2023 Australian Indigenous Voice referendum
The 2023 Australian Indigenous Voice referendum will be held on Saturday, 14 October 2023. Voters will be asked whether or not the Australian Constitution should be changed so that a body called the Indigenous Voice to Parliament can be created and so that Indigenous Australians (Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people) are recognised in the Constitution. This is something that has been called for in the Uluru Statement from the Heart, which was published in 2017.
The referendum will be held under the federal centre-left Labor government of Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, who promised to voters that he would hold a referendum on the issue if elected. Labor won the 2022 federal election and he announced on election night that he would hold a referendum in late 2023. On 30 August 2023, he announced that the referendum will be held on 14 October 2023.
Like in all Australian elections and referendums, every Australian citizen over the age of 18 has to vote, because Australia has compulsory voting.
The Voice proposal has been controversial, with different political parties and politicians having different views on the issue. The Labor Party's proposal is supported by the left-wing Greens party and other smaller parties, but the centre-right, conservative Liberal-National Coalition, which forms the federal opposition, is split. The federal Coalition, led by Opposition Leader Peter Dutton, is against the Voice, but many federal backbenchers and state Coalition MPs have different views; some support Labor's proposal while others support the idea of the Voice but want a different proposal. Other parties, like the right-wing One Nation and the United Australia Party, are strongly against the Voice.
Many well-known members of both the Yes and No campaigns are Indigenous. For example, Minister for Indigenous Australians Linda Burney and Indigenous activist Noel Pearson have joined the Yes campaign, while Jacinta Nampijinpa Price (a Country Liberal Senator from the Northern Territory) and Warren Mundine (a former Labor politician who is now a member of the Liberal Party) are against it, saying it has too much power, while Lidia Thorpe (a Greens-turned-independent Senator from Victoria who calls herself a member of the "Black sovereignty movement") thinks it does not have enough power. Some people have even called for the referendum to be cancelled.
Opinion polling for the referendum has been regularly published. While originally the proposal had a lot of support for the Voice across the country, more recent polls have shown that more and more people are now against the Voice across the country. One of the main things that has made many people change their mind on the Voice has been the lack of detail on what the Voice is, but other factors include the belief that there is a link between the Voice and a federal treaty (mainly with the proposed Makarrata Commission), a possibility that it could be a bureaucracy without representation from local Indigenous elders, the possibility that it might not have enough representation for regional, rural and remote areas or for the Northern Territory (where over 20% of the population is Indigenous), the possible risk it may have and the possible link between the Voice and sovereignty movements, Australian republicanism (including a second referendum on if Australia should become a republic after the 1999 referendum failed) and possibly changing the date of (or even getting rid of) Australia Day, and the possibility of the passage of controversial laws on both the federal and state level. Reasons for people changing their mind are also different across the country; for example in Western Australia many people (especially people like farmers) have become concerned about the possibility that a federal "Indigenous heritage law" could be created, similar to the now-scrapped state law in Western Australia, which was unpopular and controversial.
The more extreme and populist factions of both the Yes and No campaigns have also accused the opposite campaign of being racist, with a minority of Yes campaigners accusing the No campaign of being racist against Indigenous people, while the a minority of No campaigners have accused the Yes campaign of being racist towards Australians who are not Indigenous. Disinformation, misinformation and a number of conspiracy theories about the referendum have also been spread online, mainly by right-wing and far-right opponents and by internet trolls, many of whom are extremists or from other countries.
Opinion polling
References
2023 in Australia
Indigenous Australians
Referendums in Australia