Response to Yes ideas
I read and watched various media sent to me in response to my last post about the Voice referendum. I learnt things. Here's some of it.
Hi, how can I help you?
Uh, can I get a meat pie and a can of coke please.
Meat pie and a coke. Anything else?
That’s it, thanks.
Bullshit.
Excuse me?
You heard me. Bullshit.
What do you mean?
You really expect me to believe that you just want a little bit of food and drink? I know why you’re here, you upstart sonofabitch. You’re trying to get my job aren’t you? You’re trying to work out how I speak to customers so you know exactly how to role-play in the interview. You heard that I’m busy working at that other shop on Fridays, so you’re trying to weasel your way by saying you’re “more committed”.
Uh…
Wait, I bet you won’t even stop there! You’re going to buy the shop, aren’t you? You dirty, lying sack of shit. You’re going to do a hostile takeover of the whole place so you can get all those sweet sweet profits all for yourself!
Wha…
My God! That’s not even going to be the end for you, is it? You’re learning everything there is to know about running a fast food business and soon you’ll buy every KFC, Maccas and Hungry Jacks this side of Campbell Town. Wait, is that a phone you’re holding?
… Yeah? What’s that got to do wi-
This is unbelievable! People with phones are the same people who hold shares in multinationals. You’re going to not only buy every food business in the state, you’re probably going for every business! In the world!
… That doesn’t make any sense, I don’t think half those things are legal, even if they were possible. I just want a pie and coke.
Yeah, well as long as I them scared, nobody’s going to hear you, let alone believe you.
So I read a few things and watched a thing. Up top, thank you sincerely to the people who have engaged with me on this: Hannah, Peta, Dilg, Jennie, Miranda, Billie, Freya, Darcy. I’ve been sent a bunch of things that were useful in framing my opinion. This page with questions for the Conversation was the most useful page if you want to know what’s happening - some of the answers aren’t great, but many are really good. This is great at telling you what isn’t happening. Reminder again that what persuades me isn’t what persuades everyone, so some things I’ve said are important are simply important for me.
A reminder of the proposal:
“Chapter IX Recognition of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples
129 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice
In recognition of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples as the First Peoples of Australia:
there shall be a body, to be called the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice;
the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice may make representations to the Parliament and the Executive Government of the Commonwealth on matters relating to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples;
the Parliament shall, subject to this Constitution, have power to make laws with respect to matters relating to the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice, including its composition, functions, powers and procedures.”
Overview
The Main Points
The Smaller Points
What’s wrong and what we need to do
Addressing my original thoughts
Overview
The No case is more coherent and persuasive than the Yes case. This is why I originally thought it might be the right thing. Thing is, the No case is just made up. It’s like some fun activity in a Grade 10 Media unit:
“Now kids, in groups of three, come up with some arguments that you know old people will find scary. Yes Hamish?”
“Two questions sir: do the arguments need to be based on facts and what’s the topic?”
“Don’t worry about the truth, be creative and honestly, the topic doesn’t matter either, you’re just trying to scare people who can’t be bothered to check what you’re saying.”
The other problem here is that so much of the Yes stuff doesn’t address the No stuff, and is incredibly biassed. This is also what my brain was responding to. There are answers to the questions I had - good answers too - but they were diamonds in the pile of shattered glass of appealing to emotion and avoiding the question. The main point of the Amendment is simple. In fact, I’ve come to the opinion that the Amendment itself is kind of genius.
If you read my original piece and somewhat agreed, maybe skip down to my addressing of it, then come back here when you’re done.
Again, if you know some things I’ve written hereafter are incorrect, let me know. I’m not an expert.
The Main Points
There aren’t that many details because it’s not that complicated. It’s literally just what it says on the sticker. There’s gunna be a group of folks who can say a thing to Parliament and the Exec if they want to. The simplicity is part of the genius.
The mechanism of the Voice is different to the other things. The impotence of just being able to put your hand up and say something every now and then was palpable to me. So surely that’s not what this really is, right? “What’s the point?” The point is that when you’re making a decision about something, and the affected parties get to say something, directly about it, before you sign off, that changes the way you make the decision. If I was marking some student work and I knew for sure that the student would take it to another science teacher with a comment, that would feel different to if I knew for sure that they wouldn’t (marking consistently is really hard ok, leave me alone). It’s an extra layer of accountability. And if there’s one thing politicians need, it’s accountability, not about personal things or the odd faux pas which the media loves to emphasise, but about the actual job they are doing which is making laws.
