I’m in Sydney for the Voice referendum result and was ready to settle in and watch the declarations for each state – but it’s already over. No looks to have won, by a pretty big margin. Tasmania voted No and New South Wales seems to have gone the same way. Both were swing states. If those two voted heavily for No, then it’s likely that it has won by a landslide. Similarly, No is way ahead in Victoria and is likely to win by a large margin when counting begins in Western Australia. So, an ‘Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice’ will not added to Australia’s democratic apparatus. Aussies have voted to protect the principle of everyone being equal before the law and in parliament.

The Yes campaign will soon concede defeat and Anthony Albanese, who announced the referendum soon after becoming Prime Minister, will make a statement from parliament at about 9 p.m. local time. Combined with what looks like a likely conservative victory in New Zealand, it’s quite a day for the right Down Under. Campaigners for No said they were against any principle that would divide Australians by race.

The debate is quite similar to Brexit. The Yes side ended up portraying it as a battle of good vs evil, claiming that the No side were using lies and other black magic to win over voters. One of the Yes campaigners, Ray Martin, observed that anyone voting No was ‘a dinosaur or a dickhead’ if they ‘can’t be bothered’ reading up on the issues. Thomas Mayo, another Yes campaigner, said this evening that ‘we have seen a disgusting No campaign, a campaign that has been dishonest, that has lied to the Australian people and I’m sure that will come out in the analysis’.

The Yes campaign never specified what form this new ‘voice’ would take. This vagueness was exploited by the No campaign, whose slogan was ‘If you don’t know, vote No’. The Aussie system of compulsory voting summoned to the ballots many of those who thought the whole enterprise a pointless distraction. No prizes for guessing which way they’d swing. But this is such a shock to the Australian system because Yes campaign had started off expecting an easy victory. But that changed.

As with Scottish independence and as with Brexit, the arrogance of the government-led campaign recruited voters to the other side. Peter van Onselen, a Yes-supporting academic and commentator, sums it up: ‘As someone who has advocated treaties for years, I am beyond pissed off at how badly the Yes camp has butchered its advocacy on this issue. But I won’t sugar-coat its failures and simplistically blame the No campaign for challenging the proposition. That’s democratic pluralism in action. There are legitimate reasons to vote No and anyone contemplating doing so doesn’t deserve to be labelled racists, dickheads or dinosaurs.’

And the wider issues at stake? Australian journalist Peta Credlin said: ‘Albanese has been trying to exploit the goodwill that just about every Australian has towards Aboriginal people, and our commendable instinct to want to end Indigenous disadvantage, to drive a profound change to our system of government, based on the notion that the settlement of Australia was fundamentally unjust. That’s why it needs to fail, and why the bigger its failure the better in the long run.’ So the question, now, is not whether Yes will fail – but just how big its failure will be. We’ll bring you more on Coffee House as we get it.