Context:

The Voice to Parliament explained (The Conversation, August 30 2023)

EDITORIAL

Criticise the Voice if you must, but leave out the racism and vitriol

 

Australia’s Constitution is not only a symbolic document reflecting our society’s most fundamental principles, but as the supreme law of the land has a meaningful and real-world impact on many aspects of our society. Altering the Constitution, therefore, is no small thing. The binding stipulation that every adult must have a say in the matter reflects the enormity of the undertaking. That is as it should be.

Drafted in the 1890s, the Constitution has proven difficult to change. Since Federation, of the 44 proposed alterations put to referendums on 17 occasions, only eight have won enough of the public’s favour to succeed. Many of the changes put forward have sparked vigorous national debates. Again, that is as it should be. Alterations of such consequence should never just slip through without a thorough airing of the possible repercussions.

The referendum on the proposed Indigenous Voice to parliament should be no different. Years in the making, its final wording was put through a rigorous and exhaustive process. But that is no argument for rubber-stamping it. A robust public debate should be a given. It must pass muster not just by legal scholars, but the wider community.

The Age supports the Yes vote in this referendum. It supports the view that the creation of an advisory body to represent the interests of Australia’s Indigenous communities when our national laws are being drawn up and determined can only help in closing the gap with the rest of Australia.

The Age supporting the Yes vote, however, does not translate to advocating for the No campaign to stay silent. Quite the opposite. There are genuine concerns about how the Voice would operate and its possible effectiveness. The Yes campaign has failed to clearly articulate its message. Concerns about the proposal need to be heard loud and clear and be openly discussed.

Signs that the debate was tipping over into fearmongering, intimidation and crude racist insults have been bubbling to the surface for some time. Earlier this year, a spokesperson for the eSafety Commissioner reported an increase of more than 10 per cent in complaints of abuse, threats and harassment being directed at Indigenous Australians online.

According to the First Peoples’ Assembly of Victoria, it has been getting worse. Assembly co-chair Rueben Berg said its Facebook posts were now targeted in hundreds of comments a week that contained racist abuse and hatred.

What is so alarming is that social media companies are turning a blind eye to the often vile material being disseminated across their platforms. Posts featuring racial slurs and stereotypes have been judged by Meta mediators not to have breached Facebook’s community standards. It’s an appalling lack of judgment.

Racist and abusive comments have not been limited to the dark recesses of the internet. No campaign leader Nyunggai Warren Mundine has been forced to banish two people from his referendum campaign over allegedly racist comments.

He also had to distance himself from Australian Jewish Association head David Adler, who sits on the advisory board of top No outfit Advance with former prime minister Tony Abbott. In a bizarre and nasty outburst, Adler questioned independent senator Lidia Thorpe’s Aboriginal heritage and repeatedly suggested former ABC journalist Stan Grant had artificially darkened his skin.

Some have argued that Adler’s extreme comments do not represent the views of those putting the case against the referendum.

But at the recent Conservative Political Action Conference in Sydney, which was chaired by Mundine and had the Voice as its central theme, comedian Rodney Marks thought it was funny to refer to traditional owners as “violent black men” and call the Indigenous leader Bennelong a “woman basher”. Hours earlier, another No campaign spokesperson, Gary Johns, claimed some people in Indigenous communities lived in a “stupor” and recommended they “learn English”. To state the obvious, that is not humour – it’s abhorrent.

As the most prominent proponent of the No campaign, Opposition Leader Peter Dutton steers well clear of such repugnant language. But he must have known early on that his rhetoric arguing against the Voice would set the tone for debate on the referendum.

Back in May, when the federal parliament began debating the landmark piece of legislation, he did not hold back, arguing it would “re-racialise” Australia and that: “It will have an Orwellian effect where all Australians are equal, but some Australians are more equal than others.”

Mark Knight, The Herald Sun, September 17 2023.

Mark Knight, The Age, September 11 2023.

The voice to parliament may be the answer but what is the question? And will governments listen?

First Dog on the Moon. The Guardian, September 27 2023.

Fiona Katauskas in The Guardian, September 14, 2023

Fiona Katauskas in The Guardian, August 31 2023

Mark Knight in The Herald Sun, August 7 2023.

Leunig, August 12 2023.

Voice referendum: Julian Leeser accuses no campaign of attacking high-profile Aboriginal people to stir anger (The Guardian, July 2023)

A voice will help make right this country’s history of division. Will Australians slap away our outstretched hand? (Sean Gordon. The Guardian, September 2023)

A list of Indigenous-focused organisations has been once again circulating online, with claims that Australia already has a Voice to Parliament. But none of the organisations on the list resemble the Voice proposal #RMITABCFactCheck

A duty to listen
After all the things that have been spoken and written about the Voice, I was surprised to find only about 90 words in the proposed amendment. I was expecting more.
The actual words say a body representing Indigenous citizens may advise the government. And, that the parliament has the power to decide the detail of what that body looks like and how it is created. The only thing parliament can’t do if we vote Yes is to abolish the Voice. In reading the amendment to the Constitution, I can’t find anything else that supports the other more detailed and at times alarmist claims being made.
Everyone, read the 90 words that are intended to go into the Constitution, rather than listening to a bunch of people who seem keen for us not to do that. And then we can each decide whether these words should appear in the Constitution or not, and whether they actually carry the dangers that some say they do.
I would like it to be clear in the Constitution that the First Nations people of this country have a right to be heard, and that the rest of us have a duty to listen.
Tim Shirley, Benalla

