Here’s one that’ll draw a good belly laugh from BFD readers:
New Zealand Prime Minister Chris Hipkins has held up his country as one that has successfully embraced reconciliation with its Indigenous people, in a strong signal of trans-Tasman support for the voice referendum.
Perhaps a decade ago, I would have said Chippy was mostly right. Today, though? New Zealand stands, not as a beacon, but a warning: Here there be taniwhas.
As Cam and I discussed recently on Political Tragics, New Zealanders might well say to Australians, “Don’t go here”. New Zealand is well down the path of segregation and separation. Introducing race-based policies, medical apartheid: even parking at Auckland hospital is differentiated according to race.
Contradicting Anthony Albanese’s assurances that the Voice wasn’t a precursor to a treaty, Hipkins blithered that “New Zealand was a stronger country because of its Treaty of Waitangi.”
Leaving aside that a great many Kiwis might beg to differ, Hipkins, like many Australians, fails to understand the historical and legal impossibility of a “treaty”, in Australia.
In 1788, the inhabitants of Australia possessed nothing like even the political organisation of the Maori tribes. Where Hobson was able, within a few decades of colonisation, to assemble a gathering of the major chiefs to debate a treaty in just two languages. In Australia, by contrast, in 1840, most of what are now state capitals were little more than villages and most of the interior was terra incognita to Europeans.
Even if, by some miracle of exploration, the British had explored most of the Australian landmass by then, they would have had to try to negotiate with at least 150 major language groups, and 500 “tribes” and countless bands, spread across an area nearly 30 times bigger than New Zealand. Most of them would have been unable to even understand each other, let alone the language of the colonisers.
In 2023, the idea of a “treaty” is even more ludicrous — not to mention dangerous.
Treaties are, after all, made between sovereign states. A nation-state cannot, by definition, make a treaty with a segment of its own citizens. As former PM John Howard recently said, “The idea that a sovereign country makes a treaty with part of itself is just preposterous. It is constitutionally repugnant… The very notion of this treaty is antagonistic to national sovereignty.”
Yet, this is the inescapable, if tacit, outcome of the Uluru Statement, the foundational document of the Voice. It is, though few apart from Howard seem to have noticed — or will admit publicly — a blueprint for an Aboriginal ethnostate.
The only possible way a “treaty” could be negotiated is if Australia is broken up into two nations, one consisting entirely and exclusively of a single race.
No amount of prattling about “the vibe” can escape this brutal reality.
Mr Albanese stressed on numerous occasions that Australia’s and New Zealand’s histories were different but said there was a consciousness about the voice referendum when he spoke to people in the Pacific.
Then there’s this arrant tosh:
“Of all the First World nations that would form colonies, we are alone in not recognising the First Nations peoples.”
The Australian
Firstly, “First Nations” is a ridiculous misnomer in Australia. It’s a faddishly imported American buzzword. While there were some tribal organisations in North America that could legitimately be recognised as nations, as we saw above, there was nothing remotely resembling a nation in Australia before 1788.
Secondly, how do we not recognise Aboriginal Australians? When the Constitution refers to “the people of Australia”, that ipso facto includes Aboriginal Australians. To argue otherwise necessarily means that Aborigines are not Australians.
Aside from that, Australia has NAIDOC Week, National Sorry Day, National Apology Day, National Reconciliation Week, Indigenous Literacy Day, National Close the Gap Day, Mabo Day, National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children’s Day… not to mention the endless, fatuous prattlings of “Welcome to Country” and “Traditional Acknowledgement”.
On a Constitutional level, it might be asked: Where does the British Constitution recognise the indigenous Britons?
Instead of answers to this, though, all we get is “vibe” stuff and obvious lies, and self-serving platitudes from a New Zealand PM steering his own country into the dark valley of racial separatism at a rate of knots.
Keep co-governance right where it is, New Zealand: we don’t want it over here.