The other agencies I mentioned (particularly the NIAA), work at a totally different level. They do stuff directly. They absolutely should do community consultation and I hope they are ramping it up. But that’s a totally different thing to making laws.
It’s going to be better for everyone I care about. I don’t think Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders should have any preference in law over other people, particularly in the cases of comparing similarly disadvantaged Indigenous and non-Indigenous people: similar help needed, similar help given, regardless of heritage. The beauty of it is, because of the mechanism outlined above, it’s less “preference us”, more “think about the effect this will have on Indigenous people”. If you’re taking into account the impact of laws on Indigenous people, some of those laws are more likely to help low-income non-Indigenous people too.
Parliament is in control. The whole point of the third point (clause?) in the Amendment is “the Parliament is still in control”. There seems to be some disbelief about this, because obviously they’re trying to get some power, what would be the point otherwise? But it’s not about direct power, it’s more about “if you screw us over, everyone’s going to find out.” They can’t veto. They can’t use the high court. They just now have a voice in the back of their head saying “don’t forget you can’t make it unfair”.
The Smaller Points
Representation in Parliament is not a Voice. I’m on board with the point that having Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander representatives does not mean Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities have people listening to them in Canberra. But you know who else is in that boat? Nearly literally everyone. You wanna know how much of a voice I have in Canberra? I get the chance to vote for a bunch of people I generally abhor, knowing that the ones I put at the top of my list (some of whom I actually like) have a literal zero percent chance of being elected because anyone in a major party in my electorate is down the bottom of my list. Honestly, the way I think about it (and I’ve written about this before) is that my vote is worth the teeny tiny bit of extra funding to the tiny minority party whose candidate I vote for as number 1. Which is basically nothing. And I’m not even sure this is how it works. Basically everyone is in the category of not having a voice in Canberra. That said, I’d love a better system for politicians talking to regular people. So I think a Voice is definitely a good idea. I don’t know if I’d pick this one, but it’s better than nothing. (Sidenote/counterproposal: maybe we should just have a Voice for everyone. As in, pick 50 random Australians to, as a group, make a statement about each piece of legislation. Surely that would help, because they’re regular people, without all the filters required for the kind of person that can and wants to be in politics. Personally, I’d be happy to randomly select Parliament, and if you want the full argument there, Malcolm Gladwell has your back.)
To work, the Voice doesn’t need to be representative. This just falls out of the mechanism by which it works: as long as you know you have competent people making a statement about the laws you’re making, you’ll make those laws differently.
The High Court veto thing isn’t real. The idea with this is that while Parliament doesn’t need to act on it, they must have a representation from the Voice. So people worry that the Voice can withhold their Voice to prevent laws being passed. If Parliament legislates “we’re going to paint the trees purple”, the Voice says “please don’t do that, it’s a bad idea because photosynthesis” then the Parliament passes their original law, the process is being followed and that’s all that matters. If the Voice says nothing, Parliament has to wait. As stated in the third dot point of the Amendment, the Parliament chooses the process. So if they decide the way it works is that the Voice has two weeks to make a statement, then that’s how it works, end of story.
What’s wrong and what we need to do
Rightie BS
Stuff that is coherent and isn’t true is more persuasive than true stuff that is incoherent - if you do no further reading. This is the original boat I was in. It really is a “shit sticks” situation. Even when wrong ideas are corrected, there’s some part of them that stays around. It takes looking through all the points one by one to realise that none of them turned out to be true and there’s literally nothing there. This is the great media problem of our time. It’s so much easier and faster to make things up than to disprove them. I don’t know what to do about it. Maybe if you encounter people who are into the made up stuff, keep asking “what do they base that on”, and when it doesn’t come back to the Amendment, look confused.
