The Chaser Report - THOMAS MAYO: Everything You Need To Know About The Voice | THE SHOT PODCAST

Episode Date: August 20, 2023

This is an episode for The Shot Podcast which we think everyone should share with as many people as they can, including on our different podcast feeds!Very special guest Thomas Mayo joins Jo Dyer, Dave Milner, and Charles Firth on The Shot Podcast to talk about the Voice Referendum, what the Voice really is, and why it's so important to get everyone you know to #VoteYes! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The Chaser Report is recorded on Gatigal Land. Striving for mediocrity in a world of excellence, this is The Chaser Report. Hello and welcome to The Chaser Report with Charles and Dom. My name is producer Lachlan and we have something very special for you today, dear listener. It's not an episode of The Chaser Report. It's not an episode of Welcome to the Future. And no, it's not an episode of the Hamish and Andy podcast. It is an episode of The Shot Podcast

And it's a very important one that I think is well worth everyone listening to And actually sending to as many people as you can Including you, the Chaser Report listeners With the voice to Parliament referendum coming up And the Yes campaign hot on the campaign trail Joe Dyer, Dave Milner and Charles Firth of the Shot podcast Were able to sit down with the just out absolutely incredible Thomas Mayo to talk about the yes campaign, what the voice to parliament

is and why you should all be voting for it and what you can do to support it getting up because it's history in the making people. Just vote yes and tell everyone to do it. I won't pretend to know a quarter of a fraction of what anyone in this episode knows. So just listen and be in or and share this with as many people as you can. Hello, everyone, and welcome back to The Shot Podcast. I'm Joe Dar, and I'm here in the Sydney studio with Charles Firth. Hello. We have joining us from Melbourne, Dave Milner.

Thank you, Joe. And our very special guest, very exciting for us this afternoon, is Mr Peripatetic himself, the man behind the campaign for Yes, 23, Thomas Mayo. A couple of Glego. That means good day in my language, Kalalagalaya. Oh, you're the one that has been attracting all of the racist kind of horror. You're the one who was in the nasty AFR cartoon, but you've transcended that and you've become the popular face.

I have been at railway stations where Thomas Mayer has turned up and he has become the kind of the celebrity campaigner, would you say, Thomas? Oh, I don't know about that, but I'm just working really hard. And I think I've found that most Australians are curious. you know, as we experience at the train station, many are saying I'm voting yes. Yeah, they do. It's a different feeling out in public wearing the yes shirt to what we see on social media and the polls.

And I think that there is a great deal of curiosity about what the referendum can mean for us as a country. And Dave, you explored some of this in the piece that you wrote for the shot about the opportunity that it affords us some of the confusion it can throw up and the dissonance that we've been through through our history. Yeah, I did. I guess what I was writing about in that piece, I think, in hindsight, was about the way I was formerly educated as a white person in a settler colony

and not really getting a very accurate picture. And then it got me thinking about how history had been taught prior generation. So I look back at the sort of tough Australians were told about themselves in John Howard's era. And then even earlier, the history that he was looking at. And it couldn't help but thinking there's a whole lot of, a whole lot of bullshit to work past for you, Thomas. Yeah, there is. There's a lot of a long history of Australians being taught to ignore our indigenous

culture and heritage, you know. So that is quite a barrier to get over. But I think there's been a lot of hard work done by many people, the truth telling that's going on for a long time, reconciliation work, you know, royal commissions are full of truth telling, evidence truth telling, all that hard. hard work, I think, has brought us to this moment where we have an achievable, you know, opportunity here. Absolutely.

And, I mean, what that opportunity means and what the shape of it is, I think, is, you know, in a lot of Australians' minds, it is a bit nebulous. They don't really see what that's going to look like. Can you sum it up for us? Yeah, real simple. We're just saying yes or no to recognising Indigenous people in our Constitution, a constitution that has explicitly excluded indigenous people for a very long time, and to do it in a practical way, an Australian way, which gives a people a hand up, basically, that says,

you know, we've been making decisions about you, indigenous guys, for a long time, and now we're going to set up an expectation that we should listen to you first. It's that simple. I mean, that sounds pretty simple. Isn't Australia entirely based on the opposite of that idea? Like, isn't the whole sort of, like, part of the, like, and I'm not, I'm sort of slightly being joking, but I'm not being joking, which is, isn't the actual problem that is being faced by the yes campaign, that actually, if you look at, you know, what Dave was writing about in his article, the actual sort of constitutional basis, like the broad sort of fundamental idea that Australia was founded on in, you know, in 1788 when it was colonised,