This was un-Australian?
Saturday morning, about 80 Yes supporters are marching through Sale when a passing driver shouts “Un-Australian”. Gobsmacked, we laugh. Later, a darker thought emerges: was she really trying to say it is un-Australian to show compassion for our Indigenous Australians?
John Gwyther,
Coongulla

A debate is needed
A number of polls have asked voters why they are intending to vote Yes or No in the Voice referendum. It is interesting that these polls show that a considerable number of Yes voters have made their choice on the basis of ″⁣let’s give the Voice a try″⁣. I can understand people wanting to give it a go on the basis that it might deliver benefits for very disadvantaged remote Indigenous communities.
However, to make the Voice a permanent feature of political life in the hope that it might achieve good results may be seen by some voters as a step too far. I think the question of permanence is exercising the minds of many undecided voters and it is, therefore, crucial that the Minister for Indigenous Australians, Linda Burney, debates this issue with her opposition counterpart, Jacinta Nampijinpa Price.
Adrian Hassett, Vermont

Don’t think short term
The No voters can’t see that the Voice could improve the lives of Indigenous people and their fitting into wider society. The reason is they are looking into the near future. The changes that the Voice can make are in fact well down the track and are likely inter-generational. Nobody has a suggestion as to what might make differences in the short term. Doing nothing for that reason clearly wont help. Moving towards possible long-term improvements is the only and best course we have.
John Groom, Bentleigh

Welcome experience
I had the privilege of experiencing the welcome to country at the Collingwood v GWS preliminary final on Friday.
I was heartened that the 97,000-plus crowd shunned Sam Newman’s call to boo during the ceremony. In fact, there was a noticeably louder applause before and after the welcome to country as a sign of respect.
Newman should be acknowledged for his various achievements on and off the football field, and the work and skill involved in those achievements. Unfortunately, he fails to see that his achievements are less accessible to some other Australians.
Michael Radywonik, Moonee Ponds

The Age, September 24 2023

Andrew Bolt: The Voice is dead and Prime Minister Anthony Albanese helped kill it

Nothing will now save Labor’s Voice from a massive defeat, and the Albanese Government must now save itself from dying with it.

For a start, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s leadership is finished unless he starts – today – to think with his brain and not his heart. To stop preaching and start listening.

Prime Minister, your ways no longer work. Crying when you announced in March the wording of the Voice question was a warning to voters, not an appeal.

Shouting passionately at us to “vote for an idea” when you last month announced the referendum date just confirmed your idea was all dream and no details.

Gleefully quoting the lyrics of John Farnham’s You’re the Voice – now the Yes campaign’s anthem – to claim Aborigines would no longer “live in fear”, just reminded us how much you rely on emotive exaggeration to push your plan.

It’s over. Albanese started the year with almost two-thirds support in polls for his Voice, a kind of Aboriginal-only advisory parliament, cemented into our constitution,

But every poll shows the more that Australians heard about it, the more they hated it – less for its lack of detail than because it will divide Australians by race.

Newspoll last week has Yes vote cratering to 38 per cent, with the No vote at 53 per cent and undecided at 9.

The Redbridge poll last weekend was even worse for the Yes campaign. It forced the undecided to decide, and found the Yes vote was 39 per cent and the No at 61 per cent.

So the Voice is stone dead, and there’s nothing left in Albanese’s tank except tainted money from the corporates to buy more of the ads few believe and many now resent.

In fact, voters now hate such nagging and bullying so much that the pro-Voice AFL decided not to push the scheme at its grand final.

But just admitting the Voice is dead won’t save Labor. Albanese must change. He must realise his own arrogance and laziness helped kill it.

Those same failings even threaten to cripple the economy. Albanese’s ambitious rivals are jostling for attention by designing devastating policies on global warming, industrial relations and the environment, while Albanese jets around the world, not paying attention to the details that turn a dream into a disaster.

Incredibly, he last week admitted he didn’t even know his Transport Minister had blocked extra Qatar flights and kept airfares high to the benefit of Qantas, until Virgin’s boss rang him days later when he was overseas.

With the Voice, Albanese’s performance has been astonishing.

He didn’t compromise with the Liberals. He instead let an advisory panel stacked with Aboriginal radicals, former Marxists and race baiters push on him a model for the Voice that went for broke – a say over every issue that this Voice of 24 selected activists would choose, plus the power to “make representations” to every federal public servant, from the Reserve Bank to the army, before a decision was made.

And all these powers would be in the constitution, so unelected judges – not our politicians – had the final say on how this would work.

When asked for details on how it would all work, Albanese just asked for the voters’ trust. And to sell the Voice, he signed up the elites – corporate leaders, the big sporting codes, union bosses and celebrities – even American basketball legend Shaquille O’Neal and wildly loathed Qantas boss Alan Joyce – triggering a furious revolt from grassroots Australians.

