The Yes campaign for the Voice has received surprising twin celebrity endorsements, with American rapper MC Hammer weighing in and a famous Australian changing his mind.
“I’m with you. Australia, it’s time. Repair the breach. #Yes2023,” Hammer, wrote in a post on X, formerly Twitter, late on Thursday (AEST).
Hammer, who lives in California and whose real name is Stanley Kirk Burrell, said he was unaware of Australia’s October 14 referendum until one of his 3.1 million followers alerted him earlier in the day.
“Australia has no treaty with its Indigenous people, and has done little in comparison to other British dominions like Canada, New Zealand and the United States to include and uplift its First Nations people,” he said.
Hammer, who is famous for hits such as U Can’t Touch This and 2 Legit 2 Quit, has followed up with a host of further tweets. He has also engaged with social media users who praised his stance – and with those who have attacked him.
Tweet from @MCHammer
Tweet from @MCHammer
It came as singer Kamahl revealed he had backflipped on his opposition to the Indigenous Voice after a week of “sleepless nights weighing the pros and cons”.
The Malaysian-born 88-year-old declared last week that he would vote no in October’s referendum, writing on social media: “What’s the Voice, I just don’t understand it. It’s just noise and it’s not clear. Vote no-o-oh-oh, o-o-o. We’re not going to vote apartheid. We don’t want one race privilege. Vote no-o-oh-oh.”
On Thursday, he revealed his change of heart, which came after a week reading about Indigenous history and asking questions in a podcast with Indigenous Yes campaigner and lawyer Eddie Synot and comedian Dane Simpson.
“I spent nearly three hours with them and I got a better understanding of what’s going on in the referendum,” he said.
“My earlier position was flippant. It was uninformed and came after I saw an ad on the computer.”
“The whole idea of voting No is abhorrent to me. We believe 90 per cent of bulls–t. Just learn the facts.”
“We are indoctrinated with so much bulls–t.”
Tweet from @OfficialKamahl
Tweet from @EddieSynot
‘Disgraceful, un-Australian’ abuse
The celebrity endorsements came as the Australian Electoral Commission revealed a “disgraceful” level of abuse on social media, amid disturbing levels of misinformation ahead of the vote.
“I don’t want to pick a fight with the internet or the social media companies … but we continue to try to ask them to remove content which we think breaches their own standards,” commissioner Tim Rogers said on Friday.
“Some of the content relates to veiled threats of violence, and even death threats against, the staff, and I think that’s frankly disgraceful, un-Australian – and odd.”
Rogers said the AEC continued to build its register of disinformation to combat some of the untruths.
“To be clear, it’s not about the topic. Our role is to talk about information, about the process. We never censor anybody – we’re not stopping anybody from saying anything, but if someone says something factually incorrect about the process, we correct it,” he said.
The AEC is also beginning its mammoth effort to prepare for next month’s vote. Planes, helicopters and boats will all be used to enable voting in remote areas.
“It’s a huge logistical event,” Rogers told the ABC.
“We’ll be visiting well over 750 remote communities. I think last week we dispatched 160,000 ballot papers to our overseas missions. It will be the largest in-person overseas vote that we’ve seen, with over 100 of our overseas missions able to take votes.”
He said there had already been 1.2 million applications for postal votes. That is still short of the two million total for the 2022 election – although about 200,000 ahead at the same time.
The supercharged postal vote numbers have implications for counting. Rogers said the more postal votes there were, the longer a final tally would take.
By law, the AEC cannot begin to count postal votes until 13 days after the referendum, to allow time for them to be returned.
“Quite often, people will then say, ‘Oh, my God, they’re rigging the election because they could count the votes if they wanted’. We have many powers in the AEC – ESP and telekinesis are not among them,” he said.
“If we don’t have the votes in our possession, we can’t count them. It’s as simple as that. Under the law, we have to wait. The more postal votes there are, potentially it might mean there’s a slightly delayed result.
“It depends on the margin and just how big the margin is. And that will be … we won’t know that until the night, obviously.”
Voter enrolments have surged to a record 97.7 per cent of eligible Australians ahead of the October 14 referendum.
The AEC said the roll had increased by 447,447 people since the 2022 federal election – a rise of 2.6 per cent.
It is the largest enrolment in Australian history, with 17,676,347 people able to have their say on an Indigenous Voice to Parliament.
The number of First Nations people enrolled is at a record high, along with young voters.
The post Celebrity backing for Voice – and a surprise change of heart appeared first on The New Daily.
