Least Said Soonest Forgotten
In Louis CK's show "Louis" David Lynch guest starred as Jack Doll, late night producer who gave his three rules of showbusiness, the show emphasised the rule "if someone asks you to keep a secret, that secret is a lie." but the one relevant to Australian reconciliation is: "You have to go away to come back."
With the failure of the 2023 "Voice" referendum, talk of reconciliation has for the most part gone away. To an extent, I have no idea what has happened to reconciliation. I could not name an organization or an MP actively working on it, or known for discussing it.
I compare this to media coverage of a struggling pro-sports team. Rightly or wrongly, teams that produce the worst records or perform below expectations tend to fire a head coach or general manager or something and attempt to rebuild.
I'm sure this is happening somewhere, albeit I'm not sure if anyone responsible for the failure of the 2023 referendum was fired. Hence I feel it's about time to revisit it.
The Crux of My Cold Take
Having now sporadically meditated on it for a year, my impression has endured that the Voice referendum was for much of the Yes campaigners, not a good faith referendum. This is because so much of what I have poured over and come across gives me the primary impression that the people that brought about the referendum seem to have no idea what a referendum is.
Like, finding out that to drive a vehicle on the roads, you need a license. And nobody really caring that to get a license you generally need to sit a test and pass it. It was like this, a change to the constitution was asked for, and nobody seemed to act as though they understood they needed a double majority of Australian voters to vote yes.
So when I say "not good faith" I mean, I suspect many people feel that I was not supposed to think of my vote as something I should think about and make my mind up over. I was supposed to just go vote "Yes" because the referendum needed to pass for the desired body to be enshrined.
To this day it makes me angry to think of how unseriously this referendum was taken by the people who asked for it. This manifested in the great gulf between the wording of the proposed change to the Australian constitution, and what everyone was talking about.
It resulted in out-of-touch people's dreams and assumptions being pitted against both bigotry, apathy and confusion.
What Remains Perplexing to Me, As a No "Voter"
When researching reasons to vote yes, I came across an assertion that literally broke my brain.
I had started to ask myself questions, after reading the Uluru statement of the Heart, and knowing enough about the polling to anticipate the failing of the referendum as rendering my own vote pretty meaningless, why on Earth the process was starting with a referendum, and I don't mean the decades of preparation that went into creating the Uluru statement of the Heart, I mean taking the outcomes of that statement and beginning with the referendum.
I wanted to extend the benefit of the doubt, that this was just a blunder, an oversight due to overexuberance or impatience or something. That the public had not been polled sufficiently or something.
But no, allegedly there was a conscious and deliberate decision to sequence the desired outcomes of the Uluru Statement of the Heart as: First Voice, 2nd Treaty, 3rd Truth.
The idea being that the Treaty would need a body to be negotiated with. And that the truth could only be told when protected by a treaty.
I still illustrate how bonkers this sequencing seemed to me, by making analogy to a trial. The first thing you do is pay your fines and serve your sentence. Then once that is done, the jury can deliver their verdict and only with the protection of a verdict will the jury hold a case to determine the guilt of the defendant.
Intuitively The ATSI Voice strikes me as something that might be an outcome of a treaty. I remain open to the suggestion that Treaty is actually the step we are up to in the reconciliation process, but I am not fit to assess whether the various royal commissions that have been held on the impact of colonization are sufficient to saying we have a consensus on "Truth" at least as far as the nation is concerned, I doubt the people of this or any nation have any grasp on reality these days. There are flat earthers now, not always, just now.
It also goes without saying, that I still find it perplexing that I was basically unable to find substantial public discussion of the wording of the content of the proposed changes to the constitution. When you look at the history of Australia's referendums, they are generally very clear - things about federal elections being held in all the states and territories on the same day, syncing time zones, who gets to vote. Both the Republic referendum and the Voice had similar design flaws, in that it was quite literally impossible to understand what you were voting for.
Now with the Republic vote one could at least say "we take the parliament we have now, and the Governer General becomes law-signing dude and the queen disappears off our money" which we couldn't even do with the Voice, because we were asked to enshrine a body we had no prototype of, and nobody was saying it would basically be the disbanded ATSIC.
Notable Failure
It was around this time a year ago (plus like 4 months, these drafts can sit around) I became aware that I would actually have to vote in the 2023 "Voice" referendum and subsequently started paying attention to it.
