A Year After The Voice Went Down

One year on and it is obvious they don’t get it. They? Well the Prime Minister, his government, many of Labor’s advisors, various zealots and financial beneficiaries of the Aboriginal Industry. What do I mean by “it”? Just this: what they don’t get and refuse to accept is that the Voice’s proposed change to the Constitution, put to the public one year ago yesterday, was overwhelmingly rejected by a 60/40 margin. Worse, they don’t understand the very nature of the change they proposed. Though there are many who could do it much better, I will try to explain as best I can.

About a century and a quarter ago a group of educated men sat down to devise how they could combine the colonies into a single nation. In a process that took a decade, the colonies’ thought leaders met, planned, designed, argued, considered and revised over and over again until they came up with the plan to federate which was then put to the Imperial Government of the United Kingdom. It became the Constitution, the very basis of Australia, on January 1, 1901.

The people who designed our Constitution were educated, and by that I don’t mean they all boasted diplomas, degrees and various other bits of paper from organisations which today call themselves institutions of higher learning. What I mean is that while some had little more that the four rudimentary pillars of education — to read, to count, to understand the  meaning of words, and to apply critical thinking — they nevertheless brought acute minds to the task. How far some had taken those abilities through further education is irrelevant, but it does explain why in 1891, when they convened in Sydney at Pittwater aboard the yacht Lucinda, owned by the Queensland government, Aboriginal people were not represented. Despite the comments of Noel Pearson and other activists, no members of the mainland Aboriginal tribes had the standing or education to participate in the discussions. That might sound harsh but it is not racist; millions of others from the other colonies were also not included.

At that stage the six colonies which finally became Australia also considered absorbing the colonies of  New Zealand, Fiji and, for a while, Papua New Guinea. But in the end only five colonies eventually decided this was a good plan. NSW, which had withdrawn subsequently returned, but Western Australia remained reluctant by the required deadline to accept the final draft. For that reason WA was excluded from the final draft but included in the Commonwealth when it came into being.

The federal government was to have powers ceded to it by the colonies, as set out in Section 51 of the Constitution, and those yet to be created, as in Section 52. The six colonies were to become states in the new nation and would retain all those powers not ceded at Federation.

The Constitution not only set out the means by which the new nation would be governed, it also placed limitations which could only be changed by amending the Constitution — not a simple majority in the two houses of Parliament but, rather, the majority of votes in the majority of the six States and the majority of votes in the overall voting population.

Of the 46 referenda held since Federation only eight have succeeded, and of the 25 proposed by Labor governments only one has been approved.

Can we draw an inference from those results? The much-promoted theory is that you must have bi-partisan support, which is likely true enough. But I suggest there is more at work here than the obvious: any referendum that has not had sufficient debate in the Parliament and/or in the public square is bound to fail.

During the run-up to the Voice referendum the Prime Minister, the government and supporters of the Yes case quite deliberately did the opposite, stifling debate, indiscriminately flinging accusations of racism and vilifying as bigots those holding contra opinions. The committee investigating submissions was stacked with Voice proponents and the statements issued for public consumption were vague or deliberately misleading. How could such a campaign of omission and misrepresentation not be rejected at the ballot box!

I don’t believe the Voice referendum ever had a hope of getting over the line, not least because it flew in the face of the 1967 referendum’s intent to install the equality of all, regardless of race, in our nation’s foundational document. The Voice was a very bad idea, one whose few details released for discussion were divisive, costly and unexplained when not simply unwieldy. Were Voice delegates to be elected or appointed? Such a question is fundamental yet we were never given an answer! Since then the Albanese government has failed to accept the voters’ verdict, failed to change course and remains determined in the face of overwhelming rejection to achieve its ends by other means.

Worst of all, it has failed the Aboriginal people by failing to investigate and reveal where the billions of dollars poured into the Aboriginal Industry have gone and what little they have achieved. Were those who fostered and promoted the Voice genuinely serious about their stated intention of improving Aborigines’ lot, that would be the first thing to be addressed.