So here’s what will happen come referendum day. Albanese will be savaged for forcing on us a hopelessly racist idea that’s just incited more division, anger and resentment.

Many voters will blame him for wasting $360 million and the best part of the past year on his crazy crusade, when Australians are struggling to even pay for their petrol, groceries, mortgages and power bills.

Aboriginal activist who designed this toxic Voice, like Noel Pearson, will blame Albanese instead for not selling their poison.

And Voters will question Albanese’s other crusade – on global warming. They’ll see the same weaknesses in their Prime Minister: the emotive dreaming of a green future where your power bills fall, while in this real world your bills rise, your power starts to fail and every green scheme blows out.

Albanese will then be typecast as a man dazzled by his dreams, too lazy and bored with details to figure how to make them work. A man of passions, not plans.

In short, worse than Whitlam. Watch the polls sink for him, too.

The Herald Sun, September 10 2023.

Campbell: What most Australians care about more than Voice

With less than three weeks away from the Voice referendum, the latest RedBridge poll makes it clear it’s not a priority for most Australians, writes James Campbell.

From the way we’ve been talking about it more or less non-stop since election night last year, it would be easy to think the Voice is something about which Australians give a toss.

But as the latest RedBridge poll makes clear, most of us really couldn’t care less.

Earlier this month the pollster gave people a menu and asked them to pick five issues they think the Albanese Federal Labor Government should be focusing on at the moment.

The winner, surprise, surprise was cost-of-living which 49 per cent of the population ranked No. 1, 20 per cent ranked as No. 2 and 11 per cent put third.

The next most pressing issue was housing affordability which 73 per cent of respondents put somewhere in their top five.

In descending order the issues picked after that were the economy and jobs, health funding, wages, climate change, transitioning to renewable energy, national security, and roads and infrastructure funding.

Only two per cent of people had the Voice as their top priority and another two each had it as their second or third while four per cent each rated it either four or five.

All up, with rounding, only 15 per cent of people thought it should be one of the government’s top five priorities, whereas 31 per cent had roads and infrastructure somewhere in there.

If I were writing this for The Guardian I suppose I would pause at this point to ask what it says about our country that more people care about the traffic than care about the conditions in which some of the fellow Australians live.

But it’s not really a surprise is it?

Not only were Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders just 3.8 per cent of the population at the time of the last census, there’s a misplaced perception they live in faraway parts of regional Australia which are alien to the suburbs where the overwhelming majority of Australians live.

In other words, expecting people to rank this as a high priority for their government was to expect them to put other people’s interests ahead of their own.

Yet here we are, less than three weeks away from a vote that, if the polls are right, is going to leave the country feeling pretty crook about it itself.

Reading these results it is hard not to wonder why Albo decided to put the Voice at the centre of his victory speech on election night last year.

Perhaps his assumption was that while Australians might not care much about Indigenous affairs, what was being proposed was so modest they could be persuaded to vote for it anyway.

The alternative, that he mistook the media’s interest in Aboriginal Australia for the public’s, doesn’t bear thinking about.

Albo’s bet, if that’s what it was, seems to have been that this was a modest proposal which the public could be brought to accept, just as they accepted the 1967 referendum which gave the Commonwealth the power to make laws for Aboriginal people and to count them in the census.

But the circumstances surrounding the 1967 vote were very different.

Not only was that proposal supported by both sides of politics, it took place in a very different atmosphere.

I don’t mean that Australians in 1967 were more alive to the importance of Indigenous issues than the people who answered RedBridge’s poll earlier this month.

If anything I’d be prepared to bet they were even less exercised by them than voters are today.

The difference is that in 1967 Australians were able to go to a football game, catch an aeroplane or watch the ABC without being invited to acknowledge the traditional owners of the land on which they stood and to pay their respects to their elders, past, present and emerging.

For a giggle Channel 10 – not that Channel 10 existed – did not rename Melbourne Naarn during the weather report in NAIDOC week in 1967.

Indeed NAIDOC week was still NAIDOC Day in 1967.

In other words the 1967 referendum did not happen at a time when many Australians, especially older ones, were fearful the legitimacy of the whole post-1788 project was being undermined.

James Campbell. The Herald Sun, September 24 2023.

 

 

Jeff Kennett: Voting No to the Voice is merely a matter of principle

Do Australians want our Constitution to give one section of our community special access and influence with the government above all other citizens? This is the matter of principle we must decide on October 14.

Only one matter of principle will be decided at the referendum on October 14.

Do we as Australians want our Constitution to give one section of our community special access and influence with the federal government above all other citizens?

Or should our Constitution treat all people equally? As Australians today we cannot change the past, but as citizens living today we can affect the opportunities for ourselves, and those of Australians born in the future.

Australia’s population today is very different from what it was in 1788 when white settlement began. It is very different from when the Commonwealth of Australia was formed in 1901. Our population is certainly very different from post-World War II when immigration greatly expanded.

It is even very different again from after the Vietnam War when so many new arrivals came from a much more diverse range of countries.

For those of us born in Australia, and those who have chosen to live here, we call Australia home.

