The Voice

The Voice in Chris Kenny’s Head

Would it be too fanciful to suggest some sort of selective woke virus has infected Chris Kenny’s brain?  How else to explain the positively Jekyll-and-Hyde transformation he seems to undergo whenever the subject of The Voice comes up? Normally forensic in calling out the cant, hypocrisy and downright dishonesty that pervades Leftist thought these days – think CAGW, gender issues etc etc – Kenny’s conservative and sceptical instincts seem to desert him whenever any criticism or doubt is raised, or questions asked, about his pet cause.

His first reaction is to say ‘Sure let’s have a debate’ but his contribution is to simply pooh-pooh or dismiss any and all criticisms.  As an example, here is an email I sent him a week or so ago:

In September 2022, in a debate on your Sky News program, constitutional expert Dr Shireen Morris claimed that the Constitution ‘explicitly excluded Aborigines’.  You repeated that claim in an article in The Australian and last night again on your program.

This is a disingenuous claim.

In using the word ‘explicitly’, Morris can only have been referring to the original Section 51(xxvi) or Section 127 as these are the only sections that explicitly referred to Aborigines.  Section 51(xxvi) did not exclude Aborigines from the Commonwealth or the Constitution.  It merely excluded them from the class of people for whom the Commonwealth could make special laws, because that was the responsibility of the States.  As British subjects resident in Australia at the time, Aborigines were subject to every other provision of the Constitution in the same way that white people were.  And Section 127, which was repealed in 1967, only constrained government from counting Aboriginal people in ‘reckoning the numbers of people of the Commonwealth or a State or other part of the Commonwealth’.  It did not exclude them from any other provision of the Constitution.

If there were any intention to specifically exclude Aborigines from the Constitution we would expect find some discussion on this matter in the proceedings of the Constitutional Conventions.  There is no such discussion.

I totally disagree with your position on the Voice but readily concede that most of your points are at least arguable.  This one is not.  It is in the same league as the Flora and Fauna myth.

Kenny’s dismissive response, hardly redolent of a debate:

Thanks, it is a point of semantics in many ways, Aborigines were mentioned in the constitution but only (in two places) to exclude them….

I could not let that go:

That is a specious argument.  The fact that Aborigines were specifically excluded from two provisions necessarily means they were included in all the others.  The Constitution does not talk about the British people.  It just talks about ‘the people’ ‘the people of the six colonies’ or the ‘people of a State’.   Aborigines were included in ‘people’.  The colonies made laws to protect and advance Aboriginal people.  In NSW, Vic, Tasmania and South Australia, Aboriginal men had the vote at the time of Federation.  As did Aboriginal women in SA as well.

There is no doubt that Aborigines, as part of ‘the people’, were included in the Constitution.

That they were not specifically mentioned in the context of being the original inhabitants is quite another matter. 

I did not get a response to that.  Possibly Kenny would argue that he has better things to do with his time than to exchange emails with me.

In a recent Weekend Australian, Kenny had a piece in which he posited answers to Peter Dutton’s 15 questions.  That (paywalled) article drew over 1700 online comments, almost all of them negative.  Kenny, to his credit, often responds in person to comments on his articles.  As far as I’m aware he is the only one who does that.  He replied to seven comments posted over the space of a couple of hours, so that’s a pretty good effort.  He can’t spend all day combing through online threads. My comment was:

As usual, Chris Kenny speaks only of the Voice.  He does not mention the Uluru Statement, of which the Voice is an integral element.  It was the Uluru Statement that Albanese has pledged to implement in full – not just a Voice.  That includes ‘truth telling’, treaty and some form of self-government.  Aboriginal leaders such as Langton and Pearson have made it clear that the Voice is an enabling mechanism for these further demands.  That is why they are desperate to have it in the Constitution.  They don’t care about a legislated Voice because they recognize that, as far as giving useful advice is concerned, it will be a large bureaucratic white elephant.   The strident demands will not cease once the Voice is in the Constitution. We know that Kenny is passionate about the Voice.  It would be nice to know what he thinks about ‘truth telling’, treaty and self-government.

