ANALYSIS

With Robodebt and anonymous No Voice campaign, politics has descended into a dark place, feeding off downward envy

By Laura Tingle

There's a similarity between the politics of the No campaign against the Voice and Robodebt: the failure of government policy and policy delivery.(ABC News: Kyle Dowling)

A leaflet appeared in letterboxes in suburban Melbourne in recent days. It has no official authorisation, or signatories, but it is telling recipients why they need to "Vote no to the Voice".

While we have heard questions or objections from the No campaign on constitutional, legislative and process grounds — some of which have been quite reasonable questions — the significance of this leaflet is that it jumps the shark straight to the issue of money.

The Voice, it says, is going to make you pay more tax. In doing so, it takes this debate into depressingly familiar territory that doesn't have a lot to do with reconciliation or even racism.

The leap of arguments in the leaflet is that "the Voice forces Australians into Treaty", and Treaty "could include reparations, a financial settlement, the resolution of land water and resource issues" and Treaty "means Australians pay a percentage of GDP [sic], and are forced to pay rates/land tax/royalties to the Voice".

The leaflet goes on to say that "the taxes imposed by the Voice are on top of existing taxes [and] this will be the final death blow for our farmers". It also lists a range of other (untrue) things the Voice will do.

 

But a week after the Royal Commission into Robodebt released its findings, the politics of the warnings that taxes and hard-earned dollars would be ripped off by the Voice were another echo of the politics Commissioner Catherine Holmes spoke of in her report.

"Politicians need to lead a change in social attitudes to people receiving welfare payments," Holmes says.

"Anti-welfare rhetoric is easy populism, useful for campaign purposes."

It's all about downward envy and resentment: something that has been a feature of Australian politics for much of its history.

The same downward envy

Before the politics of attacking welfare bludgers (generally) that lay behind the way the Coalition government prosecuted its Robodebt scheme, there was the earlier attack on single mothers during the Howard era.

Remember? Single mothers were having children so that they could spend their lives living on welfare. It was one of the underlying rationales for reducing the age of children for whom single parents could receive assistance: it would force them out to work from their lives of indolence.

It was a policy rationale that echoed on into the policies of the Gillard government.

Of course, politicians weren't always that explicit about such things. But they had willing and noisy backers in sections of the media who would prosecute all of these cases. In the case of Robodebt, they were often complicit in actually naming and shaming people (and, in passing, seem to have gone noticeably quiet in the past week).

The same downward envy – and the widespread belief that someone might be getting something they are not entitled to that you aren't getting – lay beneath the way a lot of the politics about asylum seekers played out.

And it has been a long-running theme – and belief – about Indigenous Australia too, no matter how much the visual and statistical evidence shows black Australia is way behind the rest of the community.

If there is a similarity between the politics of Robodebt, and the sorts of things now being said under the "No" banner about the Voice, there is an even more significant similarity in the mechanics of what lies beneath both.

The similarity is about the failure of government policy and policy delivery. The Royal Commission reported how the Robodebt system "was set up with the intention of forcing recipients to respond online … to minimise contact with DHS officers, in the interests of economy; this was vital to the anticipated savings".

Bureaucrats setting up the system "made a conscious decision not to include any telephone number … in the letters sent to recipients".

It's already a political brawl

What seems so lost in the debate about the Voice is that it is – beyond any symbolic issue about recognition or influence – an attempt to rectify systems of government which utterly fail many Indigenous communities in a practical day-to-day sense: the incapacity of local, state and federal governments to deliver services in an appropriate and intelligent way. This is not even about spending more money.

It can be as simple as getting a bus stop put outside an Aboriginal Medical Service. It is about having some structure that allows complex communities to communicate with several levels of government and be represented.

 

Robodebt was supposed to save the government $1.1 billion a year but instead has cost taxpayers a net half a billion dollars – so far.

It is quite possible that a coherent body of advice to government could just as easily save money as pay out more.

But no one is really outlining these arguments on the Yes side, either.

The basic explanation to people who have never seen the dysfunction in government service delivery in Indigenous communities rarely seems to get made. There are so many other layers of the discussion driven by an understandable passion for recognition, an overwhelming obsession with process, and arguments about legalities.

The government's insistence that it wants to keep the politics out of the referendum has largely left Minister for Indigenous Australians Linda Burney out there by herself to fight this argument as far as high profile government representation is concerned.

Bringing the prime minister into the front line, it is argued, would just make it a political brawl between him and Peter Dutton.

Well, it is already a political brawl.

 

 

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