Greetings from Sydney: notes on the far right and The Voice

I’m writing this from Sydney, halfway through a six-week research stay. It’s my second time in Australia and, as it happens, my first time doing sustained archival work.

What brought me across the Pacific is a project on how the populist radical right mobilizes nativist discourse against Indigenous peoples. Most of what we know about nativism comes from studying hostility toward immigrants: the outsider at the border. But in settler societies the radical right also constructs an enemy within, recasting Indigenous claims (recognition, treaty, a constitutional voice) as threats to national unity. Australia’s 2023 referendum on The Voice, which proposed a constitutionally enshrined Indigenous advisory body and was rejected at the national vote, offers an unusually sharp case for watching that discourse at work.

My corpus so far is parliamentary: speeches from the referendum period. What Hansard doesn’t capture is the campaign itself, so most of my days here are spent at the State Library of New South Wales going through referendum ephemera. Pamphlets, flyers, how-to-vote cards, much of it never digitized. Political scientists of my generation are trained on surveys and text-as-data; there is something clarifying about holding the actual leaflet that landed in someone’s mailbox, with its fonts and its fears intact.

In early August I’ll head to Canberra to present preliminary results at a work-in-progress seminar at the University of Canberra, and to spend some time in the federal collections at the National Library.

Why does a Chilean political scientist care about an Australian referendum? Because the literature on the radical right is still written mostly from and about Europe, and its concepts travel imperfectly. Understanding how nativism operates in a settler democracy far from the North Atlantic speaks directly to the questions I work on in Latin America, including how far-right discourse in Chile constructs its own internal enemies. More on that, I hope, in a future post.

And if you happen to be in Sydney or Canberra during these weeks and want to talk far-right politics, archives, or where to find decent coffee near the Mitchell Library, my inbox is open.