was let's just definitely never listen to Indigenous people. I think that's why it's been such a hard thing to communicate. This is my perspective on it, which is Anthony Albanesey was sort of going, look, it's not a radical proposal. It's not a huge thing. And I think what he meant by that is it's not going to lead to, you know, a complete annihilation of white people in Australia or something like that. It's not going to lead to sort of wholesale upheaval in the economic lives of people.

But it is a profound change to the sort of philosophical underpinnings of what Australia is to say, actually, you know, and it's such a reasonable, it's a transitional demand to say, you know what, you know, actually maybe we should listen to Indigenous people when they're affected by decisions that are made about them. Yeah, I mean, it's, it is a big shift away from ignoring that Indigenous people were over here. Are you right? But on a legal basis, on a basis of how our democracy works, it isn't radical. You know, the Parliament remains supreme in that it decides all laws, how funding is allocated in the country, what programs and policies are implemented.

And so it's simply Indigenous people having a say. You see, one of the things that we're up against is Australia is still in that place where it thinks that, you know, that that, and it has worked for most Australians the way that it is now. And if we were to call for special rights, you can see the way the No campaign is trying to scare people with that, it would be an impossible thing to achieve. So it is a modest proposal that given all of the injustices, all of the marginalisation of Indigenous people, the massive gaps in education and health and employment, life expectancy of around eight years less, that we're not calling for a special right here. We're asking for an enhancement to our democracy so that indigenous people can just have a say. And, you know, I mean, sure, there's people that think that, you know, we should have a whole lot more. But, you know, this is an important step that we should just have the opportunity to come together, work it out amongst ourselves who speaks for us, not someone that a political party chooses,

because indigenous politicians don't represent indigenous communities and their interests because they're accountable to their electorate and their political party, not the indigenous communities that they might try to speak for. This is simply a voice that can coherently speak to the solutions for those problems that I mentioned in a transparent way that all Australians see and indigenous people ourselves can see our representatives saying, and we can hold them to account, you know, a process of electing representatives ourselves. The reason it's not radical is it's actually also, it's consistent with the way our democracy works. But I do believe that it is going to achieve great strides in progress, though.

And that's what I think a lot of Australians are interested in. Is this going to be practical? Is this going to close the gap? Is this going to improve lives? And is it going to do in a way that doesn't radically transform our democracy where we're going to lose something? And the answer is, you know, it will bring about great change. But nobody's got anything to lose, and we've got everything to gain by it. It's interesting what you're saying, because when I looked at the structure of it,

but I bought your little purple book, by the way. It really did seem like an extraordinarily reasonable, level-headed proposal without any scary overreach, which made me think about the negative reaction to it and the no campaign. And I'm wondering, do you think, how disingenuous are the people driving the no campaign? Completely disingenuous. They understand what they're doing. They are seeking to confuse and to scare Australia.

And I think, you know, especially elder Australians might be familiar with these things when I mentioned them. But in the 60s, when Indigenous people were going to get equal wages, they said that cattle stations, you know, businesses would shut down. It wouldn't be able to afford to run without their Indigenous labour just being paid a bit of flour and tobacco. Without slave labour, essentially. Yeah, I mean, they were working 16 hour days and just getting enough sustenance of work every day. Yes, that's right. It was slave labor. And when land rights were being established after the Garinji Wayfield Walk Off and their great success, and it was a liberal prime minister that saw land rights in the Northern Territory through. But people were saying, you're going to lose your

backyard, you're going to lose your farm, all those sorts of things. Then in the 80s, late 80s, when Bob Hawke was establishing the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission, a voice, Howard was saying that this would be a black parliament that there would be people were saying that there's going to be a right for indigenous people to veto the parliament and in the 90s with native title Marbo winning that high court case

native title legislation being negotiated they said again you're going to lose your backyards you're going to lose your farms and all of those things came to pass equal wages land rights you know the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission and none of those, you know, none of those doomsayers were correct. None of those things happened.