That comment attracted 159 likes but unfortunately did not elicit a response from Kenny.  So, following his Monday night Sky News program, I followed up with a email to him which made essentially the same point:

Last night you pooh-poohed the idea that the Voice has anything to do with Aboriginal sovereignty.  But the Voice is just one part of the Uluru Statement that Albanese has promised to implement in full.  The Statement mentions sovereignty four times.  It also demands ‘truth telling’ and treaty.  Aboriginal leaders, including Dr Marcia Langton, have made it quite clear that the Voice is an enabling mechanism for these other demands.  That they will use the Voice to prosecute these other issues.

You only ever talk about the Voice, as if it were the end game.  You seem to avoid mentioning the Uluru Statement.  Do you support the idea of a treaty, for example, and what do you imagine the Aboriginal community will want out of a treaty?  And what might they be prepared to concede, if anything, in order to get it?  Do you really believe that if the Voice is entrenched in the Constitution it will only be extremists like Thorpe who will demand more?

That also failed to elicit a response, so let me recap, in full, the Voice segment that Kenny aired on Monday night.  My comments are interposed:

KENNY: Others on the No side have continued to make increasingly desperate claims against the Voice – the claims about how the Voice will divide the nation, put race into the Constitution, create apartheid, confer special privileges and a host of other arguments that just don’t stack up and are designed really to just stoke unjustified fears.

[Cut to screen grab of Rowan Dean explaining the real agenda behind the Voice]

But the latest arguments put by the No advocates are the most absurd.  They cite the extremist rantings of the black sovereignty movement and use this to pretend that the Voice could undermine our sovereignty.

Look, I gotta say, this stuff is pretty silly.  The black sovereignty movement, the radical fringe has most recently been given voice by Senator Lidia Thorpe.  Thorpe opposes the Voice because it’s not radical enough.  Thorpe doesn’t want a voice to Parliament.  She wants indigenous people to reject the Parliament and claim their own nation states.

[Cut to screen grab of Thorpe outlining her grand vision]

Yeah, so that’s Thorpe.  But conservative Voice opponents are saying that the Voice will fall victim to her radicalism – even though she rejects the Voice because it’s not radical enough.

It was not Thorpe who linked sovereignty to the Voice.  It was Albanese, as I was the first to point out:

Recently, Green’s warlord, the noxious Senator Lidia Thorpe, said she would not support the Voice unless it could be guaranteed that it would not cede Aboriginal sovereignty.

Not to worry, Albanese got his hand-picked panel of constitutional experts (you know, the ones who assured us that, contrary to advice from former High Court Justices Ian Callinan and Kenneth Hayne, matters arising from the Voice would not be justiciable) to work.

Consequently, The Australian was able to report last Thursday that “The Albanese government has published a summary of legal advice from constitutional experts who say there is no basis to claims from the far left that an Indigenous voice will cede sovereignty.

Firstly, it beggars belief that the government would even entertain the idea that any form of sovereignty still resides with the Aboriginal community, that they would indulge such fantasies on the part of extremists like Thorpe.

In other words, Thorpe is irrelevant.  In effect, what Albanese is saying goes something like this: “Don’t worry, Lidia, you can still pursue your dreams of sovereignty.  In fact, we’re all on the same page.  We’re just going to get there by more subtle means, so the gullible public don’t see what we’re up to until it’s too late.”

[Cut to screen grab of Thorpe declaring war]

KENNY: Yes, Senator Thorpe is off the charts.  Her frustration with the Voice is because it accepts our Parliament and is only advisory. Well, that actually demonstrates why the Voice is OK.  And look, no push for black sovereignty could ever work through the Voice even if anyone tried it because it would make a mockery of the Voice and allow Parliament to easily ignore it.  Besides, the Voice has no power. It only exists under our sovereignty and the Parliament retains all of the authority.

