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Voice architect and campaigner Noel Pearson has just informed the Guardian Australia readership of his plans for semi-retirement should the referendum fail this coming Saturday. In the future, his talent for demagoguery and name-calling — I’m paraphrasing — will no longer be on offer to his fellow Aboriginal activists. In his words, he will never be “an advocate for conciliation and compromise again, for trying to find a middle path.”
Pearson’s self-portrait here would be unrecognisable to most Australians. After all, he seemed to spend most of the campaign trying to see how many voters he could personally insult. Only very recently has he resiled from calling the nearest person a racist and started banging on about how the Voice is, you know, all about love and respect.
If the ‘Yes’ vote goes down, Pearson’s own approach, allegedly based on all that goodwill and moderation, will have been proven a failure. For that reason, the post-referendum political landscape, he says, should be shaped by a new generation of indigenous leaders. As Pearson prepares to pass on the torch, it’s worth thinking about who, exactly, is likely to take on those responsibilities of leadership. This last stretch of the Voice campaign, I would argue, may provide some early and troubling indications.
In progressive media in the last week or so, there’s been quite a bit of giddiness about the latest enlistees to the ‘Yes’ camp. A number of former ‘No’ advocates, once aligned with Lidia Thorpe’s orthographically challenged Blak Sovereignty movement, have had a change of heart. Tarneen Onus Browne, foot soldier of the militant left-wing group Warriors of the Aboriginal Resistance, is one such apostate. That name should be familiar to many readers, by the way, as she is best known for her pyromaniacal tendencies at an Invasion Day rally in Melbourne in 2018: “F*** Australia,” Ms Onus Browne huffed at the time. “Hope it burns to the ground.”
To be fair, she later said she had the poet’s spirit upon her that day and all that arson enthusiasm, apparently, was intended as metaphor. Nevertheless, it’s still amusing to see the media now put her to work as a surrogate for the ‘Yes’ campaign, as suggested by an uncritical profile in the Sydney Morning Herald and a soft interview on Channel Ten’s The Project. Here, Onus Browne clarified her second thoughts on the Voice via her desire not to be associated with the likes of Peter Dutton and Pauline Hanson. In fact, she seems to perceive little distinction between the ‘No’ camp and — go on, have a guess — Nazis, of course.
In a follow-up piece in Crikey, Onus Browne sets out her change of mind in greater and more interesting detail. I admit that I was initially surprised by her moderation and restraint, as she waits until the second paragraph before she starts prattling about the “violent settler colonial system” and whatnot.
She calls the referendum debate itself “an act of violence”, and this leads her to the view the Voice is strictly blackfella business; therefore, in an ideal situation, non-Indigenous Australians wouldn’t even be permitted to vote on Saturday. (The Constitution, she laments, stands in the way of such a project.) Nevertheless, she calls on “settlers” to write ‘Yes’ and reminds them to keep on RSVP-ing to any and all upcoming street protests, no matter the outcome.
As I hinted, Onus Browne isn’t the only recent defector from the progressive ‘No’ camp. Fellow WAR organiser Meriki Onus, after much hand-wringing, also intends to vote ‘Yes’. Writing in IndigenousX, Onus agrees that the non-Indigenous electorate should have its voting rights restricted, at least on this issue. There’s also a good deal of blather about “ongoing genocide” and “ongoing colonialism”, which suggests that Onus has simply borrowed the drivelling style and already quite limited vocabulary from her sister, Senator Lidia Thorpe.
This kind of whinging is again on display in Crikey, where activist Roxanne Moore outlines her own change of mind and encourages her fellow progressives to do the same. The most noteworthy element of Moore’s contribution is the photo next to her byline, which shows the author with bloodied hands and a vaguely threatening stare. This coheres well, I suppose, with her view towards post-referendum politics, as she writes: “A No vote will hardly be the end of our movements; we will come back stronger, more determined and more radical than ever.” Thanks, I guess, for the heads up, Roxy.
What really explains this late decamping, I suspect, is political positioning. Undoubtedly, these activists and their ilk would hijack a seat at the table should the ‘Yes’ vote actually get up, and there is some indication that they think this is a real possibility. For example, Onus Browne — and this isn’t her only delusion — sometimes writes of when the Voice succeeds rather than if.
Imagine, for just one frightening moment, if the Voice had to listen to the radical demands of activists like these. Excising Australia Day from the calendar is one of their milder ambitions; they also favour police disbandment and prison abolition, which (and you can look this up) may lead to problems somewhere down the track.
Even in the likelier scenario in which the Voice fails, these activists will also find themselves well positioned. They can more effectively use their anger and bitterness about the result to argue for a more extreme politics and pick up exactly where Noel Pearson leaves off. After all, he has said it would be time for new leadership.
