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In September last year the Albanese government advertised for applicants for a new position in the bureaucracy, an Ambassador for First Nations People. The ambassador would be employed by the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade to work across a number of government agencies and departments. The brief would be to
engage directly on how Australia’s international engagement contributes to Indigenous community and economic development, supports First Nations businesses and exporters, delivers practical action on climate change, builds connections across the Indo-Pacific region and supports Indigenous rights around the world.
The position would mean that Australia would for the first time have “dedicated indigenous representation in our international engagement”. In other words, from the earliest days after its election victory, the Albanese government decided that the scope of its commitment to the Aboriginal Voice would extend well beyond domestic issues.
In March this year, Indigenous Affairs Minister Linda Burney announced that Justin Mohamed had got the job. The published documents gave only short accounts of the areas in which Mohamed would concentrate but it was clear he was expected to focus on issues of much more significance than overseas trade in indigenous art and artefacts or tourist attractions.
Mohamed’s former career path has been not in trade but in identity politics. His previous job was Secretary of Aboriginal Justice in the Victorian government where he oversaw the development of the state treaty with Aboriginal people and truth-telling projects. As Ambassador for First Nations, his brief from the Albanese government now is to “ensure the perspectives of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples are included in our international engagements”.
You might have thought such an appointment would have attracted its share of publicity, especially given the controversy that emerged over Albanese’s decision to give the proposed Voice the right to consult and advise not just the Parliament but the entire executive of the Commonwealth government. An indigenous ambassador could potentially influence international policies of security, defence and foreign affairs. If the Voice gets up under its present wording, the ambassador will clearly be one of those always at its beck and call.
So far, the mainstream media have largely ignored this development. The announcement of Mohamed’s appointment received minimal publicity. The only commentary I have seen about it has been an article by Gary Johns, secretary of Recognise A Better Way, in the online site Epoch Times. Johns’s piece was published before Peter Dutton transformed the media debate by announcing he would lead a Vote No campaign. Yet the implications of the Voice’s international role deserve to be much wider known since they provide more strong reasons for voting No.
In the advertisement for the ambassador’s position last September, the media release was accompanied by a statement from Foreign Minister Penny Wong, who said that, as well as helping to grow Aboriginal trade and investment, the ambassador “will also lead Australia’s engagement to progress First Nations rights globally.” What she was tacitly referring to here was the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP), a document endorsed by the UN General Assembly in 2007. Kevin Rudd’s Labor government officially adopted it at a ceremony in Parliament House, Canberra, in April 2009. Ever since then, the ideas in this declaration have been central to Aboriginal political demands on the rest of Australia.
For its Aboriginal advocates, UNDRIP promises two major gains in economic and political power: reparations and sovereignty. These issues will be the focus of much of Ambassador Mohamed’s time and energy in pursuing Aboriginal rights globally. If the constitutional referendum proposed by Albanese is successful, the activities the new diplomat will be required to pursue in international tribunals like the United Nations Human Rights Council, the UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues or the International Court of Justice, will be those identified by UNDRIP.
One of the principal issues that document identifies is reparations. Its article 28 endorses the following two clauses:
1/ Indigenous peoples have the right to redress, by means that can include restitution or, when this is not possible, of a just, fair and equitable compensation, for the lands, territories and resources which they have traditionally owned or otherwise occupied or used, and which have been confiscated, taken, occupied, used or damaged without their free, prior and informed consent.
2/ Unless otherwise freely agreed upon by the peoples concerned, compensation shall take the form of lands, territories and resources equal in quality, size and legal status or of monetary compensation or other appropriate redress.
Since the Aboriginal political class now declares at every opportunity that they never surrendered their sovereignty over all of Australia and that British occupation of Aboriginal land in 1788 was illegal both then and now, the Commonwealth government could be faced with some very costly demands. The appropriate reparations would be equal in value to all the property that was purportedly stolen from them – that is, the entire continent of Australia, its offshore islands and waterways – that have not already been returned or compensated.
In 2005, another declaration by the UN was passed by the General Assembly. This is generally identified as the acceptance of the human rights set out in the Van Boven Principles. (The formal title was: Basic Principles and Guidelines on the Right to a Remedy and Reparation for Victims of Gross Violations of International Human Rights Law and Serious Violations of International Humanitarian Law). Today it is frequently referenced in papers and reports on Aboriginal policy by Australia’s various human rights bureaucracies and in documents advocating Aboriginal treaties.