The Parliament would easily ignore a demand for some form of Aboriginal sovereignty?  Really? 

Kenny spends most of his time railing against stupid government decision injurious to our sovereignty – like signing up to Net Zero emissions, like killing our coal and gas industries, like allowing Woke ideology to corrupt our education system, like removing TPVs, like imposing lockdowns and vaccination mandates – and yet he seems to think the most left-wing Labor government since Whitlam, in thrall to the even more crazy Greens, would not hesitate in a frenzy of virtue signalling to hand over some degree of power to noisy Aboriginal activists.  Like they’re doing in Victoria.

KENNY: Ironically, the real worry here is Thorpe in the here and now, as a crucial crossbench Senator has more power than the Voice ever would and she attacks our sovereignty.  Mind you, Thorpe is happy to have a seat in Parliament and take a salary from taxpayers.

Anyway, the point is nothing can overturn our sovereignty short of Beijing invading.  Our Parliaments are our sovereignty. Our courts implement the law under authority derived from our sovereignty.  Even Mabo and native title were only delivered under our sovereignty and can only continue to function under Australian sovereignty.

Conservative critics of the Voice (who number everyone except Kenny) are not claiming Aboriginal sovereignty will extinguish Australian sovereignty.  Sovereignty in Australia, in terms of law-making, is shared between the Commonwealth and the states.  What Aboriginal activists – Kenny’s Voice colleague Marcia Langton among them – want, as a minimum, is equal status with the states.  The more moderate of them want an Aboriginal state, or states, in which Aboriginal people will be governed by a separate set of laws from the rest of us.  It is not just extremists like Thorpe who want this.  It’s Chris Kenny’s fellow travellers.  He need only read Keith Windschuttle’s expose of this in his recent Quadrant Online article, “Living on Stolen Land“,  to satisfy him of that.  Or better still, read Keith’s masterful work The Break-Up of Australia.   Does Kenny support yet another level of government in this country?

KENNY: Seriously, to try to discredit the Voice because one Voice opponent is ranting about sovereignty is like trying to oppose the whole idea of Parliament because an incoherent radical like Senator Thorpe got elected to it.  Let’s continue the Yes/No debate but let’s keep it real.

Kenny must be the only one who believes this is all just about an advisory body to Parliament.  That is why any debate with him is futile. But give him his due, he has his beliefs and he’s sticking to them, as per the video below.

Later in the same show, Kenny certainly seemed to disapprove the idea of two anthems being played at the US Superbowl – the national anthem and a black anthem.  In a separate email, I invited him to explain why two anthems in the US is bad and two (or three) flags in Australia is OK.  He declined to answer.  How could he?  The only coherent answer he might be able to give would be that the US is different because black Americans possess no unique sovereignty of their own. Oops!

32 thoughts on “The Voice in Chris Kenny’s Head

  • pmprociv says:

    Of course the most vociferous proponents of The Voice have a hidden agenda. Were its purpose purely advisory, then it’s already seriously redundant, even before it’s conceived — we have a surfeit of indigenous voices to governments. Just look at the very fancy (i.e. expensive) websites of the biggest ones, starting with the Coalition of Peaks, or NIAA, or NACCHO, or Empowered Communities — the list goes on and on, and I find it impossible to determine just how their purposes differ, or whether they overlap, cooperate or compete (and that includes the numerous individuals involved, sitting on various boards and committees). And they all claim to want to Close the Gap, by working sensitively with communities and governments blah, blah blah . . .
    Our politicians and bureaucrats are already exposed to a deluge of inputs, among which The Voice would simply be drowned in all the noise. It must be a stepping stone, to Bigger Things. The real mystery is: how come Kenny fails to see this? Or is he also working to a hidden agenda?

