The Voice: Be Careful What You Wish For

It is easy to treat the proposed Voice to Parliament as meaningless symbolism designed to pander to the loony left and repay various talking heads who shilled to elect Labor. But beneath the self-conscious ‘progressiveness’ of Labor’s support for the Voice lies a cynical political machine determined to exploit circumstances to achieve multiple and different ends. Despite its compassion-soaked wrapping, the Voice is one of the most cunningly cynical government ploys on offer.

Amid a jumble of undergraduate platitudes, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s recent address to the Voice Working Group contains an interesting line:

…you get better practical outcomes when you get buy in, when you get engagement, when you get direct involvement by people who are impacted.

Sounds reasonable. However, Mr Albanese conveniently failed to mention that you also get to shift blame.

After decades of throwing unlimited money at Aboriginal affairs for returns no different from those that the passage of time alone would be expected to produce, it is clear that things need to be done differently. It is utterly appalling that in a First World country, a percentage of Aboriginal Australians remain chronically disadvantaged, with limited literacy and prospects, ravaged by ills such as substance abuse, poor health, inadequate housing, and fractured communities.

It is also appalling that modern governments have allowed themselves to be so cowed by their fear of being accused of racism that they now meekly accept blame for every problem – no matter how unfair or unreasonable that may be. The only thing that years of political cowardice has achieved is to ensure that all blame, always, for everything, is somehow laid at the feet of ‘colonialist’ governments. It would be naïve to think that politicians of all stripes do not want a way out of that mess, even if they will never admit it.

Enter the Voice, with its strident selling point of placing Aboriginal people at the centre of policymaking for Aboriginal people. Alongside the banalities about ‘good manners’ are virtuous exhortations that the Voice is critical for ‘closing the gap.’ If we believe Labor’s rhetoric, the Voice is expected to deliver tangible outcomes that will not be possible in its absence. Based on international experiences, this is an entirely unrealistic expectation. After all, New Zealand’s embrace of parliamentary quotas, ‘co-governance’ and ‘Maori-owned’ initiatives has not exactly fixed the lot of the Maori, has it?

Supporters of the Voice are trying to promote the belief that it will somehow, in ways that are nebulously defined (if defined at all), uplift the nation on a cloud of buzz words. Some may even genuinely believe that. Yet it is hardly a secret that troubles like addiction, homelessness, unemployment, and community disorder occur in ‘mainstream’ communities, too. Most people have enough sense to recognise that today’s problems are about more than colonialist governments and historical dispossession, and are far from racially specific.

If the majority of Australians support a Voice to Parliament when it comes to referendum time, it may very well reflect nothing more than widespread frustration at how white Australia is the constant whipping boy. The Voice presents a unique political opportunity to break this pattern, by shifting the focus for Aboriginal affairs onto Aboriginal Australians themselves. This is why it is utterly diabolical.

There could be no quicker way for governments to escape from always being cast as the villain than to make ‘following Aboriginal wishes’ their scapegoat. It is only too easy to see the Voice paving the way for a country where Aboriginal Australians are viewed as chiefly responsible for the perceived or actual waste of public money on schemes that deliver little real change.

While vague concepts such as ‘truth telling’ and ‘connection to country’ may be invoked to give an impression of success, ordinary taxpayers are far more likely to be interested in hard numbers, such as welfare expenditure. It seems, sadly, that the activists who are so insistent about the endless good that Voice will do, have missed this point.

Perhaps those activists will be unwilling to admit failures, or will seek to lay blame on issues such as parliaments not following the advice they are given, insufficient resourcing, or some other thing. But activist excuses will wear thin indeed when, thanks to the Voice, Aboriginal people are widely seen by the public as the ones who design and approve policies that fail.

Is this really what Aboriginal Australians want?

No matter how much we are told that the Voice is about ‘reconciliation,’ it looks a lot like something that, far from improving lives, is likely to lead to Aboriginal people being treated as responsible for their own disadvantage in ways that non-Aboriginal people are not. Alas, in this brave new world where fairydust and rainbows cloak brutal political realities, suggesting such a thing will no doubt be derided as nothing more than racist ‘bad manners.’

Lillian Andrews writes about politics, society, feminism and anything else that interests her. She tweets @SaysAwfulThings