The referendum failed to pass a double majority, with it only winning a majority "yes" vote in the Australian Capital Territory, this is not so much to the ACTs credit in my opinion (and the territories don't count toward the double majority) so it is as noteworthy as pointing out Sydney and Melbourne's affluent eastern electorates also voted yes.
I voted no, and made no bones about my intention to and did so publicly and took in all the arguments I could find to vote yes. I have since felt no negative disconfirmation about my vote.
One of the more extreme reactions to the failure of the referendum was to declare reconciliation dead in Australia. At which point, it is better if I don't give my hot-take opinion on why the referendum failed but defer to a researched analysis of why it failed. the data suggests that it was not an unprecedented failed referendum but quite a conventional one.
So I'm happy to accept the narrative that had the coalition (Australia's right-of-centre political parties) not withdrawn their support, the referendum may have passed. Hence an argument can be made that it is the Dutton-lead-coalition's fault. This sentiment was somewhat expressed in the unsigned open letter after the week of mourning.
However, I'm left with a "after that, therefore because of that" style post-hoc-if-not-fallacy-definitely-not-useful diagnosis. It feels just one incidental step removed from an analysis that says the referendum failed because not enough people voted for it.
The strongest argument I could make for the coalition tanking the referendum and the collapse of bipartisan support was that the coalition falsified its support until a referendum was actually on the table. Like a parent boasting that they wouldn't care if their child was gay, right up until their child tells them they are gay.
So I will opine on the content of the referendum. I think it lost bipartisan support because it was a dud product, it's slightly trickier than that, because honestly it was hard for me to see what the coalition would dislike about the proposed changes to the constitution. Given it definitely gave any government the power to nerf or buff whatever "The Voice" was so long as they could pass legislation through both houses. It may be that it was the proposed first application of the constitutional changes was the dud product from coalition perspective.
As such it is understandable that "The Voice" as proposed would be abandoned due to the referendum, which is to say, that path to reconciliation shot itself in the foot, where a governing party with sufficient mandate to call a referendum certainly had the mandate to establish "The Voice" prior to a referendum - enabling an alternate history where the referendum was simply the matter of enshrining an existing body people could point to.
I feel I can characterize it as somewhat objective, that overall despite the long process leading to the referendum it wound up being a fairly mindless affair. Discourse around the subject lacked both attention and substance, my most striking memory of the time being the inability for anyone to discuss the words contained in the proposed change to the constitution.
The referendum was predicted to fail by all recent polling prior to the day, it was projected to have failed within a depressingly short amount of time. The referendum failing before polling had even closed in WA. The Yes23 campaign group called for a week of silence to morn the failed referendum and then an unsigned open letter to the prime minister was published.
Since then, basically radio silence. It is however worth noting that the referendum struggled to make headlines nor garner media attention in the lead up to the referendum vote. The content was there in mastheads like The Age/SMH which I was monitoring at the time, but it was rare for any article or editorial related to the voice to break into the top ten articles on the website landing page. A brief squidgeridoo at Google Trends confirms that a topic like the Voice referendum failed to garner more attention than Taylor Swift in Australia, despite Taylor Swifts concerts being further away than the referendum and it being relevant to less demographics.
Perhaps it is Australia's referendum process that is the dud product, I for one resented having to be asked to vote on the matter because I actually need an expert in constitutional law to tell me what I'm voting for and the legal experts were divided. I think I would prefer an amendment process more akin to the United States whose system is in most other respects much riskier than Aus' in a bad way. Australian referendums are too low risk with almost no chance of significant reforms at all.
Australia has a lot of Garbage People
More persuasive to vote yes than anything I heard from the Yes campaign, were pamphlets of truly terrible "No" arguments from people that outwardly presented so terribly as to make one believe in phrenology. I'm talking Roald Dahl's The Twits coming to life and handing out "No" pamphlets that from what I glanced, lead with outright flagrant misinformation.
Some large non-negligible chunk of the population voted no for terrible and largely baseless reasons. Probably the majority that voted no, whatever rationalizing they did, voted no because "everyone" was projected to vote no. Monkey-see-monkey-do shit.
And yes, racists. Not only racists but nationalists and in particular nativists for which Australians are no exception to the cognitive dissonance caused by the presence of indigenous people with better claims to being "true" natives.