  • Adelagado says:

    Kenny seems completely blind to the probability (certainty) that The Voice will become radically political and by enshrining it in the Constitution, and housing at least part of it within the walls of Parliament House it will have profounds consequences for the everyday business of the Government of the day. (Especially any Liberal Government), As I say in the Quadrant Online article preceding this one Labor is proposing the creation of a black House of Lords.
    ,
    “UK Labour wants to abolish the House of Lords while Labor in Australia want to establish a black House of Lords over here. (Theres no other way to think of a group that will be officed within Parliament, Activist, Politically aligned, Non elected, and ultimately Hereditary. And it will be racist to boot).
    .
    As someone said…’Any group that is not overtly right wing will inevitably become left wing’. Kenny simply refuses to consider that The Voice is going to completely change politics in Australia and probably entrench left wing Government forever.

  • Tony Tea says:

    Maybe Kenny drew the short straw at News, so he has to be the designated arguer.

    • Adelagado says:

      Kenny has said on numerous occasions that he was in central Australia and actively worked with The Voice authors, or with some similar group, so he is very invested in this.

  • Botswana O'Hooligan says:

    His opinions contradict each other sometimes and it is hard to figure out what he is on about when the facts are considered. Logic has never entered the equation for we are the one Nation all with equal representation through the parliamentary system and the laws of the land tho one sometimes wonders if that is exactly true when all the extras the aboriginals enjoy are taken into account. Queensland, Victoria, and South Australia are giving the aboriginals a “voice” apparently, all without voter approval so even if the referendum fails as it should, Labor will legislate one and since they have the numbers we will enjoy all the benefits of apartheid as second rate citizens. The people who are pushing the “voice” might be well intentioned but then again the lesson we learned to our great cost with ATSIC may have to be learned all over again for those involved with ATSIC weren’t all that well intentioned.

    • Adelagado says:

      I don’t know about the other states but the South Australian Voice required no constitutional changes. Its just another bureaucracy. I don’t have any particular objection to it… it might even work. Which begs the question, why can’t the national Voice be established without changing the constitution?

      • Rebekah Meredith says:

        It could. Presumably, such a body would be too easily removed, and would not sufficiently highlight the importance of the two-to-three percenters.

      • pmprociv says:

        But mate, as I keep harping on, we already have countless indigenous voices! Just check out the Coalition of Peaks, which represents only THE LEADING 80 (!!!) indigenous bodies, as explained in its website: “We are the Coalition of Peaks – a representative body of over 80 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander community controlled peak organisations and members. We came together as an act of self-determination to be formal partners with Australian governments on Closing the Gap.”
        It includes Indigenous Minister Linda Burney, and is in “formal partnership” with Oz governments. What possible additional benefits could The Voice provide, apart from serving as yet another trough for the snouts of its members?

  • March says:

    CK helped bust the nonsense of the secret women’s business but somehow can’t see through this sham. Perhaps he’s been promised a seat on the board?

  • john.singer says:

    Thanks again Peter O’Brien for a clear forceful article.
    Unfortunately, like Chris Kenny, many readers do not really understand the Constitution and the effects of the 1967 Referendum.

    The Reason that ONLY Aboriginal people were excluded by the original Sec 51(xxvi) was that the States did not agree to transfer the power to the Commonwealth in the 1900 Legislation. They only gained the power (and wisely did not use it) by the 1967 referendum. Sec 51 sets conditions for all Commonwealth lawmaking, requiring they must satisfy “Peace, Order and Good Government” with the High Court and not the Parliament as arbiter.

    The reason that Aboriginals were not counted in the Census prior to the 1967 removal of Sec 127 was the census figure was used to calculate the number of House of Representative seats based on population numbers and some States had many Aboriginal people who still did not or were unable to participate in civic duties,like voting. BUT Aboriginal people were counted by various State organisations and I believe that the Aboriginal people who were exercising full citizenship rights were counted among the rest of their State’s population’.

