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John Farnham’s voice is best known for ringing out across stadiums and even the rolling hills of Falls Festival.
But on Sunday, supporters of an Indigenous Voice to parliament unveiled the music legend’s involvement in the Yes campaign on a quiet backstreet in Collingwood, a Melbourne suburb with a long history of working-class activism.
Professor Megan Davis from the Yes campaign says it was difficult to keep John Farnham’s involvement secret.Credit: Luis Enrique Ascui
Farnham’s 1986 hit You’re the Voice plays throughout the Yes campaign’s two-minute call-to-action video, which started hitting TV screens at 6pm on Sunday, just over a month before the October 14 Voice referendum.
The ad features throwbacks to the 1967 referendum, former prime minister John Howard’s controversial gun buyback program and last decade’s same-sex marriage plebiscite. It ends with the tagline: “How we respond will make history.”
In Collingwood on Sunday, flanked by elders and young supporters holding Yes signs, Uluru Dialogue co-chair Professor Megan Davis said the commercial would be particularly emotional for Gen X, given You’re the Voice was released when that generation was coming of age. However, she said the ad was for all age groups.
“The ad showcases an extraordinary number of incredible decisions that we’ve made as a nation that we were anxious about, but actually just led to a better Australia. That’s what the ad is about,” she said. “It’s targeted to all Australians.”
She told the crowd it was “very, very hard” to keep Farnham’s involvement in the campaign a secret. “Australians have been stopping me saying, ‘Have you thought about You’re the Voice?’ It was so hard to [just] say, ‘Yes.’ ”
Undecided voters – which some polls suggest could make up as much as a third of the population – have a little more than a month to decide whether they, too, will say yes.
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