Most of those who left their place of birth chose Australia because of our egalitarianism, our rule of law, freedom of speech, but importantly the opportunities that could be realised through solid effort.

Today, Australia belongs to us all equally, and increasingly so.

The referendum attempts, by changing our Constitution, to include an Indigenous Voice to the Parliament, in part to make good for white settlement in 1788.

The referendum seeks to give the ancestors, our current Indigenous and Torres Strait Islanders and their children, a special place of influence and representation with the federal government of the day over all other Australians.

That I suggest is inappropriate, unfair, and discriminates against all other Australians.

We should all be treated equally through and by our Constitution.

That is the matter of principle that we must decide on October 14.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, by rolling two questions into one, that is, recognition of our Indigenous and Torres Strait Islanders, and the Indigenous Voice to Parliament in the Constitution, is at risk of losing both when the community votes.

This is the PM’s own goal.

Had the PM divided the question into two, one being recognition and the other the establishment of the Voice to the Parliament through the Constitution, I am sure the first would have succeeded; the second I doubt, but at least we would have generously recognised our first settlers in our Constitution.

This referendum is not like the one held in 1967 when Australians understandably agreed that Indigenous and Torres Strait Islanders should be counted as part of our population, and that the commonwealth should be able to make laws for them.

Our agreement to those changes removed from our Constitution the very real discrimination against our first settlers.

Now the PM is wanting to return positive discrimination to our Constitution, this time by discriminating against all non-Indigenous Australians, in fact 96.6 per cent of our population.

There are many other issues being raised in the current debate, but the fundamental question is one of equality within the Constitution.

The fact that we don’t know how a Voice would work concerns many.

Will the recommendations of the Calma-Langton report be adopted, or will Mr Albanese appoint the noisiest advocates for the Voice to its administration?

My experience with the Indigenous community – given there are hundreds of mobs or tribes and groups – is that one solution will never suit all, and therefore where problems exist they have to be locally addressed. Of course, not all Indigenous men and women are doing it tough, but so many like to think and speak of the community as all being in total need.

Indigenous leader Noel Pearson recently said, “Give us a say in the decisions that are made about us ... by having a voice we will be responsible for closing the gap”.

Can I remind Mr Pearson there are so many Indigenous groups and individuals currently advising governments who already have a voice?

I am voting No to the one question because I have no alternative.

I am voting to uphold that the Constitution should be for all Australians equally.

I want my grandchildren to have the same access to the federal government as every other Australian citizen, regardless of age, colour or heritage.

I am tired of Australian corporates and sporting bodies spending millions of dollars telling me or suggesting how I should vote. Corporates don’t vote. Individuals do.

Even worse, some advocates for a Yes vote suggest that by voting No we are racist.

I am not. I am voting No because I believe the Constitution should be for all Australians.

It’s a matter of principle.

Jeff Kennett is a former premier of Victoria

The Herald Sun, September 5 2023.

As an undecided Indigenous voter, I just want the Australian public to vote according to the facts

Rather than Australians going to the booths considering the merits, or lack thereof, of a simple advisory body with no legislative power, we have instead been fed the politics of fear, or the politics of hope.

With just under one month to go until Australian voters cast their votes on the Voice referendum, the last week has, at least for me, become a tale of two National Press Club addresses. 

In the run-up to the referendum, the National Press Club has been running a series of Indigenous speakers of different persuasions on the Voice. Lidia Thorpe, for example, gave an address from the Indigenous sovereignty activist perspective on her 50th birthday a couple of weeks ago. The last two addresses, however, have featured an interesting pair: Marcia Langton speaking for the Voice, and Jacinta Nampijinpa Price speaking against it.

Interesting to me because, as Price stated in the opening paragraphs of her speech, she and Langton previously appeared together on the stage, back in 2016 in a Centre for Independent Studies-badged event to speak about the violence faced by Aboriginal women. It was an important topic, but a controversial speech for many in the community, not least because the media ran with an idea stated in it that Aboriginal men hide behind culture to avoid penalty, while it also ignored any impacts of colonisation that may lead to inflated numbers.

 

It seems the relationship between the two women soured after this appearance together. A couple of years later, as Price was increasing her profile to run as the CLP candidate for Lingiari in the 2019 federal election, Langton was published in The Saturday Paper calling out Price’s proximity to alt-right and neo-Nazi support. There was truth to these claims — one of Price’s more well-known stunts was a truly bonkers campaign with Mark Latham to “save Australia Day”, for example — but it did leave some of us wondering just what had gone down between these two former collaborators to lead to such a takedown.

Fast-forward five years, and we see Price and Langton not only on opposing sides of the Voice debate, but delivering starkly different speeches on the same stage within a week of each other. Yet in some ways, these speeches weren’t so different. Both speeches, to different degrees, left the concept of “truth” at the door.

Taking her platform, Price proceeded to reel off some of the misleading talking points the No campaign has been utilising throughout this entire process, with a fair evocation of rank nationalism along the way. Her first point was to recycle the myth that the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission (ATSIC) had been a failure while pointing out that if a Voice goes in the constitution, it’s a permanent fixture that cannot be dismantled like ATSIC. This is blatantly incorrect as the third point of the proposed constitutional amendment states that the composition and powers of the Voice shall be determined by laws made by Parliament. 