It's also hard to estimate the effective population of these garbage people, because many people are agreeable enough to know their true feelings on an issue are "socially undesirable" and thus outwardly falsify their preferences in something known as a "shy tory" effect. Albeit, the referendum still failed 60-40, in line with the polls that predicted it would fail.
The observable phenomena that racists simply exist, to the extent that people will baselessly conflate something like establishing a body called "The Voice" with confiscation of real property as per the worst "No" arguments I came across is a phenomena that needs to be factored into pursuing reconciliation via a referendum.
That said, I find such stupidity comparable to the people who argue democratically elected representatives enacting emergency powers in actual emergencies (like the pandemic) and thinking it is the beginning of a fascist or communist regime simply exist, and have to be stoically accepted as a completely predictable part of the democratic process.
To this point, were Australia ever to get a chance to constitutionally recognize Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders without it being bundled with a preamble or some extra-parliamentary body, I think it could pass. I would hope it would pass, that simply acknowledging a fact of history is not something people can go into a moral panic about.
However it is both naïve and irrational to ask that racists simply not be racist and it is beyond irrational and in the domain of insane to ask racists to not vote in a compulsory vote where they are obliged to vote. If these are the attitudes you have adopted in the last decade, you should not be involved in the reconciliation process, due to a fundamental non-apprehension of the word "reconciliation" the word you are actually looking for is "bulldozing".
Bipolarization
I honestly don't know if Peter Dutton cynically withdrew bipartisan support by the coalition that forms the other major political party in Australia purely to score a political blow against Labour the presiding major political party in Australia.
Can we achieve reconciliation while dispensing with the need for a referendum? I say yes.
A referendum likely best serves to recognize that reconciliation has taken place, rather than a means by which to reconcile. I HAVE TO acknowledge however, that behaviour seems to drive attitudes, rather than attitudes driving behaviour. A referendum that forced people to behave as though reconciled, may result in peoples minds being reconciled - this though was not that referendum.
Yes, I bring a marketing bias that sees the failure of the 2023 referendum as a mere failed product launch, rather than the death of reconciliation.
I have an unshakeable suspicion that the reconciliation product was designed predominantly through a focus group process that consulted almost exclusively the ATSI community of Australia, then reflective of the electorate at large - the PM took a position that said "we'll take your output and run with it" rather than okay here's a product designed by 2~3% of the population (without considering other self-selection biases) it needs broader consultation with the other 97~98% of the population.
We can see somewhere between 30~40% of the population, based on the referendum, were okay with "whatever" the Uluru Statement of the Heart got converted to for the referendum question and proposed change to the law.
On the front of what did happen, the blame for the referendum's failure may lay largely with a conservative and racist electorate, but the crucial strategic failing I feel were those managing first and foremost the design of the subject matter, who likely in my opinion siloed themselves and injecting their own sensibilities into a process that needed broad appeal.
Basically the story of the 2023 Australian Voice referendum is the story of Amazon's "Rings of Power." It's a product made by a cultural silo, that owing to its massive purchase price and production budget just could not target a niche subculture of fan-fic readers or something.
Products and services that are poor out of deference to sensibilities do exist - Australia's unemployment benefits, administered by "Centrelink" are well known as a sodomising experience to deal with, when Covid changed circumstances such that sensibilities changed - that people might be unemployed not because of some moral failing but mere circumstance - virtually overnight the Australian government turned off the pain of dealing with Centrelink.
On this front, where the left have ruined their own causes via there own alienating sensibilities, I'm not confident the left wing of politics has taken responsibility yet, though the failures of this approach are now fairly well documented - in media that is expensive and unpopular like Disney's treatment of IP, to the UKs independent reviews rejecting or finding ungrounded various activist initiatives, to and probably likely to be most closely related to an Australian reconciliation process - the noteworthy failures and scandals of the leading Anti-racism authors.
Ibram X Kendi's Boston University Antiracist Research Center has proved notably unproductive with it's $55 million USD funding, Whiteness studies doctorate Robin DiAngelo, author of "White Fragility" has quite recently faced renewed scrutiny for plagiarising portions of her doctoral thesis. Ta Nahesi Coates is likely the only one of the Anti-racist thinkers that I'm not aware of any scandal, however he was perplexingly the first to pretty much disappear from the public eye as Anti-racism blew up. It should also be kept in mind, that Anti-racist thought has always been controversial even before it was cool. Right wing nutjobs rail against it, but the left only really respond to the right wing nutjobs, not the criticisms that predate trying to roll out Anti-racism
Advertising
While in Mexico one of my most dependable correspondents was my embattled anti-vax friend, we disagree on a lot, if not most things hence the value of that friendship to me and when we caught up in person shortly after the referendum we concurred that figuratively speaking the "No" campaign just didn't exist.