Nobody lost anything. But Indigenous people took some steps forward, you know, and we're still a long way from being equal with other Australians, and that is what this voice is going to do. It's going to be unifying and it will help us to have equality in all those important outcomes for our children. And that was even the case with the national apology is that you had people, including Peter Dutton,

saying that it would open up the possibility for compensation and reparations, so therefore we shouldn't do it. And as you say at every turn, this overreach, and I would go so far as to say this racist overreach, has proven to be incorrect and a fallacy. And at every point, we have matured and strengthened and become more unified as a nation because we have taken these modest steps along the way towards reconciliation. Yeah, we celebrate each of those steps, really. You know, I mean, they were great advancements for Indigenous people and for our nation.

I mean, imagine if we didn't do those things, you know? I'd be here, you know, just going home and collecting my flour and tobacco and, you know, I mean, what a shit society would be? And exhausted, you know, like, 16 hours a day. I'm doing that. And the thing is, is that those people who supported that now are embarrassed at the advocacy that they made. And then Pete and Dutner's had to apologise for the way that he handled the national apology and yet he has sees it he can't see the symmetry and what he's doing now but doesn't that go to the disingenuity of the whole thing yeah because isn't that just the perpetual conservative state

of being terrified of fucking everything and then five years later being oh I got that wrong no but but I think I think it goes deeper than that which is I think that they know that it's just a tool like I think most people especially those running the no campaign oh no certainly know that racism is just a tool it's so funny i talked to this anglican pastor guy who works at more college on the weekend as you do total fuck wit and um but and he was voting no he was literally i went to my high school reunion right like 30 year reunion literally the only person there who's going to vote no and it was like what so why why why are you going to vote no mate and it was like well i think other people are really worried about it you know they're really fearful of

you know blah blah blah and it was like well hang on but what about you like even he even had the insight to know that you know he couldn't pull off

you know an argument about himself because of course he wasn't scared of anything because there's nothing to be scared of so he just placed it in the other thing

and then so I said to him so you're just entirely basing your decision on fear like so it's just an entirely fear thing and he said fear is a great way

to control people I think the problem with the world is that we don't have enough fear fear. Now, he's coming from an Anglican, you know, Christian background. Like, he, that conservative frame. But it gives you such an insight into, it's totally cynical. Like, it's a cynical tool. Like, let's, like, I think Dutton's whole, I mean, do you feel betrayed by Dutton over this, or did you just know that it was going to be a, look, if I, if I spent all my

time worrying about what politicians say and, you know, I would never get out there and help people to understand. And that's, that's what I'm focused on, you know, just having conversations. with Australians like you were. I hope you managed to get that guy to think twice. You know, and when people just look at the words, I mean, that's the, look at it in black and white. It's 92 words that'll be inserted in the Constitution if this gets up, you know, and it just simply recognizes indigenous people, the first peoples, by establishing a voice to make representations on matters that relate to us. That's what we're saying yes or no to. The parliament decides the rest. The third point in that new section 129 says the public,

Parliament decides all matters relating to the voice, including the composition, powers, functions and procedures. You know, so it's just consistent with the way that we do things now. The only difference is it sets up an expectation from everybody that votes yes that politicians will listen to Indigenous people before they make decisions about them. And there's plenty of evidence that that is how you get better outcomes and you save money, taxpayer money, but importantly also you save lives. I mean, I think the interesting thing,

because there is this sort of dissonance at the very heart of the no campaign anyway because as they're going about, they're saying, well, we do want a voice, we just want to legislate it, which rather undermines all of their arguments about it's going to be bureaucratic or it's going to be, you know, that kind of foster disunity. They're also saying that it's tokenistic and it's also too powerful potential. It doesn't make any sense at all. But what I thought might be useful for our listeners is we want recognition of our First Nations, obviously, in the Constitution, because why would you not want to celebrate that?