Price also repeated the claim that the Voice would insert race into the constitution. When this claim was challenged from the audience by NITV’s John Paul Janke on the basis that race already exists in multiple sections of the constitution, what followed was an artful dodge by Price, as if she were unaware of this fact.

Perhaps the biggest shock to me from Price’s speech was her claim that voters don’t have the detail of what the Voice will be. Last I checked, Price is a senator, the structure of the Voice will be decided by the Parliament, and as a member of Parliament, Price will indeed be one of the very people debating this proposed legislation and then voting on it. In other words, she is one of the very people who will be deciding what the Voice will look like in the future, despite her stating “we don’t know what it will look like in the future”. Finally, Price claimed that colonisation had had no ongoing impact on Indigenous peoples. This was said with a straight face.

Professor Langton’s speech, however, was not delivered with a straight face. It was, instead, delivered with a passionate, hopeful, and at times tormented face. Langton spoke directly about the impacts of colonisation and the Frontier Wars. 

Yet straight off the bat, a claim Langton made stuck in my craw. When discussing what potential impacts the Voice could have, Langton appeared to intimate that legislations such as the Northern Territory Intervention and the BasicsCard rollout would not just simply be allowed to happen as they had in 2007. Firstly, this is incorrect. While the Voice would be able to make representations to Parliament on proposed legislation, there is nothing stating that Parliament must listen and act accordingly. Secondly, Langton notoriously supported both the rollout of the Intervention and the principles of welfare quarantining and put its many failures down to poor policy implementation.

What’s happened to Langton since her address has been nothing short of disgusting, as the media and people like Peter Dutton have sought to twist her delivered words into claims she called No voters “stupid”. Her Saturday Paper opinion piece has also resurfaced in an attempt to discredit points made in her address under the ridiculous guise of Price being a victim of Langton’s “racism”.

In this contorting, however, what falls by the wayside is that Langton was talking with hope on how the Voice “could” operate according to sentiments contained within the Uluru Statement, as well as the recommendations contained within the Voice co-design report she undertook with Tom Calma. None of these ideas are actualities set in stone as illustrated by the proposed constitutional amendments.

All this considered, I find myself again frustrated. Rather than Australians going to the booths considering the merits, or lack thereof, of a simple advisory body with no legislative power, we have instead been fed the politics of fear, or the politics of hope. We have no proof that the Voice will have any impacts on Australia’s systemic racism and build Indigenous community trust in the system (as claimed by Langton), nor is there any truth to claims that a successful referendum will lead to division (as claimed by Price). 

As an undecided Indigenous voter, all I find myself wishing for is that the Australian public votes according to knowledge, rather than half-truths and apathy. In this tale of two speeches, I feel this wish may be a mere pipe dream.

Celeste Liddle, Crikey, September 15 2023.

 

Labor’s dithering is dooming the Voice, but there’s still time to change the dirty nappy 

Albanese is intent on making the Voice his 'light on the hill' moment. Problem is his party privatised the hill and outsourced the lighting to contractors somewhere back in the 1980s.

(IMAGE: GORKIE/PRIVATE MEDIA)

The Yes campaign has the stink of death about it, and its supporters are pinching their noses and pretending otherwise. The polls have mysteriously reversed overnight (it seems to some), and a hint of panic trickles through the ranks of the politicians, advocates and commentariat who were so certain of a win not one year ago. Somehow a campaign designed to appear like a chess wunderkind launching a late-game play is instead reminiscent of a drunken, pot-bellied, elderly uncle struggling to rise from his armchair before his nightly laxative kicks in.

The only thing worse than a filled nappy is one that refuses to be changed.

Despite the shock of disappointment, there is an air of inevitability to the whole thing. The Voice has morphed into a reckoning for a certain strain of Australian liberalism, one that has spent the better part of the past decade reluctant to acknowledge its own decay. Anthony Albanese and the ALP are both the product of and proponents for this creeping rot, which spreads to all that it touches — the Voice being no exception.

The Voice is not a particularly radical or revolutionary piece of policy (if anything, it’s 30 years overdue) when considered beyond the bounds of culture war tribalism. But it has been boxed and marketed by Albo and co as a vague fix-all that will undo that which cannot be undone, a one-sip healing potion that can magic away the stoppages that make reform in this area difficult, while empowering those our nation’s very existence depends on disempowering.

From the start, Albanese has been intent on making this his trademarked Labor PM “light on the hill” moment. What he forgets is that his party privatised said hill and outsourced the lighting to contractors somewhere back in the 1980s. It is the dilemma that has faced every modern Labor prime minister since Rudd fumbled the ETS: how to reconcile the soapbox legendarium you love roleplaying with your reality as the consolidator of capital-friendly centrism.

The answer, deduced from an eternity of stage-managed nothingness, is to call for humanity while acting completely inhuman. The post-Howard years have seen the ALP bend towards an algorithmically steered semi-cognisant logic that has left its politicians as little more than bet-hedging androids, self-administering daily Voight-Kampff tests via consultancy firms who repeatedly play them for rubes.

