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After being roundly rejected in Saturday’s referendum, the Voice will never be heard by white Australia. For the many First Nations people who voted in favor of this project, the burden is heavy: how will they explain to their children and grandchildren why the rest of Australia made this decision?
However, this setback in reconciliation is the responsibility of all of us. It will be picked and picked and will fester long after the country sweets are forgotten. Only with time will researchers and historians give the plebiscite its true context.
Among the many lessons learned from Saturday’s results, there is one that needs to be addressed more urgently. And this is our appetite for falsehoods: postal votes are a way for the Australian Electoral Commission to “rig the referendum”. Pencils are distributed at polling stations to allow votes to be changed. Since 1973 the Constitution has been invalid, therefore the referendum is also invalid.
“The world is becoming more and more perilous,” Evan Ekin-Smyth of the AEC told me. “We have seen the environment change, due to the lack of trust in the system.”
Since 2019, the Commission has responded stubbornly to those peddling conspiracies and untruths; Sometimes these peddlers are politicians. For a statutory body, this is a radically new approach.
In August, Peter Dutton and Tony Abbott banged in the bathtub with the absurd assertionduly reported by the media, that the AEC banning crosses on ballot papers would “stack the dice” against No.
“We respond regardless of the person,” Ekin-Smyth said. “When the tics and crossovers happened…I was on television that evening for all the major television networks. It doesn’t serve our interests to argue with elected officials, but it does serve our interests to do know the facts.”
A garden hose against an inferno
The task is overwhelming. Before the referendum, the AEC was tagged in more than 100,000 posts per week on social media.
He rejected claims the AEC would coerce people with dementia into voting yes. When one guy claimed that “the problem is solved” because his elderly mother (not registered) received a notice that she had voted successfully, the AEC asked to see him: “We don’t “We obviously don’t send every voter a letter just to confirm that they voted.”
Elsewhere, one could only imagine the sigh emitted by the poor soul of the Ekin-Smyth team tasked with responding to a complaint. The ballot papers were secretly imprinted “Rothchild & Freemasons”. “This is what we call the official brand,” they write dryly. “It’s a requirement of the legislation.”
It is in the AEC’s interest to “lay out the facts”, says Evan Ekin-Smyth.(AAP: With Chronis)
This new approach has garnered widespread praise. In reality, however, the commission is like a man standing with a garden hose and waving it at an inferno.
“It’s getting worse,” Ekin-Smyth said. “(But) if we funded 50 people to be on social media all the time, people would accuse us of misusing taxpayer dollars.”
Moreover, the AEC can only retaliate on issues of electoral integrity.
Last week he was tagged in a photo of an absurd No campaign leaflet that suggested Voice would lead to financial restitution: “Genuine question @AusElectoralCom, are campaigns just allowed to lie on their materials? Repairs?? Seriously!?”
But Ekin-Smyth’s team couldn’t really answer: “Our work is the process, not the subject.”
So, whose job is it?
The Brexit misinformation mud
For three years, from the ABC’s London office, I tabled report after report on Brexit, on the negotiations with Brussels and on the tedious votes in the Commons. Finally, I reported to Australia the debacle that was Boris Johnson’s final Brexit deal.
We now know two important things about Brexit.
First, leaving the European Union costs the UK up to 6 percent of its overall economic value.
Secondly, we know that the 2016 Brexit referendum was polluted with a muck of disinformation, much of which pushed the UK to secede from the continent.
We will never know how many people were influenced by these lies. But given the razor-thin pro-Brexit majority – a margin of 1,269,501 in a country of 65 million – it seems quite likely that they made a material difference.
British Prime Minister Boris Johnson then holds a press conference on the results of the Brexit negotiations, in London, in December 2020.(Reuters: Paul Grover)
Moscow was partly responsible. For years, Russian deception campaigns have injected a plume of lies into British public debate. Spread by cable television channel RT and a horde of Internet bots, the misinformation amplified an already growing sense of chaos.
In the national debate that followed, Britain’s domestic security agency MI5 argued that it had failed to identify evidence of “successful interference” in the referendum. But a parliamentary inquiry later revealed it was because the agency had never started looking for him.
To suggest that there was no interference is “inconceivable”, according to the investigation report. After all, the Kremlin had felt comfortable sending squadrons armed with nuclear and chemical weapons onto British streets. Troll farms and Internet bots spewing anti-European remarks mistakes were a small beer.
Parliament asked a vital question: which security agency is responsible for protecting the democratic institutions on which the Westminster system is based? After a long investigation, the answer was: “No one”.
“There is no outrage over interference,” said a member of the intelligence committee who wrote its report. “The outrage is that no one wanted to know.”
The Albanian government is now trying to address part of the disinformation challenge. But his proposal to grant new powers to the communications watchdog is under review with great distrust for its potential to restrict legitimate political expression.
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How was the Voice referendum protected?
In 2018, the Electoral Integrity Assurance Task Force was established to “provide information and advice to the Electoral Commissioner on matters that may compromise the actual or perceived integrity of federal elections, including referendums “.
Its constituents include the Australian Federal Police, the anti-money laundering agency AUSTRAC, the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation, the Australian Signals Directorate and the Office of National Intelligence.
And what did the task force do to protect the Voice referendum? I asked each of these agencies what specific advice and assistance they had provided to the AEC in preparing for the referendum, and what resources each had allocated to this task.
None of them would say it.
Another participant is the Ministry of Communications which, to its credit, answered some questions. He provided assistance to the task force regarding “digital platforms including disinformation, unsolicited communications (and) political advertising.”
The ministry also admitted that it had been forced to carry out this additional work “within existing resources”.
It’s almost certain that would have been the case for the rest of them, too: well-meaning managers juggling competing priorities and drawn into task force meetings they really don’t have time for.
To the public’s knowledge, the only known case where the task force actually had an impact involved a Blacktown man who sent millions of racist and homophobic spam emails years ago in an attempt to influence the federal election. A court ruled that he was mentally ill.
Sleepwalking into the future
In the meantime, a major report on cybersecurity by global intelligence research organization Recorded Future has revealed the concerted efforts of far-right groups and an army of inauthentic bots to spread false information denigrating Voice to Parliament.
In August, Meta closed 9,000 Facebook and Instagram accounts run by a group linked to Chinese authorities called Spamouflage, which was producing spam aimed at Beijing. The band also played with people’s perception of the Voice.
“We’ve definitely seen some actors trying to interfere in the Voice,” disinformation researcher Albert Zhang told me. “Some actors were amplifying both pro- and anti-Voice sentiments…attempting to sow discord and undermine public confidence in the Australian government itself.”
People queue to vote during the Voice to Parliament referendum in Melbourne.(ABC News: Danielle Bonica)
It is in response to this vulnerability that the AEC has been pressuring its Integrity Working Group partners to do more. While he can continue to put out occasional fires regarding the electoral process, someone has to work to “inoculate the population against misinformation,” Ekin-Smyth said.
“We need a whole-of-government awareness campaign against misinformation – we’ve been saying that for a while. It doesn’t seem to be on the agenda.”
I asked the seven partner agencies about their position on this subject. None of them responded.
It seems little has changed in the past two years, when our security officials displayed open confusion as to who was really responsible for the problem.
For now, it’s Indigenous Australia that is reeling from the weekend’s vote and the lies behind it.
But we all risk paying dearly if we walk as we are, sleepwalking into a future in which nothing at all can be trusted.
Do you know more?
Contact Linton Besser using besser.linton@abc.net.au
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