The Voice campaign showed Labor's strategy for countering right-wing populism is in disarray

On election night, a triumphant Anthony Albanese declared Labor was committed to the Uluru statement from the Heart “in full”, thereby including establishing an Indigenous Voice.

Albanese had partly won the election by pledging to bring Australians together to build a better, more equal Australia. In doing so, he managed to sidestep Scott Morrison’s right-wing populist arguments that the Liberals would protect the Australian people, “us” against “them”: namely, elitist Labor big government and the minority groups Labor would support.

However, the Voice outcome has revealed Labor’s strategy for sidestepping right-wing populism to be in disarray. The “no” case argued Labor supported division by trying to impose an elitist, big government “Canberra Voice” on the Australian people. Worst of all, the “no” case claimed to be championing equality while Labor was depicted as supporting special rights for a minority of the Australian people.

Conservative columnist Janet Albrechtsen argued:

If the referendum fails, equality will be the single idea that did most to defeat the proposal to set up a race-based body in the Constitution with special rights not accorded to non-Indigenous Australians.

Prominent campaigner Jacinta Nampijinpa Price eloquently summed up the “no” case argument regarding equality:

Whether you’ve been in this country for 60,000 years or became an Australian 60 seconds ago, you are equal in our Constitution. You have the same rights and opportunities – the same democratic voice – as every other Australian. Proponents of the voice want to change that.

Read more: Voice referendum results point to shifting faultlines in Australian politics

A misguided sense of ‘equality’

This was a conception of equality controversially based on treating everyone the same, regardless of the different circumstances or particular disadvantages they face. But it appears to have resonated with the Australian people.

It was also a conception of equality that has long been used by the Coalition when dealing with Indigenous affairs. Writing of Indigenous policy during the Howard government era, academic commentator Jane Robbins wrote that the then Coalition government “interprets social unity as a form of equality based on identical treatment and uniform political processes”.

It was precisely such conceptions that underlay many of the arguments for the “no” case. Peter Dutton may have been somewhat Trumpian in his suggestions that the Australian electoral commission couldn’t be trusted to be impartial.

But many of his arguments drew directly on similar Howard-era perspectives, albeit adapted for the 21st century with liberal use of terms such as “woke” or “identity politics”, popularised by the US right.

Read more: How did the media perform on the Voice referendum? Let's talk about truth-telling and impartiality

So Dutton argued in parliament that the Voice would “have an Orwellian effect where all Australians are equal, but some Australians are more equal than others”.

Dutton is referring to one of George Orwell’s best known works, Animal Farm, a dystopian satirical critique of a Stalinist, totalitarian, all-controlling government. Dutton overlooked that years before, Orwell had written a lesser known satirical novel, Burmese Days, in which he critiqued the dreadful effect of colonialism on both the colonisers and colonised.

So how is it that a Labor government that saw itself as supporting a move that would increase the equality of one of the most disadvantaged groups in Australia came to be constructed as supporting divisive elites?

Read more: What are 'Advance' and 'Fair Australia', and why are they spearheading the 'no' campaign on the Voice?

First, the argument should not surprise us given another instance of arguments during the Howard era. The 1999 republic referendum saw supporters of the “no” case argue the republic would be elitist given that parliament would elect the president. Meanwhile, supporters of an unelected, wealthy monarchy, descended from the feudal era, were represented as supporting the popular will.

It was described as the “politicians’ republic” just as the Voice was described as the “Canberra Voice”, despite it having been proposed by a 250-member First Nations National Constitutional Convention.

Given these comparable strategies, it may not be surprising that the Voice referendum results show similarities with the 1999 republic referendum results.

Albanese’s ‘new politics’ is in fact very old

Albanese may have believed his election victory represented a “new politics”, but in fact his government, and the broader “yes” case, have been fighting a very old politics over the Voice.

The Voice referendum lost for diverse reasons, including the lack of bipartisan support and a successful fear campaign that sometimes mobilised quite horrible racism.

However, we need to recognise that the “no” campaign arguments also enabled some well-intentioned “no” voters to see themselves as champions of racial equality who supported national unity over division, and the people over elites. The fact that the official “no” campaign was headed by two Indigenous Australians, Jacinta Nampijinpa Price and Warren Mundine, was particularly important in this context.

It is one of the many failures of the “yes” campaign that such obvious Howard-era arguments and strategies from the “no” case weren’t adequately anticipated and countered better. Perhaps Labor was lulled into a false sense of security by the marriage equality plebiscite outcome. But marriage equality was a far simpler proposition of a call for equal treatment.

Moreover, as I explain in my book Social Democracy and the Crisis of Equality, Labor is also facing a longstanding issue regarding its pursuit of equality. The party’s conception of equality is now much more diverse and inclusive than it used to be in terms of issues such as race, gender and sexuality. Labor’s conception of equality also recognises that both equality of opportunity and equality of outcomes often needs to go beyond same treatment to introduce measures that address specific disadvantages. Indeed, same treatment can reinforce, rather than challenge, existing inequities and social power relations.

However, as Labor’s conception of equality has become more diverse, it has opened up opportunities for the right to try to “wedge” off a section of Labor supporters. It does this by arguing traditional, working class people are being neglected in favour of so-called “woke” elites.

Such arguments can have traction, particularly in a time of economic hardship. This is despite the real deprivation faced by various disadvantaged groups, and the fact that the working class itself is diverse in terms of race, sexuality and gender.

Labor needs to get much better at countering such right-wing populist arguments if it wants to succeed in its broader reform agendas. What worked for the 2022 election hasn’t worked for the Voice.

Meanwhile, Indigenous “yes” supporters are being painfully reminded that we all live in a colonial-settler society in which it can be very hard to win arguments for significant change. An early 20th century Constitution, which intentionally allowed several state governments at the time to deny voting rights to Indigenous Australians, still fails to recognise them.