We can see this play out in real time with a prime minister and government who appear detached from the reality of the referendum, especially the public’s perception of it. Decades of outsourcing difficult decision-making, ideology and even identity have meant that any nationally significant call to arms from a Labor government now feels defined by its removal from it. The ALP approaches its policies with a dog-poo bag already reversed over its hand like a glove. When it comes to something as significant as the Voice, the result of this approach is calamitous.

You get the sense with Albanese that he is playing to a base that hasn’t really existed since Howard’s first term. His and the ALP’s habit of self-mythologising has trapped them in a Whitlamian Neverland, a world where the apathy of our times is as graspable as fairy dust is in our own. That apathy, and the confusion it breeds, is the Voice’s biggest hurdle — and it’s a hurdle modern Labor is all but incapable of jumping because the party is as reliant on as it is terrified of it.

This is what opens Plibersek’s coal mines, keeps the dole below the poverty line, fuels the housing crisis, maintains our gulag archipelago, and pays off Qantas. Labor has come to depend on what it sees as the indifference of the average voter, an indifference that is actually closer to confusion, frustration and fatigue. It is terrified of this perceived indifference exploding into something less manageable, and so it makes every move with a baked-in timidity. It has paid a fortune to the bandit camps of focus groups and thought leaders who repackage the ALP’s cowardice on its behalf and sell it back to the party as courage.

And so we have an ALP in a perpetual crisis of self, incapable of doing little more than self-flagellating while blaming others for its sore back. Wearing Labor wonk goggles, this timidity is actually sensible apoliticism, a useful buffer between one’s ideology and one’s disappointment with the results it produces. This self-delusion is strained by something like the Voice, which requires a certain level of engaged, gloves-off proactiveness that tests the limits of neo-Labor’s ability to affect coolheadedness while desperately wanting things to get done.

This leads to an undeniable weirdness, made unremarkable only by its overwhelming presence across Australian politics. From Albo’s teary introduction of the Voice to a photo spot with Shaquille O’Neal that hummed with absurdist-comedy energy. The performance ends up looking like disengaged engagement, which has naturally rubbed off on the punters in the stands. And who can blame them?

Among what feels like five separate Yes campaigns tripping over each other on their way to a future parliamentary inquiry, Albo has positioned himself like an Ernst & Young Gandalf, appearing when needed to let off a few fireworks, before receding into some distance subplot in his government’s appendices. If the Voice fails, Albo will be able to dust his hands, shrug, and walk away whistling. If it succeeds, he’ll be like Leonard Nimoy at the end of the monorail episode of The Simpsons.

What we’re seeing is another brilliant example of the thinktankitisation of modern Labor, and the glue-sniffer’s strain of enlightenment dubbed “radical centrism”. By committing to this schtick of market-tested neutrality, the ALP has hamstrung its ability to make even the measliest bit of progress here or anywhere else. As we’ve seen again and again, this empowers the Duttons and co of this world to knock Labor arse-flat over even the mildest policy contention, let alone one with as much blood in the water as the Voice. If the ALP should have learned anything from the embarrassment of the Abbott years, it’s that a loud and rabid “NO!” will always trump a self-assured and smirking “Well, actually …”

But it’s a lesson the ALP can’t learn because learning it requires a lot of hard work — hard work being anathema to this middlebrow, middle management, middle road it’s dedicated to driving 20 kilometres under the limit on.

Those left pissing in their tepid tailwind will be those with the most to lose — those who put their necks on the chopping block under the darkly comical belief that Albo had their back. The repercussions of this wholly avoidable failure will be an intergenerational echo that the ALP will wave off as tinnitus.

There’s still time to change the nappy, but only if Labor admits things stink.

Patrick Marlborough, Crikey, September 18 2023.

Opinion / Indigenous Affairs

Why I stand for Yes, and why that’s hard to say out loud

'If there are personal consequences from my stance I will live with them. If I don’t take a stand I won’t be able to live with myself.'

On August 29 2023, in the early afternoon, I tweeted what might have been my first unambiguous statement in support of a Yes vote for the Indigenous Voice to Parliament.  

I made this statement not because I was suddenly willing to support the Voice but because I was finally willing to say so publicly. It’s time for the Voice, and time for me to talk about it. I may lose friends. People I love might hold my support for the Voice against me. But I have to make a stand.

From the moment I stuck my head over the parapet, the abuse has been constant — and a constant reminder of why I have stayed out of it. Yet the abuse is why I will now continue. They come for me no matter how mild my statements are, so I may as well go hard.

My stance is not new. I was first exposed to the Uluru Statement from the Heart in its entirety at Barunga Festival in 2018, when a copy on canvas was produced, allowing visitors to the festival to sign the border in support. I signed my support back then, and I have supported the Uluru statement in its entirety, and the Voice to Parliament, since I first read the document. My support has never wavered. I have planned to vote Yes to the referendum from the moment it was suggested.  

Deciding to vote Yes and deciding to talk about it in public are different things.

I have been making ambiguous statements for months, and the vitriol has been intolerable. The debate has been toxic, as poisonous and disgusting as the marriage plebiscite but for one difference that rides this debate straight to hell. In the marriage plebiscite, there were few, if any, LGBTQIA+ people campaigning on the No side; we could be sure that if we were arguing with someone, we disagreed because of their prejudices. 

