In 2016 I resigned from the marriage equality campaign after a decade as one of its leaders because its approach to the looming plebiscite was flawed.
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Now, I see the "yes" Voice campaign for an Indigenous Voice making the same mistakes.
As a supporter of the Voice I have to speak out before it's too late.
In 2016 we marriage equality advocates were told to make our message as small as possible by only talking blandly about "fairness".
We were no longer able to talk about discrimination to progressive audiences or the importance of marriage to conservative ones, despite these arguments previously winning support.
Even stricter rules applied to engaging the "no" case. We were not to challenge any of its points directly, especially about what came after marriage equality.
Meanwhile, swaths of the nation were conceded to the "no" case before the vote even occurred, including Western Sydney.
After years of successful campaigning we marriage equality veterans knew every demographic was winnable and that our opponents' talking points could be flipped, judo-style, to our advantage.
But the communications "experts" and political operatives parachuted in before the public vote felt they knew better.
The "yes" campaign is singing from the same song sheet.
Its message is blandly aspirational and lacks nuance for different audiences.
In particular it fails to speak to older, regional, socially-conservative Anglo Australians, as if they have already been wiped off as unreachable.
The "yes" camp is allergic to any discussion about truth-telling and a treaty, even though the public is mature enough to talk about all these issues at once and distinguish between them.
They have also failed to challenge and discredit the talking points of the "no" case, leaving the field open to old tropes about Aboriginal special rights, power grabs, free loading and worse.
But didn't Australians overwhelmingly vote "yes" in the marriage postal survey? Wasn't the small-target approach a winning formula?
No, it wasn't.
The marriage postal survey was won years before it was held.
Since at least 2009 support ranged between 65 and 72 per cent.
Polling showed over 50 per cent of Australians were so strong in their support that nothing the other side threw at them would ever change their minds.
Those levels of support were due to constant campaigning for a decade.
There were high points like the overseas marriages of celebrity couples, Labor's decision to support marriage equality, and same-sex marriages in the ACT showing the sky wouldn't fall in.
But there was also incessant campaigning at a local level.
This local campaigning isn't widely recognised. Historians need to look in The Border Mail, the Toowoomba Chronicle and the Burnie Advocate to find it.
But as overlooked as that grassroots campaigning may be, it's what won Australia over.
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The small-target approach of the "yes" campaign in 2017 not only didn't win marriage equality, it made things worse.
It reduced the level of support from the highs I've mentioned to barely over 60 per cent.
It left LGBTIQA+ people in places such as Western Sydney to endure the pain of knowing up to 70 per cent of people in their communities oppose their basic rights.
Most of all it empowered anti-LGBTIQA+ prejudice.
Like campaigners against the Voice, campaigners against marriage equality ignored the issue at hand and focused on fearmongering.
They said marriage equality would open the door to trans people threatening women's safety, LGBTIQA+ school inclusion programs undermining parental rights and religious freedom suffering at the hands of anti-discrimination litigants.
The failure to nip those narratives in the bud in 2016-17 has seen them bloom into Scott Morrison's Religious Freedom Bill which would have weakened existing discrimination protections, the cruel crusade against trans inclusion which has recycled old anti-gay stereotypes about child "grooming", vicious attacks on drag story time, and most recently, the rise of LGBTIQA+ book bans.
I'm not blaming the 2017 "yes" campaign for all this resurgent anti-LGBTIQA+ prejudice.
What I'm saying is that the postal survey gave the biggest platform ever to both anti-LGBTIQA+ prejudice and to the opportunity to defeat that prejudice.
The opportunity was seized by the "no" campaign but squandered by the "yes" campaign.
Given this experience, I fear the same thing will happen to Indigenous people.
Not only may the small-target approach doom the Voice, it may give anti-Aboriginal prejudice a new lease of life that will make it difficult to advance any Indigenous reform for years to come.
- Rodney Croome was awarded an Order of Australia and named Tasmanian of the Year for his LGBTIQA+ rights advocacy. He was the national director of Australian Marriage Equality.
