Opinion
The vote may have been done and dusted before anyone’s dinner had cooled on election night, but the fallout from Australians’ emphatic rejection of the “Indigenous Voice” referendum continues.
Not just the temper-tantrums and name-calling from the sore-loser left. We’re finally seeing, for one, just how much of their shareholders’ money woke corporations flushed away, to promote a referendum that most of their own customers rejected. We’re also seeing just how appallingly useless a “Voice” is, in practice.
Australians for Indigenous Constitutional Recognition was the biggest spender on the failed voice referendum, far outstripping any other entity after the campaigning group spent nearly $44m urging Australians to vote Yes.
The organisation, led by a number of prominent Australians including being co-chaired by the lawyer and director of the Business Council of Australia, Danny Gilbert, and Indigenous film-maker Rachel Perkins, also received over $47m in donations.
A number of major Australian companies also declared large donations, including ANZ Bank ($2.5m), Woodside Energy ($2.18m), Commonwealth Bank ($2m), Westpac ($2.04m), BHP ($2m), Rio Tinto ($2m) and Woolworths ($1.56m) […]
The biggest single donor was the Paul Ramsay Foundation after it declared over $7m to the Yes campaign. This was followed by Givia ATF Yajilarra Trust ($4.4m).
In this David-and-Goliath battle, their opponents spent a fraction as much.
Prominent No campaigning group Australians for Unity was the second largest spender racking up nearly $12m in expenses after receiving nearly $11m in donations.
This was followed closely by Advance Australia, which declared over $10.4m in expenses after receiving just $1.3m in donations
The Australian
Unions also spent nearly $3m, despite most of them receiving no donations. The exception was the Australian Council of Trade Union which spent $883,685 from $790,000 in donations.
In other words, union bosses blew over $2m of union members’ money to promote a cause which most union members were opposed to.
But the left, as we know, never take “Hell, no” for an answer. Even while the ballots were still being counted, they were vowing to force through state “Voices”, by legislation. South Australia was the first state to actually do so.
How’s it worked out for them? Even worse than you’d expect.
The South Australian First Nations Voice to Parliament, legislated by the Malinauskas state Labor government, has flopped ignominiously. This follows on from South Australia delivering the second highest ‘No’ vote at 64 per cent in the 2023 referendum.
Aboriginal South Australians — numbering some 30,000 people — were eligible to vote for representatives on SA’s 46-member Voice. Less than 9% of them did so — just 2,619 votes were cast.
In some electorates, candidates were elected with as few as six votes. Three candidates did not receive a single vote, showing they could not be bothered to vote for themselves.
Yet, we were told, Aboriginal Australians were busting a gut to have a “Voice”.
Apparently not.
Despite a massive publicity blitz by the Labor government over two years, and despite the South Australian Electoral Commission heavily promoting the Voice elections, and after all the millions of taxpayer dollars (ten million of them) wasted on the Voice to date, the average Indigenous South Australian has rejected the state Voice. So much for ‘racism’ being behind the ‘No’ vote to the national Voice referendum.
So, now all SA has is its own, cheaper, tawdrier version of the late, unlamented ATSIC: a self-selected, tiny minority of activists claiming a “mandate” to wield power through a fourth, unwanted, tier of bureaucracy. At least, also like ATSIC, this useless boondoggle can simply be tossed out by the actual parliament.
The state’s Voice legislation must surely be repealed in the face of the results of the vote, although that would be to admit error by its champions. Premier Malinauskas has attempted damage control by saying the first state Voice election, despite its underwhelming and unrepresentative result, is ‘a start’. The state Liberal opposition has vowed to repeal the legislation that has given us the unwanted Voice, with One Nation’s Senate representative, Sarah Game, already having tabled a motion for legislative repeal in the wake of the national referendum result.
No one would mourn its demise, except for those who support the gravy train of race-based bureaucratic sinecures.
Spectator Australia
And there’s the rub: nothing squeals louder than a taxpayer-fattened pig terrified that its gold-plated trough is about to be snatched away.