But the idea of actually entrenching the voice in the Constitution is important, not just because for time immemorial it does set up that expectation, as you say, Thomas, but previous voices have been abolished at the whim of governments. And we have had now across our history, across the last sort of 100 years. There have been many, many different efforts from governments, both liberal and Labor to set up voices that within 5, 10, 20 years have just simply been eradicated by their successor governments. Yeah, I think that's a really important thing for listeners to understand. You're right. In the 1920s, it was the Australian Aboriginal Progressive Association. Then came the Aboriginal Advancement League. There was FACAC, the NACC, the NACC, and ATSIC that I mentioned

earlier and all of these representative bodies were established under one government and destroyed by the next, you know, silenced. And we know also from a pattern throughout history that when we have these representative bodies, including ATSIC, we make great strides in progress. You know, we improve conditions, better housing, all of those things happen better and quicker. When indigenous people have an ability to make representations to the decision makers. And we also know that when we don't, things get worse. And so when we came together at Uluru, this is where the call for the voice comes from, from the Uluru statement from the heart.

It was in late May 2017, a unique opportunity for indigenous people. We had 13, three-day dialogues covering the entire continent and adjacent islands, region by region, you know, debated and discussed that history. and what steps we should take next. They elected delegates. They brought the priorities from those regions to a culminating convention in the heart of the nation at Uluru.

And they made the Uluru statement from the heart. And I was there. And those lessons that we need a voice, but we know voices are taken away if they're only legislated, that we make better progress when we have a voice, that caused us to call for a voice enshrined in the Constitution. So that it's set up by the will of the Australian people,

by the expectation of the Australian people that all Parliament should listen to the advice that Indigenous people have about their lives. This illustrates that this isn't an Albanesey idea as the no campaign tends to say. It's not a Labour Party campaign. This is not a Canberra voice.

This is a voice that has come through a lot of hard work by Indigenous people to make this invitation to Australians and we really hope that they'll vote yes. And there's a lot at stake with that too. I think there is. And I think just to that point of the representative nature of the group that met at Uluru. And in fact, that there really was an incredibly rigorous process of years in the making that went on to get to that point at Uluru

where you had those different voices coming together and synthesizing and all, in fact, speaking with one voice to say, this is what we want and this is what we need. So when people say, you know, why don't we have a constitutional convention, if we're going to move to a referendum, those sorts of things, they're ignoring the depth of time, effort, energy, and the representative nature of that process that got us to Uluru in the first place. Yeah, that argument from the No campaign is disingenuous as well.

You know, there's been so much hard work. Multiple joint select committees and expert panel. Uluru process, since the Uluru process, another joint select committee that reported in 2018. And then the co-design process led by Professor Marcia Lankton and Tom Kalma, under the Morrison government, you know, with the leadership of Ken Wyatt, who was a minister for Indigenous Australians at the time, over and over again, we keep coming to this need to constitutionally recognise Indigenous people in a way

that they have called for, which is simply to give us an advisory voice. Which seems really very simple and straightforward. It is, so I encourage the listeners to help your friends and family to understand this. to get through that misinformation. I don't want you to wake up the next morning, you know, and feel like you could have done more or blame the media. You know, it's up to us. You know, we can't count on anyone else but ourselves to help our families and friends

to understand. And that's the amazing thing. One of the points that they're making the training is that every vote is essentially like a marginal seat vote in like an election because it actually is like every single, like it needs to be a majority of people in the majority of states. Yes. So it's not like, you know, if you're in a safe seat, your vote doesn't really count. Every single vote in this country counts just as much as it would if you're in a marginal

seat. So, you know, like if you're in a place where lots of people are going to vote yes, actually you need to be in a place where every single person votes yes, because there will be pockets of places where lots of people are voting no. And those votes will be actually able to countervail, you know, completely distant places, which you wouldn't normally think of if you're voting, you know, in an election. We need four out of six states to get up as well.

So the territories, sadly, their vote does count a little bit less because they're not a state. So, you know, in the Northern Territory, my vote is only worth half as much sort of thing. I live in Darwin. Yeah. I wish I hadn't changed my voting registration from South Australia, but South Australia's looking pretty good. I mean, I think the focus is New South Wales, Victoria, Tasmania, South Australia,

and then Queensland and Western Australia, we just need to make sure that there's enough people who vote yes there to contribute to the national, if we say that they're lost, and we shouldn't say that they're lost because there's lots of great Queenslanders and Western Australians out there. You know, look, people are saying, or there are no campaign saying they've got Queensland in the bag, right? And I don't agree with them. I did a tour from, you know, doing multiple town halls and events from Marucci Dore and Caloundra, you know, and pretty a whole lot of towns into Idsvold, inland a bit and up to Mackay, including Bundy and Bundaberg and Gladstone.

