How Metropolitan Activists Would Dictate the Voice

Peter Smith says in his recent Quadrant Online article, “No Wonder They Won’t Detail How the Voice Will Work”:

The Voice, if it gets up, will not be an elected body in the sense in which we usually define elected bodies on the national political stage. To wit, bodies elected by voters through a secret ballot. The Calma–Langton report envisages an abbreviated bottom-up process … from which twenty-four members will be appointed to the constitutionally-enshrined national Voice. It’s an appointment process.

Representative decision-making by a majority vote of elected representatives is integral to Western governance processes. Persons in positions of leadership are generally accepted as having the authority to make decisions binding on all, though many may not agree with those decisions.

Marcia Langton and Tom Calma have designed their appointment process because they are no doubt well aware that the Western model of majority decision-making under an elected leader is not acceptable in Aboriginal culture. What Aboriginal culture demands is dealt with in the Indigenous Governance Toolkit, developed by the Centre for Aboriginal Economic Policy Research in the ANU, with an introduction by Mick Dodson. Fundamentally, Aboriginal culture requires decisions of a group to be by consensus:

The Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander approach to decision making is one of consensus and occurs across the layers of networks. Consensus is created through slow agreement and can change over time …

Only the relevant group can be involved:

Problems can arise for a group’s governance when the “wrong” people or layer of a network is involved in making decisions or when factional interests undermine group consensus.

Warren Mundine has explained this concept:

Here’s where Voice advocates are ignorant of (or deliberately ignoring) Aboriginal cultures. No Aboriginal person can speak for another country, only their own. Where’s the proposal for a constitutional voice for the Bundjalung people (my country on my father’s side) or the Gumbaynggirr or Yuin people (my countries on my mother’s side)? The voice won’t, and can’t, represent Indigenous people as a group.

Leadership too is a different concept for Aborigines. The Indigenous Governance Toolkit explains:

There are strong culturally-based rules and values that stress the need for leaders to only speak on behalf of (i.e. to represent) the “right” people (their own mob or land-owning group), about the “right” issue (i.e. their own country and own business).

The strongest expectation then is that a leader should, first and foremost, “look after” and be accountable to their own family and local group.

Leaders are also expected to go back to their fellow group members to discuss information, ideas and decisions with them … Leaders should also act on the basis of consensus.

Achieving the consensus that alone gives authority to decision-making in Aboriginal culture inevitably takes time, often a lot of time. Just how difficult it is to procure consensus in a single small indigenous group is illustrated by the sixteen-year history of the Quandamooka claim to native title over North Stradbroke Island. The claimant group was small, only twelve families. The claim was lodged in 1995. By 2000, all parties—the claimant group, the state government, the local council, the sand miner and the island’s white residents—were in agreement. But a planned consent determination of native title was derailed when one of the twelve families withdrew its agreement. It took another ten years for all to finally agree:

Since the first native title claimant application was lodged by the Quandamooka Peoples in 1995, the process of resolving their native title required the claim group to decide who are the people in the native title claim group, who are the person or people that are the applicant, and negotiate with multiple parties about their native title rights and interests over North Stradbroke Island and some of the surrounding islands and waters of Moreton Bay. The intense pressure on the community from these processes [to select who should be the applicant] resulted in the Quandamooka peoples declining a native title settlement offer from the Queensland Government almost ten years ago.

The notion that twenty-four peak representatives will have the support of all indigenous peoples they pretend to speak for is absurd. The Langton–Calma model is in truth designed to vest the power of the Voice in a small group of mostly metropolitan activists. A decision-making process that respected Aboriginal culture would simply be unworkable.

It’s no wonder that Prime Minister Albanese will not commit to any details about how the Voice members will be selected or how the Voice will work. Everywhere you look, major difficulties loom.

And if, after the Voice is implemented, the High Court doesn’t do what so many pro-Voice experts confidently expect, if instead, the court refuses to interpret the Voice provision in the Constitution in accordance with how Parliament in its Voice details statute tells it to, and makes up its own mind on what the Constitution means, what then? Either total paralysis of both Parliament and the executive government until the court decides or capitulation to Voice blackmail to get the machinery of government moving again.

Douglas Drummond served as a judge on the Federal Court of Australia before retiring in 2003