    In relation to Chris Kenny, he has fallen for the old “three card trick””, They formed 3 committees of 17 under the Former Minister, who assigned different jobs to them (Probably kept each in the dark of the others but told them they were the main committee). I doubt Chris Kenny understands the full import of the Uluru Statement and of Prime Minister Albanese’s acceptance of it in full as he announced at the Garma Festival.

    A good journalist needs a Nose and an Antenna, A nose for truth and an Antenna to detect the chatter. He certainly had it in the Hindmarsh Island controversy but seems to have lost it now. He seems oblivious to the truth and will not listen to his guests and panelists but does not hesitate to try to make them change their opinions.

    The Voice proposal undermines the Constitution and the basic structure of Australian society. A Federal Government acting without influence of foreign ideologies would use Sec 51(xxvi) to strike down the legislations currently proposed by three State Governments.

  • lbloveday says:

    Quote: Kenny, to his credit, often responds in person to comments on his articles. As far as I’m aware he is the only one who does that.
    .
    Chris Mitchell does, or at least did – he wrote sharp retorts to my questioning his articles.

  • Mike O'Ceirin says:

    I have read Uluru statement which the current government wants to implement in full and for me it says that anyone with a recognised aboriginal heritage owns Australia. The rest should just pay up. Australia is nothing like what it was in 1788 and certainly credit for that cannot be given to just one racial group no matter who they are. I recognise there are many marginalised aboriginals but I am certain the voice is not going to help them. Unfortunately the bleeding hearts of this world do not understand the problems of the cultural clash and have no desire to do so.

  • Stephen Due says:

    All I want before any of this is set in concrete is for someone (? Chris Kenny) to tell me who is an Aboriginal for the purposes of the proposed new components of the constitution. After that we might discuss the much easier question of whether it is advisable to make the constitution into an explicitly racist document.

    • Peter OBrien says:

      Stephen,
      an extract from my No Case booklet:

      “… a provision in the Constitution that references, or rather preferences, a certain group of people, must make it beyond doubt who those people are. If the current criterion – self-identification – is applied, that would open up a can of worms. We need to know who exactly qualifies as an Aborigine and how those persons establish their bona fides. For example, would any degree of Aboriginality in one’s ancestry qualify? If so, then the Aboriginal population can only continue to expand indefinitely, to the point where this will become less and less about disadvantage and more and more about entitlement. If not, then where is the cut-off? 50% aboriginality? 25%? 12.5%? Wherever it is set, someone is going to be aggrieved. To further complicate the issue, prominent Aboriginal academic, Dr Suzanne Ingram, suggests that as many as 300,000 of the currently reported Aboriginal population of 800,000 may not be genuine. If this issue is not adequately addressed in the referendum question itself, that alone should be a deal breaker. I cannot stress this enough. It cannot be left up to Parliament to define, expand or contract this demographic at whim. If the Voice goes into the Constitution, then it must be the Constitution (by means of a referendum) that defines and redefines – over time and as necessary – who is an Aborigine.”

      Not that I would support the Voice if this issue were addressed, but, as I say, its absence should be enough to kill the referendum.

      • southern girl says:

        An excellent reply to this article. From the ABS the proportion of the population of Australia which identifies as aboriginal has gone from 2.8% in 2016 to 3.2% in 2020. Despite this minor increase voices in this overall tiny portion of our population are demanding recognition out of all proportion to their numbers. This is ridiculous. Also the use of “identifies as” by the ABS does not give any clue as to how aboriginality is determined by any independent criteria, that is not being enunciated by the prime minister. Vote No.

      • pmprociv says:

        Spot on, Peter. If we locked the gates now, inevitably (it might take a few centuries) every Oz citizen will have Aboriginal ancestry. What The Voice would amount to by then, is that we’d all be given not one, but two votes, each! One would be for the hereditary House of Lords, election to which we’d all be eligible to nominate for.