Leftie BS
I waded through a bunch of BS leftie articles. They seemed to be designed to be shared by Yes folks, rather than actually persuade No folks. The issue is that myside bias is strong: if you show the same news programming to Israelis and Palestinians, the former see it as anti-Semitic and the latter as Jewish propaganda. It’s the same as if you’re watching footy with your mates and it’s almost like you’re watching a different game when there’s a controversial call. So if a No leaning person reads Yes articles, they are going to be more critical than a Yes leaning person reading those same articles. Any holes are ignored by the Yes people. For the No people however, the holes are just further evidence that the Yes argument is BS. The point is that if someone’s unsure and searching for more information, you want them to be encountering the best arguments, not the most, because they have limited time and will only read a handful. A bad argument will make them more against you. This an issue with news outlets needing to put out material every day - much of it isn’t very good and doesn’t have the effect they want it to. It’s partly just responding to the Google search algorithm prioritising more recent things, so I don’t know if there’s a solution.
Many expert lawyers and journalists just couldn’t help themselves when they felt like they could sound smart and score easy points from favourable judges, when they really should have been playing the game of “persuade the unsure”.
We’re losing
The polls are bad.
How do we turn things around?
“People report relying mostly on friends and family to give them information about the voice.” The Guardian (based on a poll). This is kinda what I’ve said in An Optimistic Model of Influence.
There are a bunch of things that are tempting but don’t work. If you are definitely voting Yes and know that the No case is a fairy tale, it might be tempting to tell people this directly. Or tell them they’re silly. I don’t think that’s a good idea. Studies about changing beliefs show that the best way is to ask people why they think what they think. Someone says “it’ll mean the Voice can veto lawmakers, effectively forcing them to the Voice’s wishes”. Instead of just explaining why that has no basis in reality, ask why they think that. When they get to a rock bottom belief that is false, then say how you think it’s different and why. “The whole reason the third dot point is in there is to keep the Parliament in control so situations like the one you mentioned are impossible.” Once you start chasing people down and telling them what to think, you’ve lost them. The discussion can’t be you with Yes ideas and another person with No ideas. I mean, that’s what it literally is, but if in your mind it’s framed as “we’re just two people having a chat about a thing” then they’ll have space to move rather than feeling hemmed in. At the end of the day, you want them to feel like they’ve been misinformed by others, not have them identify with the No case. This is all roughly what Thomas Mayo advocates in a recent discussion (maybe halfway, sorry I don’t have the timestamp).
Addressing my original thoughts
Only the original thoughts that need addressing.
I still think the Yes case needs to persuade people more than the No case does. You can’t get around the fact that the default is staying the same, and if you want people to stray from the default, that’s going to be work.
There are no details.
All the Voice is, is what it says in the text above. The only magic is that the mechanism isn’t about hard power and being able to force others to do things, rather the softer power of keeping people accountable.
Time matters.
It’s still true that the Voice will mean additional time spent by Parliament, much of it before the Voice even makes their representation. It’s also true that every instance of me taking more time to do something at a higher quality rather than rushing it has resulted in no regret. It’ll take marginally more time to make laws, but the quality of decisions should improve.
All the NIAA stuff.
The NIAA takes action directly. The Voice is about making laws, not running programs. The NIAA should absolutely do more community consultation if that works. The Voice works at a different level.
The Voice can’t represent all Indigenous communities.
Even without literally "representing" all Indigenous communities, the effect of the mechanism is that the Voice would be "representing the interests" of all communities. I think this kind of thing will not only benefit Indigenous Australians, but likely all Australians who aren't well off.
Moral licensing.
This could go either way. If the Voice gets up, maybe we get complacent, maybe we don’t. If the Voice doesn’t get up, that seems definitely worse than both those options.
Precedence.
This is a scary one. The messages out of this referendum are: make sure your shit is watertight before you start a referendum process; be incredibly clear with your messaging from the start; and, anticipate the drivel and lies of your opponents so you can counter them early.
Why not do a trial.
I’m not sure where I stand on this now. A trial would certainly negate some current lies about the Voice, but would likely generate more. There is only one Truth, but Lies are infinite.
To group or not to group.
Now that I think a Voice would be good for everyone, then we really are just trying to move everyone below the black line up a bit.
Closing the Gap with a Similar Group
I’d still love these data.
The Law vs. The Done Thing
If the Voice comments on everything and says it should be more Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander friendly, Parliament will stop listening. The Done Thing will be to make representations when it’s relevant, and not when it’s not. This article is great in explaining this.
That’s it. Please comment publicly or privately if you wish. Share if you think this might be helpful in persuading anyone. I’ve heard from a lot of people who resonated with my first post about this. Hopefully they feel the same about this one. Thanks again to everyone who spoke to me.