We both would have been using an availability heuristic - basing our impression on what we could see, I asked him about it because I live in one of the concentrated "Yes" vote areas, so maybe that's why I saw pretty much no "No" campaign presence. But my friend is on the rural outskirts and goes to church and reported much the same.
The money story bares this out though it is not literally the case that the "No" campaign didn't exist, but it was a 5th of the size of the Yes campaign.
Now this subheading is "advertising" and I should clarify what I mean - I am referring to the term as used in "Manufacturing Consent" by Herman and Chomsky, which makes the following argument I can not improve upon by rewording myself:
The product is composed of the affluent readers who buy the newspaper—who also comprise the educated decision-making sector of the population—while the actual clientele served by the newspaper includes the businesses that pay to advertise their goods. According to this filter, the news is "filler" to get privileged readers to see the advertisements which makes up the content and will thus take whatever form is most conducive to attracting educated decision-makers.
I can simplify it though, if that's a bit wordy or too lacking in context - businesses want rich customers because they buy more of their products and services, the media is a business and pay disproportionate attention to the affluent.
Bringing me to the referendum map-
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| This map sourced from "The Daily Mail" and appears factually accurate to my recollection of the night. The link above goes to the ABC's electorate map that is harder to translate Geographically. |
So, basically if Nike wanted to sell a $400 running shoe to compete with newcomers Hoka and Cloud, that was designed to integrate with the apple watch and smart drink bottles that send push notifications when you need to drink more water - they would probably target their campaign for this luxury good to spend the entire budget targeting much the same geographic regions as show up Blue on the above maps. Which is to say predominantly affluent eastern suburbs of Melbourne and Sydney.
Herman and Chomsky's argument is kind of saying that the entire news media is just advertising appealing to these same geographic zones. After the 2023 referendum, we can see how powerful this is because it is likely also true of the Australia's publicly funded national broadcaster The ABC. Right, like their studious are also in Sydney and Melbourne, they may run news programs like "Landline" that wouldn't be viable on commercial stations, but ABC news presenters have for as long as I can remember been more middle-class targeted than Channel 7 or Channel 9 who dominated TV ratings pre-internet.
When we look at something like Brexit, we think of Nigel Farrage and Borris Johnson appealing to working class Brits in economically devastated or neglected parts of the country with misinformation.
The crucial takeaway I feel, inherent in the Referendum maps is just a clear cut example that actually MOST propaganda is targeted at the affluent. Yes grifters flatter uneducated people to run their scams, but flattery is a fact of people-of-means' lives. They are constantly being lied to by job applicants, service providers, friends and family who seek to acquire their resources.
And this probably works great outside of a referendum when a rich person's vote doesn't count just as much as a poor person's and you need a double majority of the population as a whole and a majority of states voting Yes to the change.
Even if we are to take the position that readers of broadsheet newspapers and watchers of The ABC and SBS are better informed and less misinformed than readers of tabloids and watchers of SkyNews, the business model is not up to snuff for getting a referendum carried.
Likely a big part of the problem was revealed and diagnosed in the UK white-paper by Alan Milburn "Unleashing Aspiration" that is written up in the Guardian here crucially in 2009 Milburn found "journalism becoming "one of the most exclusive middle-class professions of the 21st century".
I learned of the Milburn paper, not in 2009 but more recently listening to "100 Years of Dirt" Australian journalist Rick Morton's autobiography. Published in 2018, I am going to assume that legacy media with shrinking staff numbers hasn't gotten less picky about the qualifications and pedigree of the people it employs.
The media speaks to its audience, as a general rule and yes university graduates from middle class backgrounds can then competently work in media targeted at blue collar markets, but just looking at the election map I suspect we have a map of who reads broadsheets and watches the ABC and SBS - a double minority.
Targeting the affluent is all well and good outside of the election cycle, and no, I can't explain why the ABC as a public broadcaster has always targeted its programming to the affluent middle class. But this was the thing, the Yes campaign had to make its case to a majority of Australians, and all of its marketing material was targeted toward the middle class.