And, you know, each event was packed out. There was a lot of people that were undecided, but they walked out of there when they had that simple explanation that I've already given, you know, and saying that they'll vote yes, and we signed up supporters walking around the streets with my yes shirt, you know, I wasn't heckled or anything like that, you know, people occasionally stopped and asked a question or, you know, said they were voting yes too. You know, and I think it sort of helps us in Queensland that the no campaign is saying that they're going to lose because, you know, I like my rugby league and I back Queensland and we love being the underdogs, so I reckon Queensland can get up, you know.

I know that you could say that Queensland is the underdog in rugby league, could you? Well, they always say we are, but we always win. Hey, this is a Melbourne podcast. We don't talk about rugby. Thomas, related questions, what is the most helpful thing people can, Australians can do, to help this get up? And what is the biggest barrier to this getting up? So three things that I'd love every listener to do is to go to the yes23.com.

website to, if you can, donate, we need resources to run this big national campaign and reach every Australian. We also need volunteers, so please volunteer, help Joe and I on the train stations and, you know, getting around. And, you know, just putting a bit of information into your fellow Australians' hands, we'll be doing a lot of door knocking. There was a lot of door knocking over the weekend, and there will be a lot more. So please volunteer. And lastly, help us with visibility. So, you know, go to the S-23 side again. You can get a shirt, a hoodie that I'm wearing. You can get placards and badges. All of those things we want to see of yes by the time we reach the final couple of weeks to the referendum, and I would love for you

to help us with that. And I think one of the things that, the lessons that were learned from the last federal election campaign on a seat-by-seat basis where the community independence was successful was that thing about visibility and giving permission for people to try something different. So people who had been, you know, rusted on liberal, suddenly, you know, their neighbor had a placard up. They saw people walking down the street wearing t-shirts. Their sense of community and possibility was formed by that visibility. And I think that's really important. I pretty much decided I'm only wearing yes merchandise between now. And I have a whole range of different.

I've got my volunteer t-shirt, I've got this one. I've got one nice new black one coming. But I've also got the support Uluru from history. So you can go back into the archives and find things. So I think it is about that just being very present. And as we've discussed, not thinking that if you're in a safe left progressive area, that that means you can relax. We need to offset some of those other areas.

but also, you know, we're all contributing to that big national vote as well. I think there's a big thing in what you're saying about the visibility making it acceptable and that sort of runs up against what Australians have been taught for so long. Seeing your neighbour thinks that this is a perfectly acceptable, reasonable thing, it just makes it easier for you to get on board that train if you're leaning that way anyway. So yeah, definitely an important part of this. Yeah, and I think, you know, one of the strategies is with the negative poles and things like that is to try and take the wind out of our sales.

But as I said, it's a very different feeling. I wear, you know, the same as Joe. I wear this shirt all the time. Nobody's heckled me. Nobody's, you know, you get a lot of smiles. You get a lot of interest. It starts a conversation. And from wearing my shirt and that every day...

And being the celebrity campaigner, obviously. I do believe that most Australians are, you know, are ready for this and are fair-minded. They just need that confidence and they need someone that they love, someone that they trust, you know, to give them a call and I encourage people to do this as well and just say, hey, I'm voting yes. You know, I've looked into it. It's safe and it's meaningful. I'd like for you to vote yes too. And you'll be surprised how many people will just walk with you when you say that. Walk with us along that journey. We have left now

the camp, base camp. So we're on the way. I think we're going to end up in a good spot come October 15, but as Thomas says, and we all know, we can't take anything for granted. So we know you're a very busy man, Thomas. So thank you for stopping by here at the shot. Charles is trying to twist Thomas's arm to write something. He said as a wharfy, he's well versed in the word fuck and can probably include that, at least once or twice throughout a tract. I'm a bit rusty, you know. He's been very civilised. But we're being thrilled to have you here today. So get out there, everyone. Yes23.com.com.a.u. There's, or just dot com, no.a.u, everything. We're just universal here. And buy, donate, give your time and your

money to help get the result that we know that Australia needs. Thank you, everybody. I really appreciate it. And just for the record, which way are you going to yes or not? Yes. Definitely yes. Like everybody else. Thank you all. We'll be back next week. Our gear is from Road. We're part of the Iconiclass Network. See ya.