A depressing feature of post-truth politics is the way words are brazenly flipped. As politics falls through the looking glass, the Voice becomes racism, anti-transgender campaigners become feminists.
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In the US, the same Donald Trump who pressured electoral officials to "find" him some votes, denied the national result, and fomented an insurrection, is the saviour of democracy.
When Peter Dutton delivered his tawdry negation of the referendum question, he claimed it was because the "Prime Minister's Canberra Voice" would divide Australians. Dutton would reunite them.
Let's be clear, these were lies. It is neither the PM's nor a Canberra Voice. It is a Voice to Canberra, not in Canberra. Misrepresenting for political advantage is deliberately divisive and grotesquely dishonest.
Having walked out on the Apology in 2008, and skipped the introduction of the referendum bill, Dutton has now walked out on an historic chance of a harmonious national future.
He did this knowing the Voice was backed by a clear majority of Australians. Assessing this to be a soft consensus, however, it seems as though he hopes to wreck it with fear so he can claw back ground from Anthony Albanese.
His method, gleaned directly from Trump and similar authoritarians, is to declare himself the great unifier, while feverishly dividing. It may be brazen but Dutton is nothing if not attentive.
Facing multiple counts of business fraud, Trump told his cult base (AKA the Republican Party) that had the Department of Justice and FBI not colluded to protect the "criminal" Bidens, he would have won in 2020.
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"It would have been in our favour, not my favour, our favour, because our country is going to Hell" he told devotees gathered at Mar-a-Lago, the tasteless site of an FBI raid last year to recover top secret documents.
"The only crime I've committed is to fearlessly defend our nation from those who seek to destroy it."
As he so often does, Trump casts himself as victim of "millions of votes illegally stuffed into ballot boxes and all caught on government cameras". His supporters lap up this infantile and contradictory patois as if they too face possible jail time.
Behold the terminal phase of democratic decay where reason, evidence, logic and objectivity lose their purchasing power against an emotionally charged victimhood felt by vast swathes of the population is packaged back to them by a cynical demagogue. Up becomes down, truth becomes lie. Facts are twisted or ignored in a self-serving confidence trick plain to some, invisible to others.
In Australia, the hard right adopts a similar approach.
At rallies against transgender rights, bigots parade T-shirts declaring "let women speak" - positioning themselves as the true feminists, the only real advocates of women.
They maintain this charade even as neo-Nazi man-boys prance about at their rallies doing Hitler salutes in their dinky black outfits with their faces hidden.
"Why do you hate women?," organisers chime back at any critics of this shallow dishonourable theatre.
By smugly appropriating terms they abhor, (feminism, democracy, liberalism) adherents bask in the cheap satisfaction of turning mainstream society's "elitist" lexicon against it.
This crude inversion is at the heart of despicable claims that a constitutionally enshrined Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice would create "black apartheid" in Australia.
Consider an uncorrected sample of the Twitter responses to those questioning Dutton's motives in trying to destroy the Voice:
"No future in an apartheid state," declared one trenchant opponent.
"I'm sorry you don't agree with a decision not to support Racism or Apartheid. Perhaps go to South Africa?" invited another.
"This Voice is Racist & would set us back 200 years in Relations with each other!" asserted a third. There were many more.
This is how dog-whistling works and Dutton knows it. He benefits from such absurd arguments even though nobody who understands the undiluted evil of Apartheid would ever draw such a comparison.
Neither can the Voice be branded racist - a pejorative term exclusively used to describe discrimination (usually systematised) by a dominant group over less powerful persons based on skin colour, ethnicity, or cultural/religious heritage.
As a nation founded on violent dispossession for which it has not atoned, compensated, nor formally adjusted its Constitution or flag, Australia already does racism. Addressing it is not racism, but a step towards ending it.
When someone called MrMagoo1900 writes "Our future is racism? I hope not. Vote No to Racist Voice," we see how close we are to falling through the Trumpist looking glass.
At least some Liberals see the danger. The installation of the LNP's hard man was always a perverse response to the centrist rejection of Scott Morrison's reactionary Pentecostalism. Especially as Dutton was thought unelectable by colleagues in 2018 when he nominated. Nothing has changed. Hopes that he would park his own ideology have been dashed.
Said NSW moderate senator Andrew Bragg of his party's humiliation in Aston: "There has been a tendency on the fringes to try and Americanise some of these culture wars here in Australia ... and I think that has been nasty at times."
Fred Chaney, a former Liberal leader in the Senate slammed the decision to block the Voice as "sad and pathetic" and as a "sell-out" by people "desperately looking for political advantage".
Amid those currently in Parliament, Bragg and fellow backbencher Bridget Archer stand out for their moral clarity. History will judge other "moderate" enablers more harshly.
- Mark Kenny is The Canberra Times' political analyst and a professor at the ANU's Australian Studies Institute.
Mark Kenny
Mark Kenny is The Canberra Times' political analyst and a professor at the ANU's Australian Studies Institute. He hosts the Democracy Sausage podcast. He writes a column every Sunday.
Mark Kenny is The Canberra Times' political analyst and a professor at the ANU's Australian Studies Institute. He hosts the Democracy Sausage podcast. He writes a column every Sunday.