Unfortunately post referendum Yes23.com.au's site has taken away pretty much all of it's marketing material. Probably because it is no longer funded to host all that content. I can only go by my recollection - and that was that the material was appealing broadly to the young and relevant and the old and affluent, and pretty much nobody else.
Characterized by Mill
So John Stuart Mill famously wrote in "On Liberty" that "He who only knows his own side of the argument knows little of that." which is a testable hypothesis and it was once again validated in the case of the 2023 Referendum.
This referendum was about listening respectfully. Australia's terrible situation is that we are facing a doom spiral. Long before social media and the internet exacerbated siloing, Australia's frankly embarrassing history of dispossessing and disenfranchising Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders appears to have created a deep fracture where the two major players are mostly out of touch with each other.
I was grateful to get any responses, I was searching for reasons to vote "yes" and needed reassurance, and I kid you not, the first response I got kicked off with the deliciously ironic words "Just vote yes..." then there was a presentation of arguments that may be sufficient to convince a certain demographic but rendered quite the opposite effect on me.
I don't wish to revisit the content of arguments because I wrote about them in a hopefully timely manner where they would have been of impact. Suffice to say, I am old enough to know that you are going to hear first from the most impassioned or enthusiastic advocates, not necessarily the best ones, so I held out for more thoughtful arguments, which I got.
One of my most thoughtful friends eventually probably summarized the best argument for the Yes vote as "vote for the vibe of it" and I don't say so to be dismissive because it was contextualized as this is how change begins and the important thing good or bad is to begin it. If you would, I interpreted it as a rewording of Theodore Roosevelts "The best thing to do in any situation is the right thing, the next best thing is to do the wrong thing and the worst thing to do is nothing at all."
However, I ultimately landed on, what the Australian public were evidently given was a dud product that it rejected, again the data suggests that it was not an unprecedented failed referendum but quite a conventional one.
The lasting impression I have of the Yes campaign, is that they saw the failure of the referendum as an intrinsic failure of the Australian people, not the chosen method for achieving reconciliation.
The data suggests that when the coalition withdrew support for the referendum, public support collapsed. Again, all I have is my impression and this has the big drawback of I only started paying attention long after bipartisan support had collapsed, but my recollection of Yes campaigner reactions to this piece of analysis was a kind of "stab in the back" by the coalition. This is item 6 in the open letter and again, I feel the observed polling phenomena validates Mill's hypothesis.
None of which is to suggest that people voted no, largely for good reason. Quite the contrary, the data does indeed suggest that people largely vote along partisan lines, having no real opinion on whether pineapple should be on pizza and instead using their proxy opinion of political parties. Suggesting a large population of voters who can resemble bipartisan support for pineapple on pizza until the party they associate with changes its mind and they dutifully follow.
The trouble for the Yescampaign is that this applies equally to the partisan support for the campaign. There were analogues of mindless and misinformed no voters, voting yes and I knew them and heard from them. People had truly terrible reasons for voting yes and I should qualify this with my personal standards - for example not smoking because you believe tobacco to be a sacred ceremonial crop for Indians is a terrible reason to quit smoking. A good reason to quit smoking is because it is the single healthiest decision a person can statistically make.
I don't wish to commit the fallacy fallacy here, so smoking is a good example. Quitting smoking because of superstition is a terrible reason that nevertheless will provide you with all the benefits of quitting smoking for the good and overdetermined health reasons.
Which is to say, that drawing the conclusion that Australia does not seek reconciliation with the Indigenous based on the failure of the 2023 referendum is akin to concluding that Australia loves communism based on the failure of the 1951 referendum, and that Australia loves the British Royal Family based on the failure of the 1999 referendum. (Incidentally the first time any constitutional recognition of Aboriginal and Torres Straight Islanders failed, but I guess with the failure of the republic it was harder to conflate than the Voice referendum.)
The worst thing to do from the perspective of reconciliation would have been nothing at all, what was done was the next best thing which was the pursuit of a dud-reconciliation process. The reason Teddy asserted that it was better to do the wrong thing than nothing was, I assert, that the wrong thing fails and you can learn from it, whereas nothing tells you nothing and you can't learn.
So I would say the referendum isn't the time for the public at large to adopt Theodore Roosevelt's approach to running a country.
I experienced so little negative post-vote disconfirmation because the Yes23 campaign was run incompetently, insofar as they campaigned for a referendum system that requires a double majority by campaigning to a silo - based on the districts that carried a yes majority - the affluent suburbs of Australia's major metropolitan centres.
