With a two-letter word, Australians have struck down the first attempt at constitutional change in 24 years, major media outlets reported, a move experts say will inflict lasting damage on First Nations people and suspend any hopes of modernizing the nation’s founding document.
Early results from the Australian Electoral Commission (AEC) suggested that most of the country’s 17.6 million registered voters had written No on their ballots, and CNN affiliates 9 News, Sky News and SBS all projected no path forward for the Yes campaign.
The proposal, to recognize Indigenous people in the constitution and create an Indigenous body to advise government on policies that affect them, needed a majority nationally and in four of six states to pass.
Many is a bigger word than I would use. Some definitely did, but no group of people has a homogeneous opinion of what the right next actions on any big issue are, and it’s kind of weird anyone would expect otherwise. Overall I got the impression that ATSI Australians supported the change, but others may not have felt it looked that way based on what they saw.
20 years ago I believed that might be true. Since then i have learnt to never rely on it being about age. Imcreased age can correlate with increased power and the reluctance to change the system to increase competition, but age isn’t the cause of stagnant beliefs. In 50 years time there will still be a generation of old people afraid of social change and a bunch of younger people who are the same or just think change is not in their personal best interest, even though it’s an entirely different set of people.
We’re all going to have to do a lot more than just keep waiting for the elderly to shuffle off the mortal coil if we want something different for the future.
Studies of Millenials show that we are not growing more conservative as we age, and neither did boomers.
It’s more that, what is currently considered progressive becomes conservative and new progressive positions emerge.
Boomers didn’t suddenly become opposed to interracial marriages or premarital sex or divorce or against gay people or minorities as they aged. The generations before them had those issues and now that those generations are gone, those issues are no longer issues.
And now the issues are more things like trans rights, reparations, climate justice, etc.
Maybe not in AU, but they very much are in other places.
Cool, there will just be a huge group of people marginalising different groups of people unnecessarily. I look forward to it between the news stories of other people in the world killing each other over the same millenia-old territorial disputes.
Please forgive my complete lack of excitement for that prospect; I don’t have it in me tonight.