      • Rebekah Meredith says:

        Very well put, Mr. O’Brien. Can you tell me how I could get your booklet?

      • rosross says:

        In a modern democracy surely the question of what is an Aborigine is irrelevant since it is undemocratic. If we applied the same criteria to all ancestry which applies to those with Aboriginal, there would be no Australians, just hundreds of different ‘tribes.’

        However, in this age being able to register as native, is common in Western nations. Most of them require at least 50% ancestry although some American Indian tribes will accept 25%.

        If we regulated that no less than 25% was acceptable, this could easily be established through birth records, since, someone who is a quarter Aboriginal, from any tribal clan, would have one fully Aboriginal grandparent. I suspect such a regulation would see the 900,000 currently registered drop down to less than 9,000.

        The fact is, there are no Aborigines, just Australians with Aboriginal ancestry, which, while personally interesting, should be irrelevant to citizenship. Unfortunately the use of the term race has endured from the 19th century, when such labels were common, even though there never was and certainly is not today, an Aboriginal race.

        Neither are there any Aborigines who live anything approximating a traditional life, recognizable from the 18th century. All of them live hybrid Anglo-European/Aboriginal lives where some tribal systems remain, generally the worst of them, and it is retrofitted to some semblance of modern life and technology. It is, by its nature, so artificial and doomed that it is little wonder those who attempt to live it are such a mess.

        Like many ‘noble’ ideas it was always going to fail in the face of clear, common and daily realities. But those who were instrumental in setting up the remote communities meant well.

        The other guarantee of failure, as they knew in the Victorian age, is that welfare does not make people stronger, it makes them weaker and too much welfare makes them even more dysfunctional. We see quite clearly that having Aboriginal ancestry does not by necessity create dysfunction because those who have assimilated over generations are doing fine. The problems lie with those who are the least assimilated into the modern world and who play at a pretense of a traditional life, i.e. wandering off into the bush, in their clapped out Toyota, to bludgeon a bandicoot to death and them coming home and heating up a frozen dinner in the microwave. Such artificiality sears the soul and psyche.

    • IainC says:

      I’m old enough to remember when waving flags, raising clenched fists, proclaiming yourselves sovereign citizens and rejecting the authority of the state, and demanding cultural preference because you were here first was a “far right” gig.
      As a long time fan of CK, I find the weakness of his Yes arguments astonishing, as though they were written by a copyboy who failed logic. CK made this absolute howler in the article referred to, and requires unbelievable contortions of meaning to fit his thesis.

      (CK) It is also wrong to claim this is a racial or racist measure – it proposes a representative body for Indigenous people not based on racial characteristics but on the simple reality that they are the descendants of the original inhabitants. Nor does it confer special privilege; it allocates only an opportunity to offer advice on matters affecting Indigenous people.

      (my response) Chris, you are wrong – this special Voice is ONLY available to those with Indigenous ancestors (i.e with that racial heritage), and no other race. It’s not available to Asians, or Africans, or Europeans, or Eskimo, or American Indians, or…. Ironically, an upper-middle-class woman in a million dollar house in Northcote with an Aboriginal grandmother would comply, and an Anglo-Saxon woman married to a full Aboriginal man in the Kimberleys would not; her 18-year-old son would, however. This race selective nonsense has got to go, for the sake of our international reputation.

  • David Cragg says:

    I am closer to Kenny than to O’Brien on this one ………….. the critics of the Voice seem to be in awe of the organizing skills of Australia’s Aborigines – who seriously takes the notion of an additional “Aborigine only” state? Who takes the concept of Aboriginal sovereignty seriously? My support for the Voice is based on the belief that Aborigines, or their most articulate representatives, need to take some responsibility for their own situation – the rest of us haven’t, and I believe cannot, come up with any viable solutions for the problems many Aborigines face. Do I expect the Voice to be a success? I am 50-50 on this – I hope that the elected representatives can achieve some progress through a cordial and positive working relationship with the National Parliament. And I expect that Aborigines will gain some precious self-esteem from the respect and confidence that the rest of the community has shown them through the creation of the Voice …………. But if it turns out to be another useless white elephant, add it to a long list – but at least we gave it a go.

