Let us Praise Lefties Who Won’t Shut Up

Tim Blair

Dec 17 2023

8 mins

There are two good reasons for continued analysis of the Voice to Parliament’s referendum defeat. The first reason, obviously, is to further understand how a conservative movement not only prevailed during an era of woke, but how we did so having begun our campaign with such a huge polling disadvantage.

And, moreover, an enormous media, business, sports and political deficit. From the outset, the No vote had no big-league supporters.

The second reason for continued analysis, just as obviously, is because it’s fun to ridicule leftists when they lose—especially when they plainly lack the coping ability that a sense of humour might provide. On October 14, the day of glorious judgment, they went down scowling and sneering. Rather than accept the people’s will, pre-fab Voice personality Thomas Mayo angrily declared: “We won’t take no for an answer.”

Well, mate, you just did. You and your team copped a resounding No from just about every electorate in the country, aside from a few inner-city Teal tofu zones and our degenerate narcotics-legalising capital. Elsewhere, reason reigned. Two of the strongest No electorates outside of Queensland were Parkes in New South Wales, with a 78.8 per cent No vote, and my own enlightened electorate of Mallee in Victoria, narrowly shaded on 78.4 per cent.

All credit to Parkes. They just put in a better effort on the day.

Massive credit, too, to Jacinta Price and Warren Mundine, whose crusades against the irrational and destructive Voice push were thrilling and tireless. As a friend in the Yes camp unhappily observed, this Aboriginal-focused referendum presented two of the most compelling Aboriginal orators of our time—but they both worked for No.

Price was especially impressive, landing the campaign’s finest woke slapdown during her National Press Club appearance in mid-September. Asked by some white kid in the audience if Australian Aborigines suffered because of colonisation, Price simply replied: “No.” She then elaborated: “A positive impact, absolutely. I mean, now we have running water, readily available food.”

This was a simple truth, empirically established not just in Australia but throughout the planet. Modernity wins. It’s why nobody is begging for dentistry without anaesthetic. As a species, humanity’s entire aim has been to drag ourselves forward—towards, in other words, running water and readily available food. Yet the Sydney Morning Herald was appalled, claiming that Price had challenged “widely held views of Indigenous and intergenerational disadvantage”.

For “widely held”, read “mistaken”, “conde­scending” or “perverse”. A little more on colonialism later, from a little moron. First, please consider how leftist Voice promoters did so much to destroy their own case, and how this fits a long-standing pattern of leftist behaviour by comparison to conservatives. As my US friend Jim Treacher once put it, leftists want conservatives to shut up while conservatives want leftists to keep talking.

As my US friend Jim Treacher once put it, leftists want conservatives to shut up while conservatives want leftists to keep talking.

Much if not most of the arguments aimed at Mundine and Price were intended to disqualify them. They were frequently denounced during the Voice debate, as they’ve been denounced by hostile entities throughout their professional lives, as betrayers of the Aboriginal cause. Leftists, aware of how powerful were Mundine and Price’s arguments, wanted to shame them into silence. They wanted them to shut up.

But conservatives couldn’t get enough of Voice boosters Mayo, Megan Davis and especially Marcia Langton, whose ruinous interview with the Australian—published on April 8, when support for the Voice still ran at close to 60 per cent—seemed to accelerate the Yes team’s slide.

In one of Australia’s greatest electoral misreadings, Langton threatened a ban on welcome-to-country ceremonies—and, just to sweeten the deal, a ban on her own conference appearances. “I imagine that most Australians who are non-Indigenous, if we lose the referendum, will not be able to look me in the eye,” she told the Australian.

It was a risk we were evidently prepared to take.

“How are they going to ever ask an Indigenous person, a Traditional Owner, for a welcome to country?” Langton continued. “How are they ever going to be able to ask me to come and speak at their conference? If they have the temerity to do it, of course the answer is going to be no.”

