The 'Don't Know? Vote No' slogan comes straight from the Tobacco Playbook

A potted PR history of sowing confusion

Riddle me this: which Voice to Parliament referendum campaign promotes an indifference to knowing the facts? We find the answer in the No Campaign’s startling slogan: Don’t Know? Vote No.

This encouragement of voters toward small-mindedness is beyond breathtaking. It is profoundly illiberal. It foments a kind of protective obtuseness, an armoury of wilful ignorance and suggests there is personal power – freedom no less – in evading and ignoring the facts. Democratic elections are here an impost, a waste of voters’ time.

By their main slogan, a good citizen is a lazy citizen, inveterately. Facts are the preserve of the elite who get them from ivory towers. They are locked away and inaccessible to ‘ordinary Australians’ who should pride themselves on refusing to engage with readily available materials, mere clicks away. The No campaign’s slogan (as distinct from the ‘Progressive’ No, or Radical No campaign) exempts a nation of citizens from engagement in democratic process.

On issues concerning Aboriginal people, non-Aboriginal Australians are well practiced at deliberate not knowing. The amplified resistance around a Voice to Parliament shows we remain a nation of denialists. Despite intense historical reckoning since the intervention of Henry Reynolds, and the enriching of all Australians by the Blak Resistance movement, not knowing remains a national refuge from hard historical truths. This collective habit of mind is being revived by the No Campaign as a legitimate ‘choice’.

Doubt, denial and disengagement are proven tactics in campaigning. When facts are not expedient, particularly to industry with deep connections to politicians and certain media heirs, effective public campaigns are fought not with alternative facts, but with a mere question mark. The question mark has acquired a supervillain potency, indeed over the last half-century these campaigners have become highly effective Riddlers.

In 1969 an internal memorandum from the R. J. Reynolds Tobacco Company noted, ‘Doubt is our product since it is the best means of competing with the “body of fact” that exists in the mind of the general public.’ So successful was the tobacco industry at refuting the science – not by presenting alternative evidence, but simply by casting doubt over the evidence which threatened their profits – it is now known as the ‘Tobacco Playbook’.

In its slogan Don’t Know? Vote No the No campaign has taken a leaf directly from this Tobacco Playbook. It is talking in riddles, taunting the public with the confusion they themselves are propagating, deliberately muddling facts to create voter disorientation and loss of nerve. They provide a sanctuary of obstinance and fortified insensibility. Safer to not know, and vote no.

In among this villainy Peter Dutton has assumed the tactics of the Riddler, a supervillain in the dark arts of mystification. Former Liberal Party leader John Hewson has noted his deliberate ‘muddying the waters’, to avoid ‘participating in genuine debate’. But his obfuscation is well rehearsed.

Guardian columnist George Monbiot has identified groups that were funded by tobacco firms to claim that smoking was safe and were subsequently recruited by exxonmobile and other fossil fuel companies to attack climate science - also documented in the podcast Drilled. They now actively mislead and misinform the public on climate change through a cabal of carbonated think tanks: from the the Cato Institute, to Competitive Enterprise Institute, The Heritage Foundation and the Reason Foundation.

(What is the real fallout of deliberately misleading and misinforming the public on questions of life and death? In the wake of the Maui firestorm disaster, we have to ask, if the victims were better informed about the unprecedented danger they faced might they have been better prepared? Could more of them have survived?)

The strategy of countering mounting evidence of public health dangers by merely casting doubt over the science, lazily plonking a Riddler’s question mark over the findings, has also been adopted by the soft drinks industry and to counter findings of acid rain. Most recently there are parallels in attempts by the National Football League to downplay the issue of CTE in football.

The smoking Riddlers’ playbook has been closely scrutinised in the book Merchants of Doubt. Riddlers fund studies designed to give the appearance of dissent within actual scientific consensus. They characterise rigorous peer-reviewed findings of harm as ‘junk science’. They appoint fake experts and astroturf grass-roots organisations. They recruit from the revolving door of politics and industry, PR, media and lobbying. Similarly, the No Campaign has depended on the authenticity and lived experience of Aboriginal commentators and parliamentarians themselves funded by miners and elite money, and making increasingly outlandish claims.

The No Campaign appeals to an authoritarian mindset through their slogan Don’t Know? Vote No. They imply that ‘we’ know, leave it to us, with the imprimatur of your vote, we’ll take care of it and resolve all this perplexity. Ominously the slogan misses the next logical step: Why Vote At All? Riddle me that.

Post script: the referendum was defeated on October 14.

Here are some salient reflections from Aboriginal Leaders who supported the Yes position:

7. ‘Lies in political advertising and communication were a primary feature of this campaign. We know that the No campaign was funded and resourced by conservative and international interests who have no stake or genuine interest in the lives of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. We know this funding supported multiple No campaigns that intentionally argued in varying directions to create doubt and fear in both non-Indigenous and Indigenous communities. This included resurrecting scare campaigns seen during the 1990s against land rights, but the scale of deliberate disinformation and misinformation was unprecedented, and it proliferated, unchecked, on social media, repeated in mainstream media and unleashed a tsunami of racism against our people. We know that the mainstream media failed our people, favouring ‘a false sense of balance’ over facts.

8. There has always been racism against First Nations people in Australia. It increased with multiple daily instances during the campaign and was a powerful driver for the No campaign. But this campaign went beyond just racism. ‘If you don't know - Vote No’ gave expression to ignorance and licensed the abandonment of civic responsibility on the part of many voters who voted No. This shameful victory belongs to the Institute of Public Affairs, the Centre for Independent Studies and mainstream media.’

Read their full open letter here:

https://ugc.production.linktr.ee/2e09849a-25e6-4743-8317-e33dfb437728_Statement-for-our-People-and-Country.pdf