more immediately, in the realm of the oppression and violence against First Nations people in Australia. How many more deaths in custody with governments doing nothing? How much longer must some communities live in deprivation in one of the richest economies in the world?

And, worldwide, as we can see in Palestine and elsewhere, there are no grounds for taking things slowly.

We must build to explain and awaken while working with everybody everywhere, to the best of our ability, to strengthen all struggle campaigns on all fronts around immediate demands and, wherever possible, explaining the necessary comprehensive solution of having a society where production is planned, controlled and implemented under the peoples’ democratic supervision.

Some of the immediate demands relating to winning equality and liberation for First Nations people are already clear. We can start with ending deaths in custody and with ending all patronising control of First Nations communities. Other demands are also being continuously raised from amongst First Nations people, for example, for a Treaty.

Build from the 40 percent! Deepen and activate the democratic, humanist sentiment! The potential for mobilisation and struggle is there.

It is based on these ideas that I am active in RED ANT.