CLANCY OVERELL | Editor | CONTACT
5 days until the nation goes to the ballot box, and families around the country are discussing this Indigenous Voice thing.
The plan to include Indigenous people in the Constitution, and constitutionally enshrine an Indigenous Advisory Body that cannot be slashed to make room for ballet subsidies under a Liberal Government, has been floating in the background of the Australian news cycle throughout the entire footy season.
Unfortunately for Indigenous people, the limping final stages of Australia’s traditional media has turned this simple proposal into one of the lowest political debates since Federation.
This has driven a vast number of Australians online to unregulated social media channels, leaving older demographics susceptible to misinformation due to their dial-up levels of tech literacy.
Aunty Jill is one of these Australians – an over 60s voter who finds herself stuck in an outer-suburban media desert, where the scariest news becomes the most believable.
Sitting around the kitchen table at a family lunch on Sunday, it became clear that the misinformation and fake news being spoonfeed to the Aunty Jills of the world – is as bad as her nieces and nephews thought.
Like many Australians who stopped watching the nightly news of free-to-air channels after three years of pandemic hysteria, Aunty Jill is now getting her current affairs updates form YouTube videos that falsely warning the public that an Indigenous Voice will mean that Aboriginal people will all the land off farmers and turn us into a communist nation.
She’s also been mainlining the Liberal Party’s media arm known as Rupert Murdoch’s Sky News. This means hours spent listening to failed advertising executives and failed political hacks spewing misinformation about Indigenous children occupying their grandchildren’s spots in school.
While the Liberal Opposition rely on this kind of bullshit to land a punch on their political rivals in the midst of a cost-of-living crisis that was caused directly by Scott Morrison and Josh Frydenberg, moderating misinformation actually works against the conservative political class.
Although even using the word misinformation is as taboo as calling racist people racist at this stage of the pearl-clutching No Campaign. That’s one thing Jill knows for sure.
“You’re just calling it misinformation because you don’t agree with [the notion that this Indigenious Advisory Body is working in partnership with communists from the World Health Organisation who want to eventually microchip us and make every kid gay by using Aboriginal elites as a woke distraction]” she says.
