Australia Rejects Indigenous Referendum (opens in new tab)

> Very few referenda in Australia's history have received a 'Yes' result. The usual result has been overwhelmingly 'No'. The viewpoint is that it's better to have 'No Change' in the Constitution than 'Bad Change'.

I think there are several constitutional amendments which would pass easily except neither of the major political parties seems interested in proposing them. Examples: repeal of section 25; removal of all references to Inter-State Commission; repeal of section 74 (or its amendment to ban appeals to the Privy Council entirely). These are all effectively spent provisions so their repeal should be non-controversial. To save money, the referenda could be held concurrently with the next federal election

I don’t think it is reasonable to blame the Australian people as a whole for things which are the fault of Australia’s political class

> The same result happened in the last referendum 25 years ago on whether Australia should be a Republic. Despite most Australians wanting a Republic per se, the kind of Republic actually envisioned in the referendum was rejected. reply

I think for both referendums, a major factor in their failure was the incompetence and unnecessary haste in proposing them.

For the Republic referendum, a staged process involving plebiscites (1) should Australia become a Republic? (2) which model of Republic should Australia adopt? (3) then a final referendum to approve the details of the model chosen in (2) - would have been more likely to have been successful. (1) and (2) could even have been structured as a referendum: e.g. (1) could have amended the Constitution to add a new section saying “(a) Australia will become a Republic with a President replacing the current offices of Monarch and Governor-General; (b) the current system of the Monarchy will be retained until the details of how the President is to be appointed or elected and removed are added to this constitution by a future alteration”

Similarly, why didn’t Albanese create a statutory Voice first, allow it to operate for a few years, and then propose a constitutional amendment to entrench it? It would have been harder for Dutton to oppose a statutory Voice given the Morrison government had already committed to create one, and even if he had, the government likely had the numbers to introduce one anyway; many of the “No” campaign’s arguments (e.g “we don’t have enough detail on how the proposed Voice is going to work”, “it is risky and we don’t know the consequences”) would have been significantly less effective if the debate had been about constitutionally entrenching an existing body instead of creating a brand-new one. But instead, we are now in the situation that even a statutory Voice is a political non-starter, given the nation has just voted “No” to a Voice. A Voice would be more likely to exist today (or next year) if this referendum were never held