New prime minister Anthony Albanese has taken time out from his busy schedule of overseas trips and holidays at home to announce a referendum on a constitutionally-enshrined “Indigenous Voice to Parliament”. What is an “Indigenous Voice”? Well, don’t bother asking, because Albo won’t tell you. In fact, he’s explicitly arguing that if they explained it in detail, Australians wouldn’t vote for it.
Yes, he’s actually admitting that. The result is that the question being put forward is perhaps the vaguest that the Australian people have been asked to vote on in the history of Federation. Other referenda have either included the detail of the proposal in the question, or asked for a Yes or No vote on an explicit draft law.
Australians take a notoriously dim view of Constitutional change — and the founders of Federation wisely made it difficult to achieve. Of the 44 referenda proposed over the past 120 years, only eight were passed. (Same-sex marriage was not passed by referendum, nor even by plebiscite, but by the weakest “democratic” means imaginable: a voluntary postal survey.)
The very vagueness of the referendum question is sadly in keeping with the whole Voice campaign: what’s even the point of it? Why do we “need” this Voice? What will it achieve? How will it work? How will eligibility be decided?
On all of these vital questions, the answers are missing, muddled, or mendaciously obfuscated.
Proponents claim that Aboriginal people are not represented in the Constitution. This is a blatant lie. When the Constitution refers to “the people of every State and of every part of the Commonwealth”, that includes Aboriginal Australians as much as it does the immigrant who was naturalised yesterday. (It never seems to occur to “progressives” that claiming that immigrants are “100% Aussie” is logically incompatible with their conceit that Aboriginal Australians are “more” Australian than those of us with generations of ancestors committed to the dust of this land.)
Voice proponents also blither about “recognising” Aboriginal Australians. When, we might ask, are Aboriginal Australians not recognised? It’s certainly not during the ubiquitous, odious “Traditional Acknowledgement” ceremonies droned at everything from a school awards night to a simple plane flight). Nor is it during “National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Day of Recognition” (which actually goes for a whole week). Not even football games can escape having an “Indigenous Round”.
So “recognition” certainly can’t be the point of a Voice.
It’s claimed that the proposal is to create a “body” for Aboriginal Australians to “consult” on legislation that affects them. In answer to which, many have pointed out that Aboriginal Australians do have a voice to Parliament, the same one every Australians has: their vote.
In fact, as a result of the last election, Aboriginal Australians have a disproportionate Parliamentary representation. Notwithstanding the blinding whiteness of some of them, currently there are nearly double the proportion of Aboriginal senators and members to the proportion of Aboriginal Australians in the recent census. That’s quite a “voice” already.
Added to that, as Aboriginal academic Anthony Dillon has pointed out, there’s already a list of at least 50 Aboriginal “voices”, ranging from the Indigenous Advisory Council and the Indigenous Land Corporation to National Indigenous Television and National Indigenous Times.
Finally, what legislation is ever passed without, as they say, “consulting with key stakeholders”?
Indeed, as a key document that is regularly referred to by Voice proponents, The Indigenous Voice Co-design Process, makes not exactly clear (in keeping with such reports, clarity is not exactly one of its virtues), “consulting” is apparently all a Voice would do. According to the report, the Voice would not have the power to alter existing or proposed legislation.
If that’s it, what’s the point? It’s already covered. Why is a referendum even needed, when the Government could simply, easily, just legislate another statutory body like the late, unlamented Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission (disbanded in 2005 because of its endemic corruption)?
The sheer non-necessity of a referendum to establish such a dishwater body naturally breeds suspicions that there is a hidden, “real” agenda. The Voice is, not without reason, accused of being a Trojan horse for everything from a third chamber to apartheid.
Reading the other document widely cited as a blueprint for the Voice, the “Uluru Statement from the Heart”, it’s hard to escape the uneasy misgiving that those suspicions are precisely on the money.
The Uluru Statement refers to “Aboriginal sovereigtny” five times in its 400 words. “Sovereignty” is a word with specific meaning in international law: the sole, supreme lawmaking authority within a territory. The Statement was co-written by several constitutional lawyers, so they cannot have been unaware of what it means to assert that “Aboriginal sovereignty… has never been ceded or extinguished”. They must also know that it cannot co-exist “with the sovereignty of the Crown”. Sovereignty is absolute and exclusive.
We know someone’s not telling the truth about sovereignty. Which poses the question of what else they’re not telling the truth about.
Another mendacious term used (three times) in the Statement is the ludicrous nonsense of “First Nations”. There was nothing resembling a “nation”, in its realistic usage, in Australia prior to 1 January 1901. On that day, the Commonwealth of Australia became literally the first nation on this land.
As is the way with the left, “First Nations” is nothing more than an imported American slogan that just sounds pleasing to leftist ears. No doubt, too, its sudden ubiquity is of a piece with the now-dreary formulation of any given “Indigenous” personage as a “proud [insert tribe] man/woman” (notwithstanding that many of the people who are wont to adopt such sobriquets are obviously more English, Irish, Scot or German than they are any local tribal group).
It’s all just a bit of pretentious putting-on-airs. People who might once have hidden a “touch of the tar” in the family history are now suddenly strutting about, proudly proclaiming themselves tar-babies, through-and-through.
“First Nations” is more of the same. I suspect that its popularity springs from a scarce-concealed sense of embarrassment that “tribal bands” is the most cohesive level of political organisation that the “world’s oldest living culture” was able to come up with, after 60,000 years.
Like the Maori who were never aware of a wider-enough world to actually come up with a specific name to distinguish their land, the boundaries of the pre-European Australian mind were mostly set at the tribal level. This is evidenced by the fact that there were no collective nouns beyond the tribe. Such collective names as have recently been coined still do not cover Aboriginal people as a whole, and are merely the regional term for “person” or “human being” (Koori, Anangu, Noongar and so on).
This is the inherent danger of the whole Voice concept: ingraining tribalism into the Constitution, the founding document of the nation. Whether proponents will admit it or not, the Voice is rooted in racial separatism. Proposing to write it into the Constitution means that Australia will legally become a nation of one specific race and everyone else.
In 1967, Australians voted in one of the precious few referenda they’ve ever actually passed. The 1967 referendum, unlike the proposed Voice referendum, was very specific and removed racially separatist language pertaining to Aboriginal Australians. It passed with an extraordinarily high majority, 91%, and a majority in every state.
Nearly half a century later, Australians are being cajoled into re-inserting racially separatist language pertaining to Aboriginal Australians.
And they have the cheek to call this “progressive”.