For example, one of the most exhaustive of these reports is the Northern Territory Treaty Commission, Final Report, 2022, which argues that a treaty with First Nations should provide reparations for indigenous people under the Van Boven Principles. This requires the Commonwealth to provide to Aboriginal people “an acknowledgement and apology for breaches of human rights; guarantees against repetition; measures of restitution; measures of rehabilitation, and monetary compensation”.
The NT report says reparations should be paid to those indigenous peoples who have suffered personal pain and suffering, and have endured losses of identity, family connection, language, culture, and access to traditional land. Since large numbers of those who identify as Aboriginal today would not trouble their conscience by pleading they or their ancestors endured such misfortunes, they would not hesitate to join the long queue for reparation payments.
We already have an example of the granting of similar terms by the Commonwealth government in the $600 million dollar grant announced in 2021 to members of the Stolen Generations and their offspring. The then Minister for Indigenous Australians, Ken Wyatt, allocated the money for the “healing” of those allegedly suffering from trauma. Most of it, some $378 million, was to fund a “redress scheme” comprising compensation grants of $75,000 to each individual who identifies as a survivor of the Stolen Generations, plus a $7000 grant “to facilitate healing”. The rest was allocated for grants for research services and healing treatments.
Even though the major test case of the Stolen Generations in the Northern Territory Supreme Court, Cubillo and Gunner v Commonwealth, found the claims by the plaintiffs were unproven, and the High Court of Australia in Kruger v Commonwealth found the same about claims of genocide, Wyatt agreed to pay compensation not only to those who claimed to have been stolen but to their relatives and descendants for the alleged trauma they suffered, with no limit on how distant this family relationship might be. Even the great-grandchildren of the original Stolen Generations claimants could make a claim. The policy would serve those “descended from older generations who were removed — great grandparents, grandparents, parents, aunties, and uncles”.
Even greater munificence can be expected if the current Commonwealth government wins constitutional referendum later this year and introduces a treaty with similar ideological objectives.
The key ideas that inform these policies do not derive from Aboriginal culture or its modern political advocates. Like the term “First Nations”, the most influential ideas about reparations and compensation in the international milieu come from the US. They are not ancient or traditional there either.
Since 2001 and the publication of a best-selling book by Randall Robinson, The Debt: What America Owes to Blacks, a growing number of lawsuits and political demonstrations have generated a movement to compensate the distant descendants of America’s black slaves. US academics have embellished their careers by joining the throng and specialist lawyers have emerged to pursue the issue through the courts and legislatures.
Since the police killing of African-American George Floyd in May 2020, the Black Lives Matter movement has become the most publicised promoter of the link between slavery and contemporary race relations. And just as Australian Aboriginal radicals in the 1960s imitated Black Power advocates in the American Civil Rights movement, today’s Aboriginal political activists are doing the same again this time around. This is despite the fact that the movements they are imitating were founded not by indigenous Americans but by African-American socialists.
Since January this year, the most notorious of the American demands for reparations has been initiated by advisors to the government of the City of San Francisco. Although California was never a state that permitted slavery in any legal or political sense, it is now being told to lift black reparations to a breathtaking new height.
San Francisco’s African American Reparations Advisory Committee produced a report advocating a $5 million payment to every black person who qualified, plus a supplemental income to low-income residents for the next 250 years. The principal qualifications required for these payments were that recipients be at least 18 years old and have identified as black or African-American on public documents for at least ten years. Other requirements include that the resident is “personally, or the direct descendant of someone, incarcerated by the failed War on Drugs” or is a “Descendant of someone enslaved through US chattel slavery before 1865”.
The San Francisco report also included a statement that is very likely to have an influence on the kind of debate we can expect in the Vote Yes campaign in our own forthcoming referendum. In a testimonial bordering on ethnic blackmail, the report declared that San Francisco’s “international reputation as a shining progressive gem in the west is undermined by its legacy of mistreatment, violence towards, and targeted racism against Black Americans.” The San Francisco city government is currently negotiating with the authors of this proposal who will submit a final report in June.
Is the $5 million per head of reparations an ambit claim that will inevitably be reduced? Probably yes. But in the minds of reparations seekers everywhere it has certainly lifted the bar of what could be possible and what they are likely to settle for.
So by the time the Australian government’s negotiators settle with the Voice on a figure for individual reparations here, it’s a safe bet the $600 million granted by Ken Wyatt for his Stolen Generations redress scheme will look paltry. In fact, the number of Australian indigenous claimants attracted to a reparations offer like that of San Francisco would make the costs of the recent national Covid lockdowns look like small beer.
