In the classic film Jack Reacher there is a scene in which the evil arch villain makes a bargain with a henchman who has failed him.
The hired goon can either be executed on the spot or his life can be spared if he bites off the fingers of his left hand.
After struggling rather memorably for a few seconds to munch through his thumb, the thug cries out: “I can’t!”
The evil arch villain looks down on the figure in front of him and mutters: “Always the bullet. I don’t understand.”
And then, of course, the guy is instantly shot dead.
By an illuminating twist of fate I happened to be watching this scene on the plane home from Darwin the day Marcia Langton’s now infamous comments made national front page news.
Like our hapless henchman, Langton and all the other mercurial polemicists and angry activists attached to the Voice to Parliament’s Yes campaign had been given a simple choice if they wanted to keep alive any chance of the Voice’s survival.
But they didn’t have to chew off all the fingers of one hand. They didn’t even have to nibble the nail of their pinky.
All they had to do was not call people racist.
And they didn’t even have to do it forever — hell, Langton and others had already done it countless times over. All that was begged of them was to stop doing it for six weeks and it turns out even this was too much to ask.
To their further shame this was not ambiguous nor assumed, even though of course it should have been blindingly obvious.
Deriding people who might disagree with you — or their beliefs or opinions — with lazy labels is the surest way to turn them implacably against you and turn any debate toxic. It is not as though we have a shortage of evidence of this in 21st century politics.
But even if such supposed intellectual and political giants failed to grasp this most basic fact of life until now, they were explicitly and emphatically reminded of it by the South Australian Premier Peter Malinauskas ahead of the Voice campaign’s official launch in Adelaide.
“I don’t think voting no means you are racist or ignorant. That’s only going to drive people away,” the Labor leader told The Australian on August 30.
Yet just two weeks later Langton was telling a public forum in WA: “Every time the no case raises one of their arguments, if you start pulling it apart you get down to base racism. I’m sorry to say it but that’s where it lands, or just sheer stupidity.”
Langton has since tried to argue that it was the No campaign and its arguments she was calling racist and stupid, not voters.
But when you consider that by every published poll of recent times the vast majority of voters are now intending to vote No that is hairsplitting of the highest order.
And if the damage reflected by those polls wasn’t bad enough, there is little doubt that the damage caused to the Yes campaign by Langton’s comments and the tsunami of previous slurs that have come to light in their wake is little short of terminal.
As a proud, longstanding and increasingly desperate Yes supporter watching this self-inflicted car crash unfold in the Territory — where the gap between Indigenous and non-Indigenous lives could not be starker and a potential solution was being torched before my eyes — I was consumed by sorrow and rage.
Not because it is about me, of course, but because it isn’t.
Langton’s lack of judgment won’t harm my family or my future but it has almost certainly killed off a lightning rod of hope for the long grassers or the battlers of Bagot Road who live a stone’s throw away from the mansions of Fannie Bay.
I make no claim to know these people, I only know that they are far worse off than me and facing daily problems I probably could not conquer in a lifetime.
And I know that the Voice might — just might — provide an avenue to fix some of those problems by elevating them to the national stage.
And so why, with everything we know, are those who care more and understand more about these issues so careless and destructive in the once in a lifetime chance we have to address them?
Why, when the call has been so resoundingly clear to bring people with us instead of turning them against us, are those supposedly on the side of progress hellbent on making enemies instead of friends?
Referendums — Latin pedants spare me — are not elections. By their very nature negative campaigning cannot succeed. Destroying the opposition doesn’t make you the government by default. You have to make a positive, inclusive and consensual case for change, not just sh*t on the other side.
That’s why the Yes campaign can only win by explaining and championing what Yes means. Attacking the No campaign is merely another pathway to failure, and it is a path that too many on our side have trodden.