    • Gerry Van Hees says:

      The only problem being that giving it a try is not an option as once it’s in the constitution it’ll be there to stay. So good luck with that option!

    • rosross says:

      Since there are no Australian Aborigines in any real sense, let alone organizing anything, your statement makes no sense. There are Australians with Aboriginal ancestry ranging from 100%, very few of those, to less than 1%, lots of those, with most so minimally Aboriginal in ancestry they are not and could not register as such in any other country.

      The ones doing the organising are more Anglo-European than Aboriginal in ancestry and are working for themselves. Is the argument that somehow the slightest bit of Aboriginal ancestry eradicates the blight of Anglo-European ancestry so these Abominimals are actually Aboriginal? Surely all of them, whether 100% or less than 1% are Australians with Aboriginal ancestry?
      You said: Who takes the concept of Aboriginal sovereignty seriously?

      Some of the Abominimal radicals certainly do even though there is no unified group which could be deemed Aboriginal.

      You said: My support for the Voice is based on the belief that Aborigines, or their most articulate representatives, need to take some responsibility for their own situation –

      Most have. Are you truly unaware that the vast majority of those with Aboriginal ancestry are doing fine, as well, sometimes better than the rest, with the same sorts of lives and outcomes?

      The tiny minority who are struggling are doing so because they remain trapped in backward and violent tribal systems and are the least assimilated into the modern world. No voice would ever help them because the Voice pushers and power-players do not live in such communities, but are fully assimilated into modern Australian and looking for power and profit.

      You said: the rest of us haven’t, and I believe cannot, come up with any viable solutions for the problems many Aborigines face.

      We have a solution and it is staring us in the face. By the way, it is not many, but a few of those with aboriginal ancestry. We know that Assimilation was a mighty success, as has been intermarriage and integration, for the majority are doing fine through this process.

      The problem has been the few stuck in communities trapped in primitive tribal systems. That was well-intentioned but it has been a disaster.

      You keep talking about Aborigines when none exist. Aboriginal communities are riven by familial and tribal divisions and violently so, which means there is no unity possible with all communities let alone all those with Aboriginal ancestry.

      Give it a go and destroy our democracy on the basis of racism. No thanks.

  • en passant says:

    It is beyond my comprehension that normally sane people can be sucked in to cultish fanaticism over some clearly irrational matters.

  • Ceres says:

    CK has gone off the reservation on this one and does not seem to contemplate the probable involvement of High Court activist judges.
    . Andrew Bolt pointed out tonight, that on the ABC , Marcia Langton prominent architect of all this, agreed that when a government decision has been made it could be stopped from being implemented and challenged in the High Court until the Voice had been heard. Government paralysed whilst argy barry by people unelected by 97% of the population proceeded and democracy is dead, buried and cremated before our eyes. Sounds like a junta, with real power to nullify the voices of 97% of the population.
    Maybe Kenny feels backed into a corner now given the overwhelming no case but I wouldn’t really know as I gave up watching him over this.

    • Peter OBrien says:

      Ceres,
      I watched Kenny and he did have a Voice segment but did not address the big news re Craven’s and Langton’s contretemps, that you refer to above. He interviewed a former Liberal VP who has authored a chapter in a book subtitled ‘the Moral Case for the Voice’. To his credit, Kenny wondered if positioning the Voice as a moral issue was quite the right strategy but seemed mollified by his guest’s assurance that this was the moral, conservative and Liberal way to go. God help us!

  • Louis Cook says:

    Rebekah, you will find the book here under ‘new books’.
    https://www.connorcourtpublishing.com.au/

Leave a Reply