In France, Le Monde said Indigenous Australians had expressed anger and anguish that the white majority had rejected calls for “a reckoning with the country’s bloody colonial past”.

“More than 230 years since the first British penal ships anchored in Sydney, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese proposed the reforms as a step towards racial reconciliation. But instead, it has sparked a deeply rancorous and racially tinged debate that exposed a gulf between First Nations people and the white majority,” it said.

Deutsche Welle, German’s public, state-owned international broadcaster, described the result as a “major setback to the country’s efforts for reconciliation with its First Peoples”. In Italy La Repubblica, the left-wing daily paper based in Rome, said the vote which was aimed to give new rights to First Nations peoples had been sunk by a campaign which scared voters with “disgusting lies”.

The Irish Times said the reasons for the decline in support since the initial strong opinion polls were broad.

“Albanese, and his ministers were prominent faces of the Yes movement, and while Labor did not lead the campaign, the government’s focus on the referendum was seen alongside its handling of other national issues,” it reported.

“It weathered accusations that it championed the voice push while failing to deliver tangible improvements for citizens facing cost of living pressures and a housing crisis hurt the yes side.”

Al Jazeera, the Qatari-owned 24-hour English-language news channel, said the result may also have implications for misinformation in Australia, referencing a campaign spread through social media that the Voice would become a third chamber of parliament and bring Aboriginal people more federal funding.

It said Albanese had criticised sections of the media that he said steered the referendum debate away from the core issues.

In the United States, The Wall Street Journal said the rejection of the constitutional amendment, which would have given Indigenous people more say in government, reflected “deep divisions over how best to address the legacy of colonialism and improve the lives of the nation’s first inhabitants”.

It highlighted that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people were now “poorer, less educated and less healthy than other groups”.

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“The result shows the difficulties in reaching a consensus to address historical wrongs in countries that are grappling with their colonial histories.”

The New York Times, which in the past week has likened the tactics of the No campaign to “Trump-style misinformation”, has warned the reverberations from election conspiracy theories, until recently the domain of political fringes, could be acute.

It said the result had crushed Indigenous hopes of reconciliation, but the campaigns had “raised fears and hopes that were both overblown”.

“Many of them saw it as a sign of Australia taking a step to do right by them after centuries of abuse and neglect,” it said.

“In reality, the proposal, known as the Voice, was much more modest, making some of these expectations rather lofty. At the same time, it had given rise to unrealistic fears – like of homeowners being forced to return their land to Indigenous people – that galvanised opposition to the Voice.”

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