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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
” 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.” Why is this ever surprising? If aborigines are allowed to live on country, in remote settlements with no source of income other than welfare and mining company handouts and no need to occupy themselves with traditional hunting and foraging for daily food., of course they will revert to traditional sponging off white people. Eg Henry Reynolds in The Other Side of the Frontier, spoke of indigenous men changing traditional patterns of migration round their country to travel down to the sea coast when the pearling luggers were laid up for the monsoon season because they preferred to live “in ease and idleness” from the earnings of their women who they prostituted to the pearling fleets along the northern coasts of the continent. This was not a recent or localised abuse by aboriginal men of their women. Reynolds also refers to reports in the early years of the 19th century of similar behaviour by aboriginal men in the Bass strait region.
Yes Doug, all very sad with those communities having very high levels of violence and murder rates
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Beautiful young children who grow up to be dysfunctional parents at an early age. Then there is also the very high rate of suicide by young people who can see nothing hopeful in their future.
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Throwing money at it all and racist tactics have not improved the situation. Nor will the money grubbing antics of those who thrive in the aboriginal “industry”.
The “Uluru Statement from the Wallet” started the gaslighting of all Australians, and it’s going to get ugly as the Leftist government unleashes a tsunami of lies in its upcoming, undermining media campaign.
If you were asked to take a pill that permanently damaged your DNA, including for your future generations, would you take it?
That’s what this “voice” is.
The issue is that those activating and pushing The Voice will be the usual recipients of the funding that has so far failed to assist in aboriginal education, employment and advancement. That won’t help anything and these people care not a jot that they are in the public view with their chicanery (witness ASTIC for that). I doubt if it will result in reduced funding either, for the moral suasion of The Voice will be loud and prominant, resulting in.just more of the usual ineffective funding.
Precisely! It’s merely about more “job opportunities” for the usual boys and girls, the Voice providing the same snouts with yet another feeding trough. Shouldn’t it be reasonable for the net worth of those individuals in the Nomenklatura, and their annual earnings, to be public knowledge? No doubt a career in professional victimhood can be rather lucrative.
Why can’t readers of QoL understand that Albanese is a hard-line socialist and that socialism is about destruction by whatever means possible. Refer to the works of Ludwig von Mises, (an oldie but a goodie), and more recently, The Problem with Socialism by Thomas DiLorenzo. As was true of Hitler, Stalin, et al, the socialist mind turns constantly on thoughts of destruction.
I read the comments, and the article; yet there are many many people of Aboriginal descent who are CEOs of large organisations, who successfully run their own businesses, who manage NGOs, who succeed in the professions. As Jacinta Price has pointed out, its about culture. Stuck in a tribal culture that (like the very older tribal cultures of our ancestors in many cases) has gone all the way along a Foucaultian journey to the ascendency of power and this is how we end up….with the power now coming from the financial largess of feeble governments and their addled cheer squads to fund a feckless life of addiction, unproductivity and uneducation.
Fully agree that The Voice will not produce any discernible benefits for those living in remote communities, so the next step will be demands for a treaty. What can we expect from that? Obviously, as Keith Windschuttle has clearly explained elsewhere, reparations without end, nothing more than permanent rent-seeking. As the ABC constantly reminds us, we all live on the country of some mob or another. Trouble there, yet again, is that the only people living on remote community land are the “traditional custodians”, who wouldn’t receive any rent (at least in theory).
Noel Pearson and others involved in the aboriginal industry need to be recognized for what they are, lobbyists for segregation within Australian society.
There should be no place for policies like Apartheid in this Country. Australia will be served best when it becomes an inclusive society, without segregation, without different rules for different peoples, and with the same laws, benefits and responsibilities for all.
Aborigines and peoples from any other ethnic or cultural background must be brought to understand the benefits of becoming part of an inclusive society.
It is time to be honest about the Aborigines and their cultural practises at the time of Settlement in 1788 and thereafter.
Many other cultures come from origins equally as old as the Aborigine, but have progressed and changed during that time such that their roots are not as obvious today. Aboriginal technology was, and remains, primitive, consisting essentially of the ability to make fire, digging sticks, the spear and woomera, the boomerang, various basic stone implements, fish traps, painting with ochres, and the hand plaiting and weaving of plant fibres. Aborigines did not build large stone monuments, did not farm animals and did not cultivate the soil for crops, notwithstanding the embellishments and misinterpretations of Bruce Pascoe in his book “Dark Emu”. Aborigines never developed an “iron age”, “bronze age”, or pottery. Neither did they invent the wheel. Aboriginal culture essentially remained unchanged throughout the past 60,000 years, producing none of the advances made by most other human groups during the same period.
Aboriginal cultural practises, languages, and laws varied widely between the 600-odd separate Aboriginal groups across Australia. Some practises included infanticide, cannibalism, and sexual exploitation of women. William Buckley, an escaped English convict, lived for thirty or so years amongst many different groups of aborigines. His story, published by Morgan in 1852, includes, “Violence, treachery, and killings were common, almost everyday occurrences in many groups among whom Buckley lived. In a very high fraction of the cases the conflicts began over women, sexual jealousy, and abduction of women who … were the ‘source of almost all the mischief in which the men engaged.’ … His account makes it clear that aboriginal men actively competed to acquire them and took many of them by force from weaker neighbours whenever possible.”
There has never been an Aboriginal nation. Indeed, there was never Aboriginal sovereignty over the land now called Australia because there was never a sovereign controlling the country until settlement by the British in the 1700s. Indeed, the Uluru Statement from the Heart states explicitly that the claim of sovereinty is a spiritual notion based on a long-term connection to the land. This is no different in kind to the connection most people have to places where they are their families have lived for a long time. It has nothing to do with actual sovereignty.
Apart from the fundamental issue of true indigeneity, we should start asking what is being done with the large flows of native title agreement money across Australia. Is it being used to Close the Gap? For instance, Gina Rinehart’s companies say they have handed over $300 million in recent years to local ‘landowners’. That’s a lot of money. What happens to those funds? Does anyone know? Shouldn’t we know about the quantum of these funds, and how they are being used, before we consider new benefits of various kinds, including the Voice?