Any form of constitutional recognition, however, isn’t likely to be on their agenda. Tarneen Onus Browne says such symbolism has never interested her and Meriki Onus, like her sister, clearly loathes the Constitution and doesn’t see herself as part of it. “Good riddance to the reconciliation era,” predicts Roxanne Moore. If you thought the Voice debate has been divisive and nasty, just wait for what’s coming up next.
In some ways, though, I’m rather glad the media chose to spruik these newest ‘Yes’ advocates, as they really offer yet another good reason to vote ‘No’, and perhaps to do so with even more determination. When that’s done, I suggest we begin cultivating a bit more annoyance with those who wish to burn Australia to the ground. As we enter the post-Voice political era, it’s worth keeping in mind that the more continually disappointed the likes of Tarneen Onus Browne and her accomplices are, the better off and safer the country will be.
Yes, all true! But why do we allow people to openly vilify and attack Australia, fly foreign flags, and particularly, why do we allow Parliamentarians to stand up and say that the Constitution and Australian law doesn’t apply to them? Their citizenship of the vile colonial entity should be taken from them, and they can then return to the bush and use their 60,000+ years of knowledge to thrive in peace!
To everyone – My ‘Communese English Dictionary’ defines DEMOCRACY as ‘a system of government, where communism can flourish without hindrance’.
This is one of the downsides of out society which we must accept to remain a FREE COUNTRY and not regulated from the cradle to the grave. There is a marked lack of respect for our Institutions and one another. So it starts with us to make a stand and reject the ‘change agents’ and their nefarious objectives.
Improvement must come from the ‘grass roots’ – the ROT is too ingrained at the TOP to be receptive to change. These people have forgotten GOD so this indicates where a start must be made.
The solution is to remove protections from these groups: they don’t want Australian law? No problems. Communists are allowed to send each other to the Gulag, Indigenous activists can stab each other with spears.
Then, if they survive, they can *earn* the right to be protected by our Rule Of Law.
I am not sure there is much that can be done about “accusers and incendiarists” they seem to exist in most successful country’s. I was however disquieted by Paul Kelly’s article in the Weekend Australian. While he conceded that the Yes vote would likely fail he cautioned that it should not be taken as any political turning point in the reconcilliation story. Sadly I think he is right. Some one or some group on the conservative side of the Australian polity need to come up with a unifying theme in this country that ordinary people can accept, but which steals the air from the left wing progressives. It could be attempted in a number of ways. But what conservatives need to articulate is an appealing case for Australian as a unique country, not just one where you can get wealthy and comfortable. Younger generations are not impressed with the wealth argument, they already are wealthy thanks to the efforts of previous generations. I dont expect this “unifying theme” will ever originate in the political class. But as can be observed in the voice idealogues like Chris Kenny who one would normally expect to be on the no side, the appeal of being a warrior for “down and outs” holds a powerful attraction.
Unfortunately for our Yoof, they’re not breeding up enough future taxpayers to pay for their retirement aspirations and those of the many new voters currently being imported by the trade unions.
I’d believe those who want to repudiate the British settlement (who were refugees from economic persecution and should have been welcomed with open arms by the Aborigines), if they wore grass lap skirts, walked on bare feet and lived in bush lean toos., But no, they take every benefit that the Brits and the rest of the modern west have provided. Hypocrites. But then, for Marxists, the issue is never the issue, the issue is always the revolution (or just plain power).
Noel Pearson says: “he will never be an advocate for conciliation and compromise again, for trying to find a middle path.”
This comment sounds more like Lidia Thorpe’s cry: “this is war!”
All I can say is if the Yes mob start misbehaving after the referendum, it will simply solidify in many minds that they did the right thing and entrench a viewpoint of conservatism.
The only thing that would turn the Yes vote around is a false flag, but even then I think it’s too late for that option. I can’t wait to have the UN chastise us as backwards and racist.
The problem with the whole ‘reconciliation’ agenda is that it posits two polities – Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians – who need to be ‘reconciled’ by something in the Constitution, or by treaties or the like, instead of a single, unified polity in which we are all Australians. It’s the opposite of what was achieved in 1967. Then, it was we’re all Australians; now it’s Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians in need of being ‘reconciled’. I reject that and sing I am, you are, we are Australian!
Well said, Michael.
If No wins and the Yessers react with rage it will just do their cause more harm. One thing is certain if NO wins a resounding victory no political party will go near such things for generations, if ever again.
When I heard, with astonishment, Noel Pearson setting aside his notorious, oft-publicised verbal thuggery, as exercised most recently in support of the Voice, and suddenly becoming an apostle of sweetness and love expressing sanctimonious disapproval of the unkind way his fellow-Yes nabobs have been characterising the No proponents, I knew for certain that the Yes case has no hope. Noel is obviously re-positioning himself so that when the Voice is resoundingly voted down, he will still be accredited, even by soft-brained Yes-voters on the political Right, as the foremost champion of the true interests of Australian aboriginality. It is reminiscent of a very fat rat deserting a fast-sinking ship.