The Vision of the Anointed

Australians will almost certainly reject their Prime Minister’s invitation to join him on the right side of history at the referendum later this year. Anthony Albanese’s proposal to enshrine an indigenous Voice to Parliament is on an inexorable path to defeat when the vote takes place in the spring.

The advocates of the Voice to Parliament are perplexed. The burden of colonial guilt weighs heavily on their shoulders. The time has come to restore the sovereignty of Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders, end the torment of powerlessness and end the nation’s shame,

This language of equity, inclusivity and compassion has failed to soften the hearts of their compatriots, however. Nine months ago, support for the Voice was around 65 per cent. Today it is in the low forties, trailing the No vote in four of the six states.

Supporters blame ignorance, disinformation and lingering prejudice. Yet the polling tells a different story, one that will be familiar to followers of the 2016 Brexit referendum. We are witnessing the rejection of another elite pet project, a revolt against what Thomas Sowell identified as the vision of the anointed. The Voice is popular in the metropolises of Sydney and Melbourne but has failed to win support in the regions. It is favoured by millennials and Gen Z, particularly those with a university education. The Baby Boomers and the wartime generation will vote No by a large majority. Support splits along party lines: it is highest among Greens but rejected by seven out of ten Liberal and National voters.

Whatever the result it is clear that the referendum won’t be the “unifying Australian moment” the Prime Minister hoped for when he announced it at a national Aboriginal gathering a year ago. The elite’s geographical and intellectual isolation from their fellow Australians leaves its members struggling for answers. Blinded by self-virtue, they struggle to understand how those who reject their proposal could be motivated by anything other than hate.

“While it is not true to say that every Australian who votes No in the Voice referendum is a racist,” says columnist Nikki Savva, “you can bet your bottom dollar that every racist will vote No.” Marcia Langton, a distinguished Melbourne-based Aboriginal leader, says it would be “terribly unfortunate” if the referendum “sinks into a nasty, eugenicist, 19th-century style of debate about the superior race versus the inferior race”.

Yet the most commonly heard objection to the Voice is anything but discriminatory. The notion of special treatment for anyone offends the Australian spirit of egalitarianism, the unshakeable belief that every citizen stands on an equal footing. It makes no difference whether your Australian ancestry goes back sixty years or if you pledged the citizen’s oath of allegiance sixty minutes ago. No one gets special favours simply because of their race.

The last referendum on the standing of Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders was held in 1967. Australians voted nine-to-one to support amendments removing the last vestiges of official discrimination against native people. Like the dismantling of the White Australia policy that began in the same year, it was an affirmation that the state was blind to colour in the administration of policy.

It is widely argued that this year’s proposed amendment puts race back in by granting special privileges to one group to the disadvantage of others. If there is to be a voice for this particular ethnic minority, then is it not unfair to exclude the voices of others? Why not appoint an Asian voice to Parliament, a Greek voice or even a Pommie voice, since immigrants from Britain have formed a minority of new arrivals since the early 1960s? Opponents fear the Voice will effectively become a third chamber, giving it political muscle and the power of veto. They fear the mischief an activist High Court might indulge in when interpreting the amendment.

Most of all, they are worried about what comes next. The Voice is a mere staging post on the road to healing outlined in the Uluru Statement from Heart, a 2017 petition by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander leaders to the Australian government calling for separate sovereignty and reforms to address structural “powerlessness”. It has risen to the status of a sacred document among Voice supporters, and its proposals have been accepted in full by Albanese. The petition describes the Voice as the first step towards a truth commission and a Makarrata agreement or treaty.

Some indigenous activists would go further and are not afraid to say so. Thomas Mayo, a prominent Yes campaigner, says the Voice will be a vehicle to force non-indigenous Australians to “pay the rent” for living on stolen land. In a series of 2020 tweets, Mayo claimed the “Blak [sic] rep body” would have the resources to demand “reparations, land back, abolishing harmful colonial institutions, getting ALL our kids out of prisons & in to care, respect & integration of our laws & lore, speaking language, wages back—all the things we imagine”. Mayo’s social media posts, and similar intemperate remarks by pro-Voice supporters, have formed the No campaign’s advertising script.

The strongest card for the Yes campaign is the appalling poverty that blights the lives of roughly one-tenth of the indigenous population. The most confronting poverty is found in remote communities that were given partial autonomy by well-meaning reformers in the 1970s. The disparities between indigenous Australians are as stark as they appear intractable. Australians have the eighth-highest life expectancy in the world: eighty-six years for women and eighty-two for men. Life expectancy for Aboriginal women in remote communities is seventy, and sixty-six for men, roughly on par with Ethiopia.

Decades of welfare and countless government programs have barely shifted the dial. Indeed, the social fabric in remote Aboriginal communities has rapidly deteriorated. The prevalence of alcoholism, domestic violence and child sexual abuse is badly under-reported in the mainstream media. Editors and reporters have self-censored for years to avoid stigmatising Aboriginal people. Few have taken the trouble to spend time in Australia’s own Third World and seen the empty schools, runny eyes, overcrowding and packs of wild dogs. Those of us who have will never forget it.

Supporters of the Voice have conspicuously failed to explain how it will change conditions on the ground. Framing contemporary welfare challenges in the legacy of colonialism and lingering prejudice is an intellectually weak argument that had fallen out of fashion in Australia until the influence of the Black Lives Matter movement revived it. It is a claim with no empirical basis. Is historical injustice causing higher rates of cardiac illness and cancer? Or might it be tobacco consumption, which is five times higher in remote Aboriginal communities than in the rest of the country? Might the high incidence of kidney failure be related partly to higher rates of alcoholism? Could higher rates of type 2 diabetes partly be due to poor diets?

Sowell’s empirically grounded arguments over several decades about the Civil Rights movement in the US apply equally in Australia. Political change benefits the political class which has self-interest in arguing in favour. There is no evidence that political change leads to social change. The evidence points to the opposite conclusion.

The most grievous effect of insisting that everything boils down to race is the theft of agency from people who, by dint of their genetic inheritance, are considered incapable of changing their lives for good or ill. Administering welfare in compensation only makes matters worse. The argument that Aboriginal people uniquely need additional political agency to fix their problems is belittling. The tyranny of low expectations it breeds is anything but empowering.

Nick Cater is the Executive Director of the Menzies Research Centre and a columnist at The Australian. He is the author of The Lucky Culture (2013)