In the case of the Voice referendum, there are people campaigning for No who are like me, who are my friends, who stand to lose as much as I will if this referendum fails.

I didn’t speak on the referendum because I didn’t want to engage in this space. People who support the Yes vote get attacked from all sides — racist abuse from the mainstream No and attacks from our friends who are part of the “sovereignty No” and adjacent movements. For example, I was once accused by an Indigenous woman of wanting genocide against my own people for pointing out that the majority of Indigenous people support the Voice.

Perhaps if you wish to be brutal you could consider me afraid, and it would not be far from the truth to say that I was afraid of losing friends. In reality, I did not speak out explicitly because I didn’t want to hurt my friends or alienate anybody. I remain aware that after this referendum we all still need to live with ourselves.

Now that time, when I stayed in the shadows because people I love are fighting against what I believe in, is over. I will upset people no matter what I do, if I stay quiet or speak up, so the only option left is to take a stand for what I believe in. People I respect have asked me to speak up, to stand tall and be ready to fight. So I will take a stand: our people deserve and need a Voice.

If there are personal consequences from my stance, I will live with them. If I don’t take a stand I won’t be able to live with myself.

The Voice is far from perfect. The government having the power to decide its structure and how it is selected is one issue. However, after the long and complicated life I have lived, after all I have learned and said, one fact stands out: nothing is perfect, and you never get precisely what you want. Every action and every change requires compromise, both in our personal lives and in politics. 

The Voice referendum is no exception, and what I have learned from life and my Noongar elders is that you negotiate rather than demand, and you work with people who want to work with you.

That is why I will vote Yes, why I am joining in the campaign for the Yes vote, why I am taking a stand, and why I am, finally, talking about it.  

Claire G Coleman is a Noongar woman whose family have belonged to the south coast of Western Australia since long before history started being recorded. She writes fiction, essays, poetry and art criticism while either living in Naarm (Melbourne) or on the road. She is the author of the novels Terra Nullius, The Old Lie and Enclave, and a non-fiction book, Lies Damned Lie

Crikey, September 5 2023.

Opinion / Indigenous Affairs

The Yes campaign must abandon its ‘make history’ shtick or risk being on the wrong side of it

Progressives seem more interested in changing people's core sense of self than they are in the practicalities of just winning the damn referendum.

Elizabeth? They held the launch for the Yes campaign in Elizabeth? That would be Elizabeth the noble but failed experiment, right? Elizabeth, Australia’s most extensive experiment in a UK-style “new town”, isolated from the capital, initially centred around an austere plaza with uplifting modernist sculptures that’s now a shopping mall? That Elizabeth? The one that over the years, cynically undermined by Liberal and Labor governments, became a welfare town — with many fine low-income people, but also a fair few predators and degenerates who turned sections of the place into a sump, showing the capacity for bold experiments to achieve the opposite of what they intended? That Elizabeth? The one named after the queen? (The poor old Guardian journalists covering it didn’t seem to have a clue as to the significance of where they were.)

Well, one can see the angle, but still. I presume it was thought, if it was thought at all, that the potshots the right might take at this failed and undermined monument to planning wouldn’t matter because no-one would be listening. And they would probably be right. Most people have long since switched off.

The Elizabeth launch was part of the Yes campaign’s, and the government’s, “pivot to the suburbs”, and from the reports the mood seemed positive but it also looked like all the same palaver. Noel and Marcia in the mix, the great and the good assembled, the Yes campaign fused with the government itself, in a way that no-one involved with these entities seems to think anyone out there has a problem with. The same speech from Albo with the chance to make history rhetoric, and a repurposing of South Australian Yes campaign coordinator Jakirah Telfer’s opening reference to the red kangaroo, and its anatomical inability to move in reverse. Said Albo: “We rise to the moment. Like the kangaroo and the emu on our coat of arms. They never go backwards — they just go forwards.”

That extra twist, and once again, the question: ham-fisted, or too clever by half? Can I point out that 1) if the kangaroo and emu do go forward, they will bump heads and the shield will fall over, and 2) as far as rising goes, the emu is a flightless bird. But sure, yes, the symbol of the Federation whose consecrating act was the exclusion of the original inhabitants is something that can unite us all as a positive example or something. 

True, there was a fair bit of the more practical stuff in there, improvement of outcomes and closing the gap, but it was wrapped in the oracular notion of national destiny etc. I guess it’s hard to see how it couldn’t be, but that’s the problem of having this total identification of the state and one side of the contest. It blunts the capacity to make the most effective political argument for the Yes case, and puts it in the service of state self-aggrandisement. 

Since the statecraft purpose of the Voice is to present ourselves to the world as a settler nation redefining itself through an act of dialectical synthesis, the Yes campaign is loaded with a purpose that may not be in its best interests. Quite possibly, many in the government now wish they had handled it differently, as a No vote will be an international disaster for this country. 

First as myth, then tragedy?

