It takes humility to grapple with the details
Advocating for change
It’s clearly more of a continuum than a binary, but one difference between people is their attitude to details. And I wonder whether there is a systematic connection with political attitudes.
Insiders is an Australian Sunday morning politics show. Last Sunday, one of the guests was Narelda Jacobs. Talk turned to a possible referendum to change Australia’s constitution and enshrine a First Nations ‘voice to parliament’. Jacobs was bullish. 90% of the public are in favour so the new government should go ahead with a vote.
The fact is that we don’t yet know how a voice to parliament will work or what it will look like. When other guests pointed out this issue, Jacobs batted it away. People will vote for the principle and even once constituted, it will have to evolve over time. And any referendum bill will have to set out the details. Patricia Karvelas, the host, asked whether it would set things back if a vote was held and lost. There is no chance of that, replied Jacobs.
To a student of Australian politics, this is a surprisingly confident stance. Since 1901, only eight out of 44 such proposals have succeeded.
One reason campaigners want to see a voice to parliament enshrined in the constitution is so that such a body cannot be abolished by an unfriendly government at some future date. This is a reference to the centre-right Howard government’s 2005 abolition of the Aboriginal and Torres Straight Islander Commission (ATSIC), an earlier experiment in First Nations political representation.
However, this was not a simple case of right-wingers being backward and a bit racist. The Howard government announced its intentions to abolish ATSIC several weeks after the opposition Labor party said it would do so if it won the next election. This came on the back of allegations of corruption and other misconduct against ATSIC and its members.
Such details are unlikely to be front of mind for the majority of people who currently back the voice to parliament in polls. Even in its worst days, criticism of ATSIC was muted and limited to the right-wing fringe. Yet if we can guarantee one thing, it is that as soon as a referendum is announced, we’ll all be hearing a lot more about ATSIC.
Because opponents of a referendum question have a much easier task than its supporters. All they need to do is sow doubt. And you sow doubt with details.
In 1999, despite a popular majority in favour of Australia breaking ties with the British monarchy and becoming a republic, a referendum to this end failed.
We cannot say for certain why people voted against the proposal, but many advocates of a republic disliked the model on offer, where a president would be selected by parliament, rather than directly, and could be dismissed by the prime minister. These details even split the republican camp*.
Progressive reformers tend to like platonic ideals. They favour big principles — ‘all children have a human right to inclusion’ — and when under attack, they reply with abstract, obfuscatory arguments — ‘critical race theory is not taught in schools’.
A good example in education is those who campaign against school exclusions on the basis that they are supposedly discriminatory and cause harm.
I have often asked opponents of exclusion whether a child should have to go back into a class with someone who sexually assaulted them. Rather than engaging with this question — engaging with the details — and delineating the boundaries of their argument, they will accuse me of using extreme examples and the question goes unanswered. This may seem reasonable in activist circles, but every unaligned person watching the debate — such as a teacher or parent — becomes a little more sceptical of the anti-exclusions position.
I am sure there is a good, pragmatic case to be made for reducing exclusions or considering more alternatives to exclusions, but that is not happening.
Progressive causes and the call to change are not all alike. There is nothing intrinsically good or bad about change. Sometimes I find myself on the side of change and sometimes against. However, there do seem to be some constant features. Opposing change is relatively easy. Just focus on the details. Promoting change is hard and those who do so tend to have an idealistic disposition that causes them to talk in abstract principles and makes them vulnerable to attack. Dare I say it, they have a tendency to hubris. Even then, it can work — “Yes, we can!” — but without details, it will eventually crash against hard reality.
It takes humility to grapple with the details.
*In a foretaste of the Brexit and Trump votes, the republic campaign also became tainted by an association with supposed urban elites who looked down on rural and less affluent monarchists