Links from this week

John Farnham has given permission for the Yes campaign to use his song You’re The Voice in an ad to be released soon. Paul Kelly has released a song called “If Not Now” for the Yes campaign as well.

Conservative lobby group Fair Australia has been asked to stop using a clip from the movie Seven Psychopaths as part of their campaign for No in the referendum. They put PM Albanese’s face over one criminal threatening another criminal whose face was replaced with the Australian flag. The director of the movie, Martin McDonagh (who recently won Oscars for The Banshees of Inisherin) called it “deliberate copyright infringement by a bunch of rightwing swine”.

John Birmingham, author of He Died With A Felafel In His Hand, has a good post about the referendum. What surprised me was what he found out about the 1967 referendum to give Indigenous peoples the full rights of citizens of Australia: there wasn’t any No campaign. Both the conservative and progressive sides of politics supported it.

Lara Watson on TikTok (no captions, but the web version has a transcript) explains how race is already in the constitution (section 51, point 26, which is called the “races power”), so the Voice won’t be adding anything new. Yes2Voice on TikTok has a good discussion with his friend Jack about why the Voice shouldn’t be limited to issues covered by the existing races power. And Mike Siers shares how the Voice is not a new idea – there have been 5 bodies before which had the same goal.