Much-thumbed, dog-eared, coffee-stained, tattered by so much use as a reference work, my copy of the Australian Electoral Commission's official Referendum Booklet is here at my elbow as I write.
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The AEC, altruistic and responsible, but perhaps naive, distributed 13 million copies of the booklet, one to every letterbox in the nation.
I am an avid reader of everything, especially of fiction (at the moment I am re-reading Sylvia Townsend Warner's brilliant Lolly Willowes with its persuasive argument that every strong, thinking woman should liberate herself from the patriarchy by becoming a witch, only ever paying heed to one male, the Devil) and so have paid the referendum booklet rapt attention.
But what of the other 12,999,999 copies? How many of them have been even opened and skimmed by those they were delivered to?
We are a dumbed-down nation now, with a special aversion to reading. The latest (2021) National Reading Survey laments "more Australians [are] not reading books at all", finding that one in four Australians doesn't read or listen to a single book a year.
Yes, I know the referendum booklet is not quite a book in the sense that Jane Austen's Pride And Prejudice is a book but the booklet does require of Australians the sorts of minds and education-level talents book-reading requires.
Better attuned to the true state of the Australian intellect, to the nation's shrivelled and frivolous attention spans and appetites, the AEC might have made the referendum booklet a kind of comic book.
As it is, the booklet does not contain a single picture and as well contains lots of demandingly long words (words such as "indigenous" and "recognition") and so has probably been too intellectually daunting and difficult for millions of Australians to face.
One way to think of Australian referendums and to explain why they almost always fail to get a "yes" (only eight of 44 have been carried) is to think of them as an exam the whole nation sits for, and for want of doing any study, usually fails.
As I write, it is a truth being universally acknowledged by commentators everywhere that Australians' ignorance (of facts and truths) is working powerfully on the side of a "no" vote on October 14.
The cunning but deplorable pro-"no" slogan - "If you don't know, vote No" - (all dog owners give their dogs commands more sophisticated than that one) seems to be working well, giving an added lustre to the bloom of Australians' natural ignorance. The referendum booklet, for the reasons I've just muttered about, has probably done nothing to touch and spoil the bloom of the nation's natural ignorance.
Every poll and vox pop finds "no"-inclined Australians whinge-complaining that they have not been sufficiently fully informed on the Voice to be able to vote for it. There is indignation and resentment in their complaining, as if they have somehow been failed by governments and electoral commissions when, really, it is their lazy, wallowing choice of pigs-in-mud ignorance of the subject that is leaving them underinformed.
Quite how one educates anyone who has taken a vow of deep ignorance is not clear. The AEC's booklet, even made more attractive, would have struggled to reach minds as loafing as these.
Funnily enough, though, for a sophisticated fiction reader like me, the AEC booklet does actually have some of the qualities of highly readable fiction. For example, it has dozens of named characters (at least as many as there are in Pride And Prejudice) quoting things they have said for and against the Voice, and the "yes/no" adversarial format imparts some of the tension of a ripping yarn.
And so it amuses me to think that the booklet, alas very plain in style, looks and format, might have had more allure if presented as a kind of novel, recommended to the nation as a ripping yarn.
READ MORE IAN WARDEN
In the AEC's shoes I would have opened the booklet with a paraphrase of a legendary opening of a great, great novel.
Everyone who reads books knows that Jane Austen's Pride And Prejudice opens engagingly with "It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife."
Every bookish person is gripped by Tolstoy's wise truism "All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way" with which we embark on the voyage of reading his Anna Karenina.
The referendum booklet opens unexcitingly, unengagingly with "This official referendum booklet contains two important documents: Your official Yes/No referendum pamphlet. And your official guide to the 2023 referendum."
A book-booklet needs a more stirring intro than that if it is to be a national page-turner.
So it amuses me to imagine the booklet given allure with an imitation of Austen's touch and beginning: "It is a truth universally acknowledged that an Australian soon to vote in a referendum must be in want of information so as not to be as pig-ignorant and thick as two planks on polling day and so as to be able to meet his informed obligations to his dear nation's democratic processes".
Or the booklet should have opened Tolstoyishly with: "All happy nations are alike; each unhappy nation with a long history of treating its indigenous peoples with cruelty and indifference is unhappy in its own way".
- Ian Warden is a regular columnist
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