Keep digging, Marcia. Keep digging until you’ve worn down an entire Bunnings worth of shovels to useless wooden stumps. And by all means keep talking—although you might work on your pronunciation of specious. Despite her decades in academia, Professor Langton thinks it’s a three-syllable word. Television auto-captioning renders her attempts as speciesist, which adds a whole new level of confusion.

Another Aboriginal academic, Uluru Statement from the Heart co-author Megan Davis, probably wished she’d been silent in the years prior to October’s Voice vote. Maybe then she wouldn’t have left such a trail of verbal and written evidence contradicting Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s claim that the Statement was just a single-page document.

Sky TV’s Peta Credlin—besides Price and Mundine, the most persuasive No plaintiff—helpfully rounded up all of Davis’s page-worthy performances. In 2018: “The Uluru Statement from the Heart isn’t just the first one-page statement. It’s actually a very lengthy document of about eighteen to twenty pages, and a very powerful part of this document reflects what happened in the dialogues.” In 2022: “The Uluru Statement … is occasionally mistaken as merely a one-page document … in totality [it] is closer to eighteen pages.”

Again in 2022: “It’s actually like eighteen pages, the Uluru Statement. People only read the first.” And once more from 2022, just to drive home the multi-page message: “It’s very important for Australians to read the Statement, and the Statement is also much bigger. It’s actually eighteen pages.”

On August 8, by which time the Yes case was circling helplessly like a punctured-hull Bismarck, Davis offered this online clarification: “The Uluru statement is ONE PAGE.” Whatever you say, Professor. And at that point the Voice to Parliament was a shot duck.

Whatever you say, Professor. And at that point the Voice to Parliament was a shot duck.

It takes a special talent to destroy a political quest that in its initial stages was so generously supported. It takes an even greater talent to demolish the period of healing or grace that often follows a contentious vote. The Voice team not only bunged on a week-long post-election sookfest, but in so doing demonstrated that the Voice might not have been as “advisory” as they’d promised.

After all, the Australian electorate had just presented this advice: “No.” Fairly straightforward. Easy to understand. Not much room for misinterpretation. Yet Voice advocates, as our mate Mayo explained, just weren’t having it.

Nor was ex-ABC host turned national man in mourning Stan Grant, who in an Australian National University sob speech on October 30 took peculiar issue with the referendum result. “I am hearing that word: no,” Grant said, apparently imagining that the entire $300 million Voice-voting process was about Stan Grant.

He was just warming up. No, Grant continued,  was “that word without love. That word of rejection. That word from which no other word can come. This morning in the darkness I am hearing the cold-hearted no of a country so comfortable it need not care.” Seems like “no” is the problem then—except, presumably, when we say no to racism, no to child abuse, no to poverty, no to sickness and so on. It isn’t exclusively a “word of rejection”, unless you’re more or less unfamiliar with the concept of words in general.

Then came Grant’s finest moment. Taking sarcastic aim at Jacinta Price and her rational view on colonisation, Grant fumed: “I drink from a bubbler and I give thanks for running water. That’s the measure of history, we have running water now. Thank you colonisation.”

Running water is one of the greatest single advances in human history. It has probably saved more lives than any other basic technology. To this day, in remote Third World locations, a lack of running water invariably leads to the spread of deadly illnesses.

The Left launched their Voice campaign with the full support of Australia’s wealthiest institutions. They ended that campaign complaining about indoor plumbing. This fascinating episode deserves to be studied for decades.

A central document in that study must be The Voice to Parliament Handbook, co-written by Voice frontman Thomas Mayo and ABC veteran Kerry O’Brien, with illustrations by the Sydney Morning Herald’s Cathy Wilcox.

It’s a rousing call for Aboriginal justice—created by two of the whitest people in the Australian media and a cranky ex-wharfie who celebrates the contribution of “communist elders” to “our struggle”.

You know, the more historians examine this referendum, the more they may be inclined to wonder how it ended up being defeated by 60 per cent to 40. A more reasonable result might have been 90–10.

Tim Blair

Tim Blair

Columnist

Tim Blair

Columnist

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