CLANCY OVERELL | Editor | CONTACT
The campaign to convince Australians to reject the government’s proposed Indigenous Voice to Parliament is officially underway, according to social media comments.
While the figure heads of the heavily funded right-wing No Campaign has received non-stop media attention, with Warren Mundine and Jacinta Price on both ABC News and Sky News almost every night, it seems the most effective messaging is coming from racist motorbikes openly vilifying public figures and private citizens with dehumanising slurs in social media comments.
These comments are mostly appearing on the posts of major news mastheads, and are yet to be condemned or moderated by publishers in any way.
It seems Australia’s conservative media landscape looks to prove that this referendum is ‘dividing’ our nation, by providing bigots with divisive soundbites to parrot on their own online platforms, as well as cruel and targeted smear campaigns against any Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders who are brave enough to argue that perhaps constitutionally recognising First Nations people is a nice thing to do after 200 years of dispossession and extremely unhelpful policies.
With the YES campaign struggling to get any traction behind the media’s fascination with Mundine and Price, the only two Aboriginal people in Australia, the online landscape is also crowded with suspiciously organised abuse.
While the pictures of motorbikes and utes are likely just rednecks who have gotten excited by NewsCorp’s decision to declare open-season on uppity black fellows, it seems the social media accounts with default pictures and zero followers might actually have only been created to join the campaign of racial vilification.
As the media continues their depraved obsession with riling up voters in the midst of a cost-of-living crisis by pushing racist hot buttons and portraying any Aboriginal person with media training as ‘elite’ – it also seems that the No Campaign is winning the culture war on online and in the streets.
It is not yet known what other tricks the pro-Voice advocates have left up their sleeves, however, without the hundreds of millions of pink dollar donations and the well-oiled marriage equality media machine behind them – there is far less love in the air when campaigning against racist vitriol of anonymous social media accounts and shiraz-toothed old Murdoch goons.
