![Some Canberrans, when questioned by a reporter, were unaware of the upcoming referendum. Picture Shutterstock Some Canberrans, when questioned by a reporter, were unaware of the upcoming referendum. Picture Shutterstock](/images/transform/v1/crop/frm/Z4Q6sUEHdcmw72MBPYgZkU/ebd4c24c-8973-4fb1-b2bc-0ca77915a31d.jpg/r0_53_1000_615_w1200_h678_fmax.jpg)
"I do not approve of anything that tampers with natural ignorance. Ignorance is like a delicate exotic fruit; touch it and the bloom is gone."
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- Lady Bracknell in Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest
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Some of us who lead news-immersed current-affairs-marinated lives gasped an astonished "Stiffen the wombats!" at a recent story in The Canberra Times reporting how some Canberrans have not even heard that there is to be such a thing as a referendum on the Voice.
Then last week, on the eve of the Fadden by-election, one gasped another "Stiffen the wombats!" to hear an ABC reporter report that she was meeting people on the streets of Fadden "unaware" of the robodebt horror-imbroglio.
The Times reporter had ventured out to some suburban Canberra shopping centres to ask members of the lumpenproletariat how they were planning to vote in the forthcoming referendum. The trained newsgatherer, aghast, duly reported his shock at finding himself being some people's first bearer of the tidings that there is even to be such a referendum.
For those of us obsessed with the referendum, our senses attuned, twitching, to the zillions of everyday mentions of it in the media, the ignorance the reporter discovered seems startling in the extreme.
That anyone in Fadden could be (to the delight of all Lady Bracknells) ignorant of the throbbingly current issue of robodebt is similarly bewildering for those of us who are twitchingly news-tuned.
"Who are these people?" we, the twitchers, marvel.
"Do they live under rocks?"
But perhaps one should know better. At low points in my generally brilliant journalistic career I was sent out to do "vox pop" newsgathering stories about what the man and woman in the street felt about pressing issues of the day.
READ MORE: IAN WARDEN
I learned that when and if the man or woman in the street was walking a dog, one was as likely to get an informed, intelligent opinion-answer to one's questions from the dogs (unless of course they were red setters) as from their owners.
And yet (for as Socrates and I always maintain, "The unexamined life is not worth living", I find myself examining whether or not my news-obsession, my manic determination to be well-informed, necessarily makes me superior to the news-ignorant.
What if my habit of beginning my every day from 6am to 9am with ABC Radio National's news and current affairs programs (leaving me twitchingly news-revved for the rest of the day) is a bad habit, even, perhaps, a perversion?
What if for some good people a total ignorance of current affairs and news is not Lady Bracknell's "natural ignorance" at all? What if it is even an achievement rather than a failing?
One would like to know more about the Canberrans the reporter found unaware of the approach of the Voice referendum. Was it that their ignorance was the invincible and wide-ranging "natural" ignorance so reassuringly appealing to aristocratic Lady Bracknell (when she saw it in the lower orders). Did the ignorant Canberrans as well as not knowing of the referendum perhaps also not know what day it was, who Sam Kerr is, what the word "referendum" means, whether the Earth is flat or round, etc.?
Or was it that, asked about a referendum, their excellent minds were forgivably elsewhere, concentrating on Bigger Pictures? For example, what if the woman in the street who seems unimpressive when vox popped about mere news is a philosopher?
"To a philosopher," the philosopher Thoreau thought, "all news, as it is called, is gossip, and they who edit and read it are just [oldies doing something inconsequential] while they drink their cups of tea."
What if the people of Fadden and Canberra who wouldn't recognise a robodebt or referendum if it surfaced in their soup are creative souls, too engaged on composing their sonnets and symphonies to be bothered with news' evanescent folderols, its repetitive airy persiflages?
What if, whatever the equivalent local political news trinket-trifle of robodebt was in May 1802, a cub reporter from The Lake District Times had tried to pester Wordsworth with it while he, Wordsworth, was giving deep poetic thought to the host of golden daffodils he had just marvelled at (he'd seen 10,000 at a glance, lifting their heads in merry dance) on his morning walk?
What if someone's avoidance of news is consciously, wisely, mentally self-protecting?
The news (because of the very nature of news) is so often shocking, terrifying, despair-making. The daily, hourly news of the war in Ukraine can seem like an unnecessary reminder of our species' callousness and cruelty.
Then there is, now, the news-induced, every day news-reinforced phenomenon of "eco-anxiety". The American Psychological Association catalogues the mental harms this anxiety does and defines it as "the chronic fear of environmental cataclysm that comes from observing the seemingly irrevocable impact of climate change".
Yes, this columnist and millions of altruistic Yes-minded Australians, feeding hungrily on news and current affairs, are keeping ourselves utterly well-informed about every nuance of the coming referendum. The referendum is our Hard Quiz special subject.
And yet it seems inevitable now that our hopes are to be dashed and our despairs stoked with a No. And so perhaps some of us envy the blissful ignorance of those aforementioned Canberra ignoramuses who don't see a referendum coming and who, the lustrous bloom of their ignorance unspoiled, will not notice or care about its result.
- Ian Warden is a regular columnist
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