The way it looks at the moment, the Voice is going the same way as Brexit. The cause of the knowledge class progressives — which includes the First Nations’ leadership — spruiked with an arrogant confidence in the obvious superiority of its case, of its appeal to reason and enlightenment, is failing in every possible fashion. Its circular focus on “making history” — make history by making history — leaves people cold, if they haven’t already bought into the idea and are Yes voters.

Beneath that, the notion that the central meaning of this continent-nation-state is the evolving mutual definition of settlers and colonised First Nations is something most simply do not agree with. Though few Anglo-Celtics in the suburbs have a strong sense of national destiny or purpose in the way that Tony Abbott or the Institute of Public Affairs would like them to have, they do have a sense of basic legitimacy about their own lives, and such historical connections as they can summon. It’s thin compared to other countries: a bit of Anzac, mostly family history, and the sense that one’s ancestors made something that wasn’t here before, which we carry into the future. 

For those descended from the 1948 migrant waves, and more recent arrivals, the story is even more at variance with the one the Yes camp wants to tell. Some polling suggests that a greater number of non-Anglos will vote Yes — especially knowledge-class non-Anglos — an expression of non-white solidarity. But at the same time, the basic migrant story, the undercurrent of post-1948 lives, runs against the notion that the non-Indigenous presence on this continent is not resolved. That is because, quite simply, migrants resolve their presence here, or anywhere, by making their lives from scratch, even if that is now two or three generations back. The migrant, by migrating, claims the right to make a life wherever they have landed, without apology or deference. 

So the more one tries to assert the story that legitimates the Voice as a moral absolute — you must be interested in this, this must be significant to you — the more it starts to piss people off. 

What it was all for, whatever it was

What many people are getting from the relentless state push of the Yes case is the idea that the meanings they have made of their lives don’t count, that their struggles and achievements are second tier. It is turning mainstream indifference to First Nations self-determination into an active hostility towards it. This is all the doing of the Yes case. Much of the uptake of the No case’s more lurid falsehoods has been as a sort of manifest content, of this latent dissatisfaction, a way of giving accusatory voice to a complaint which, were it expressed directly, would sound simply pathetic: why are the blacks getting all the attention, again? Don’t I count? What about me?

Thus, what is emerging is something approaching a tragedy, a modest demand that will fall short because it has summoned an opposition that would not otherwise exist had it been done differently. For most people in said suburbs — the country and the north might be another matter — the claim to legitimacy of their own lives does not, any more, require a narrative of supremacy to give it meaning. Most people accept that a bloody, annihilatory event began in 1788, and continued for decades after. But they don’t accept that the current inequality is simply a continuation of that, or that there is an obligation to see it that way. There is a moral obligation to care about the grievous disadvantage of people you share a continent with, and that is what many people respond to. They want things to be better. But many don’t accept there is anything to be reconciled.

The greater divide

By insisting on such, the Yes leadership and progressives in general have lost the lead. They have not only insisted on a specific formula for a new Australia as the only possible moral arrangement, they have asserted a more general morality about how politics should be done — the idea that it is good to be curious, inquisitive, to like new knowledge, other cultures etc. This is the knowledge class/progressive v mainstream division in its strongest form.

The knowledge class cannot see the habits and values that make their life — curiosity, willingness to change, reflection on received truths etc — as only one way of living, among others. “If you don’t know, it’s OK to vote No” is a perfectly legitimate conservative judgment to make. There’s no point attacking that general principle when you’re trying to explode its specific argument: by establishing that there’s nothing to fear from this particular initiative. The disdain for political caution — in which every sense of disquiet is constructed as irrational fear — is simply progressives using the Voice campaign to buttress their own preference for the new over the old, the future plan over the messy present etc, to the detriment of actually persuading people and winning the damn thing. 

From and to the suburbs

What’s to be done then? If the Yes campaign is really going “to the suburbs” then it better bloody mean it. It better admit that the level of knowledge, of First Nations peoples, of history, is very low, and accept that there is no moral requirement on someone to be interested in things they’re not interested in. Anyone motivated by the “make history” thing is surely already got; now it’s just scaring people off. 

The full pivot to the ’burbs means abandoning all that history stuff altogether, and going almost wholly with the instrumental case for the Voice: that the assembly will help find better solutions to the problems experienced by First Nations peoples in health, housing, education etc. Galling as it might be to many, an exclusive focus on the minimal, advisory, supplicant and mildly ameliorative role of the Voice may convince enough undecideds and waverers that it is both practical and no threat, and to give it a go. That may be a most unmacropusian step backwards,  but it is also a reculer pour mieux sauter. 

Roo the day

There is something very endearingly stupid about the Albo government launching the campaign for this audacious progressive Australian initiative from the middle of one of the most failed audacious progressive initiatives of modern times, a few years after the national Australian company it was built around pulled out. But really there’s no time for this klutz act anymore.

Make the case for a Voice in such a way that people can vote for something to improve First Nations peoples’ lives, without feeling they have to put their own in question. If that seems to be rewarding complacency, small-mindedness and limited conceptions of the nation by pandering to such, get over it. The Yes case needs to decide whether it is trying to win people’s vote or change who they are. The whole campaign needs to turn on its central core to kick back hard and yes, yes, it’s those damn kangaroos again…

Guy Rundle, Crikey, August 31 2023.