The symbolic and practical proposition to recognise First Nations through an advisory Voice to Parliament is hanging in a perilous position on referendum day as "yes" and "no" cases make final campaign pitches.
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Polling stations close at 6pm for the once-in-a-generation ballot. It is estimated by the Australian Electoral Commission half of everybody who will vote on the Voice proposition has already done so via post or in person. Before polls opened on Saturday, 6.13 million people had voted early at pre-poll stations.
The vote is the culmination of a 2017 request from Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander leaders and elders who signed the Uluru Statement from the Heart as the best solution to tackle entrenched disadvantage and overwhelming disempowerment. "Yes" proponent, Liberal MP Julian Leeser, regards the Voice as a chance to complete the constitution and improve lives, while "no" campaigner Jacinta Nampijinpa Price insists it will divide Australia along the lines of race.
But the Saturday referendum has the "yes" vote placed by political scientists averaging public polling nationally at just 42.7 per cent with a 1.7-point margin of error.
A double majority of a majority of voters in a majority of states is needed to pass.
"So on that, and with the trend over time, it would be a miracle basically if 'yes' were to get up at the moment. It's looking like it won't get up in any state," Professor Andrea Carson from La Trobe University told ACM, publisher of this newspaper.
"Yes" campaigners such as Noel Pearson are urging voters to suspend their "tribal loyalties" to vote for the country, while the Prime Minister said he "sincerely hoped" voters would write three letters "Y-E-S" on the ballot paper.
"We will feel better about ourselves on Sunday with a 'yes' vote. Just as we felt better after the apology to the Stolen Generations," Anthony Albanese told reporters in Adelaide.
But it has been a rancorous, partisan debate over the state of Indigenous affairs in 2023, coloured by the use of deliberate disinformation and Trump-style, fear-based campaigning. Indigenous figures, on both sides of the debate, have complained about being the target of racial threats and attacks. Independent senator Lidia Thorpe was targeted by a neo-Nazi threat.
Opposition Leader Peter Dutton insists he has been respectful and is still seeking Voice details even though the constitution is about principles.
"They've won the hearts, they've lost the minds because they've kept the detail from Australians who are curious," he told Sky News.
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There are 17,676,347 million enrolled voters, and as of Friday afternoon, there had been more than 5.4 million early votes at pre-poll stations, remote polling and through mobile teams. There has also been more than 2.1 million postal vote applications.
The Prime Minister, Opposition Leader, and campaign figures have made final dashes as they crisscross the continent and are all urging voters to not think the vote is "done and dusted" and come out to vote in the compulsory referendum.
Some "yes" figures remain optimistic what they have heard on the ground does not match the negative polling.
"This is not a political issue and should never have been a political issue. This is something that involves human rights. It's about closing the gap," former Liberal MP and endurance runner Pat Farmer said while campaigning.
The referendum will ask voters if the First Peoples of Australia should be recognised by establishing an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice to the Parliament and the executive government. If successful, it will be established as a new constitutional body in a new chapter at the end of the constitution.
It came as a request from around 250 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander leaders and elders who signed the Uluru Statement from the Heart.
Minister for Indigenous Australians Linda Burney said the Voice would have a full in-tray with four priority areas: housing; health; education and employment.
But Prof Carson said the Voice campaign had devolved in the last week into a lot of "noise" and it was difficult to get messages out. There was also a co-dependency, she explained, between social media and mainstream media with messages bouncing backwards and forwards between each other.
"It's become really noisy. We're seeing this in the Twitter data," she said.
"Now we're seeing this overall tide lifting of discontent around the quality and nature of the referendum debate."
Prof Carson is part of a team of political scientists with Simon Jackman and Max Gromping who have been digging into the state of the two "yes" and "no" campaigns through mainstream news, social media, blog sites, online ads, and opinion polls.
Last month, they found the high-spending "yes" campaign showing 33 different messages, compared to the more targeted, "if you don't know, vote no" argument of the "no" campaign.
"So you can see that they've consolidated the messages much more now to 'recognise', 'listen' and 'better outcomes'," she said.
"There's still some other messages around the edges of that, but they've landed pretty much on those main messages.
"But by the same token, 'no' has really consolidated down to that message of 'division'. [It] is everywhere for 'no', including on the how-to-vote cards."
Former Liberal minister for Indigenous affairs Ken Wyatt has decried the "tactics are copied out of America" and told ABC RN there was the "same fearmongering from my party over Mabo". He was concerned the party had not "moved on".