journal of the s.r.c. sydney university
honi soit
FEAR WINS WEEK ELEVEN, SEMESTER TWO, 2023
Australia votes “No”
FIRST PRINTED 1929
Have You Noticed...
T HAT First Nations sovereignty remains unceded. T HAT this “No” result will only embolden racism. T HAT colonisation actually has had ongoing impacts. T HAT Australia is an ongoing settler-colonial project. T HAT the Left must fight for First Nations justice.
suffering of First Nations people.
This country needs to face its collective apathy towards First Nations issues. Australia has voted No to the Voice to Parliament. Overwhelmingly. In all states, and in the Northern Territory, the majority voted against a constitutionally-enshrined advisory body representing First Nations people in parliament.Apart from the specific proposal it presents, the referendum asked Australians a moral question: “how seriously do you take your obligations as settlers on this land? How seriously do you take First Nations people and their wishes?”
to historic proposal.
It asked Australians — settlers living in a country built upon the dispossession of First Nations land — what is Australia? In voting to reject the Voice, Australians have shown that they plainly do not know. They have shown that they do not take the history of this country seriously. They have shown that they are blind to the colonial violence which underpins this country and, further, ignorant to the
Fifteen years after Rudd’s Apology to the Stolen Generations, thirty-one years after Mabo, and more than two hundred years after colonisation began, Australians have once again proven that they do not take the struggle of First Nations peoples seriously. They have once again said that which they have always said to First Nations people: “you are not welcome here.” It is not enough to say that this is merely an Australia which has been misled. Much of the discourse around the referendum result will rightfully focus on the culture war deliberately stoked by the No campaign. However, the reality is that this country needs to face is its collective apathy toward First Nations issues — an apathy which defaults to racism. The truths of genocide and dispossession are never confronted or acknowledged in this conceptualisation — to do so would be for the nation to reckon with the brutality of our history, to invite uncomfortability in examining how they benefit as settlers. Instead, settlers opt for the cruellest form of laziness. an Honi Soit editorial, continue reading on Page 4.