As such the post-referendum disconfirmation that I observed really go off the rails was the Yes campaign, who drew far-reaching, if not hysterical conclusions some of which are expressed in the open unsigned letter.
Missing Data
Akin to the shy-tory effect, where I as a coroner, would direct attention to for people who like myself want to see reconciliation ASAP would be opinion polling on Welcome to Country and Acknowledgement of Country.
Firstly I would say the clear good intentions of these rituals is obvious to me, but particularly the Acknowledgement of Country which takes place when no indigenous people are present, has begun to render the opposite of the intended effect on me at least. Much like Climate Summits, I have begun to just expect them to be the talk of people with no real intention to ever act. Much like listening to a politician promise to solve the housing affordability crisis while it has just grown worse in Australia for pretty much my entire life.
I gave a quick google to see if anyone like gallup had polled Australians on their opinion of welcome to country and acknowledgement of country. All I could find was a paper by the Australia Institute about SA parliamentary session openings. Shockingly, SA parliament (state) opens each session, or had been, with a Christian Prayer. I sometimes forget that as part of the Commonwealth Australia is probably officially linked to the Church of England in some way, but despite all the mentions in our constitution of the King (Now King Chuckles the III) Australia is for the most part a very secular place to live.
Acknowledgement of Country has an analogue though with same-sex marriage, or marriage equality. Until the Federal government changed the law in like 2014 or whenever, there was a period of around 8 years where if you went to a wedding and it wasn't a religious one by a religion that hates the gays like Catholicism or whatever, you had to hear the celebrant read out the legal definition of marriage as between a man and a woman to the exclusion of all others.
In my experience, nobody liked this. Everybody hated it, but if you wanted a legally recognized marriage and you didn't want some fucking 80 year old virgin conducting the ceremony, you had to swallow this pill. Really this stipulation may have been the single greatest campaign for the marriage equality act passing in Australia.
When the law changed, I'm pretty sure this legal requirement stopped.
So what would be interesting to research would be the expectations of people voting in the referendum as to what would happen to these Welcome to Country/Acknowledgement of Country rituals.
For example, would you get people voting "no" who dislike the ritual and expected that if the referendum passed it would get "worse" (as in showing up in more places, more often) or would you get people voting "yes", anticipating relief from the ritual (as in, the ritual would disappear, being reconciled). And so on.
I think the most reasonable projection based on the deliberate sequencing of 1st Voice 2nd Treaty 3rd Truth, that the intent was more, not less of these rituals.
Nevertheless, I'm open to the data being anything. I'm open to the possibility, certainly, that I'm in a minority of sticklers who cannot see past the content of Acknowledgement of Country to just appreciate its symbolic value and intention of respect.
I once was walking through the nightclubby part of the CBD with a friend of mine, and expressed my inability to understand why anyone goes to venues with a velvet rope where a bouncer or "door bitch" assesses your worthiness to enter. My friend pointed out that for some people being deemed up to snuff was the entire point - some people like a dress code and an enforcer giving them a pat on the head in the form of uncoupling a rope.
I'm sure some significant proportion of Australians like Acknowledgement of Country for it's repetitious nature, that it is a known quantity and someone who has never really thought about reconciliation can know how to be on the right side of it.
The line of inquiry could run against my suspicions, but that doesn't mean the inquiry isn't worth making. If you did find that with proper anonymity a vast majority of Australians have simply grown tired, weary and wary of acknowledgement of country and are using this experience to extrapolate out the desirability of a body like the proposed "Voice to Parliament" this is really good for anyone pursuing reconciliation, particularly via referendums, to know.
If public perception is such that the plebs feel like they can't open the fridge without hearing about First Nations people, and then you run a campaign saying that First Nations people need a voice, the reconciliation may be a victim of its own success.
In Conclusion
1.) Referendums are not the way to pursue reconciliation.
2.) If you are advocating for listening, you need to listen.
3.) Tertiary educated, middle-class affluent people need to PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE realize that you are targeted by at least as much propaganda as everyone else. People are telling you things you want to hear to get at your money.
4.) Reconciliation cannot be unilateral or partisan. We have to reconcile. For which, a mindset that sees as imperative the destruction of racists, is probably going to suck at reconciliation. Destruction is a genocide mindset. As per Abe Lincoln "I destroy my enemies when I make them my friends."