As a growing number of comments by readers of articles in our daily newspapers are beginning to recognise, the treaties and reparations generated by the Voice can never lead to reconciliation. Instead, discussions about who will get what from treaties in Australia have already created two separate entities, Aboriginal people versus Australian people, engaged in an unseemly contest for moral supremacy and political power.
As leftist historian Henry Reynolds’s argued in his 1996 book, Aboriginal Sovereignty, and as the subsequent stream of books and reports by the Aboriginal elite in Sydney, Melbourne and Canberra confirm time and again, their common objective is to divide this continent three ways, between Aborigines, Torres Strait Islanders, and the rest of us. The 97 per cent of the population descended from those who came here after 1788, have nothing to gain and a lot to lose.
The objectives of indigenous sovereignty and reparations for bogus historical offences should be seen as the opposite of “completing the nation”. Those conservative political identities who have long supported the Voice, such as Julian Leeser and Greg Craven, have based their stance on wishful thinking. As any realistic conservative could tell them, a victory for Yes in the forthcoming constitutional referendum is guaranteed to divide the nation. The goodwill of the majority of our population towards Aboriginal people, clearly in evidence since the previous referendum in 1967, will be lost in a swamp of unjustifiable political and moral dogmas that the Voice will institutionalise. The unintended consequences can only end in sorrow.
in·di·gen·ous
[ɪnˈdɪdʒɪnəs]
ADJECTIVE
originating or occurring naturally in a particular place; native:
It seems to me that a person born in Australia is indigenous to Australia.
Are descendants of the Aboriginal race “indiginous” because their anscestors wer here first?
If such is the case, what is the implication of up to nine other races preceding them?
Are they then more Indiginous than persons born here after 1788?
There seems to be sopme compelling evidence to support this idea.
[https://cairnsnews.org/2022/09/07/aborigines-possibly-the-tenth-race-to-have-inhabited-australia/]
“..We have photographs of the “little people (150 cm) of the Kuranda rainforest…”
Yes..but they are locked up from the public since they show images of “natural persons”.
I have had some amusing swords fights trying to get hold of the photos from the SA Museum.
I am supposed to find relatives of the people in the photos….
Then get permission for the photo to be sent to me..
Which is insane.
Does anyone know of any source/book etc that shows all the photos of pygmies listed in the SA museum.?
Some of them were relocated to the Mona Mona Mission near Kuranda in Nth QLD. I have seen a photo of them standing beside a european, I believe the photo was taken by a Robert Atkinson. I have seen this photo a couplke of times in books that we have I will see if I can find it. My email lolpg@iinet.net.au
Just like a purchser who didn’t know the goods were stolen property, we have a receipt – the Constitution of Australia that was issued as an Act of the British Government. If reparations are due it should be from Britain who stole the land. Give them King Charles’ email address.
WHY I OPPOSE THE ABORIGINAL ‘VOICE TO PARLIAMENT.’
The ‘Aboriginal Voice’ will likely just be the first cab off the rank here. Other minorities who believe they have suffered discrimination will each have a case for their own ‘voices’ to be added to the general parliamentary cacophony. The Jewish community, and the Muslims of Australia, who copped a lot of flak after 9/11, and whose forerunners the ‘Afghan Cameleers’ built the world’s only corrugated-iron mosque out there at Broken Hill, NSW; they both have a case. If they get their Muslim ‘Voice’ then likely the Australian Hindus (mainly immigrants from India) will want theirs too, potentially bringing the Hindu-Muslim conflicts that separated India form Pakistan in 1947 into it as well.
We also have the Chinese, who were racially vilified, killed and injured in the goldfields riots such as occurred at Lambing Flat, NSW in the Gold Rush days of the 1850s. The list of groups with a case for a parliamentary Voice of their own can only grow.
Moreover, consider the possible consequences should the Aboriginal Voice be ignored by the pollies on any given issue. Street demonstrations and public protest meetings etc, etc, etc will likely be the order of the day, and of the type that are routine in Alice Springs and elsewhere today. Because, after all, ‘The Voice’ will represent a racially-based constituency, not a geographic one.
If you ask me, the whole thing is a can of worms inside a time-bomb. The saying of former Chief Justice of Australia Sir Harry Gibbs: “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,” is appropriate here.
Our Constitution ain’t broke; on the contrary, it is a lighthouse to the rest of the world, and has served us well. The cobbling-on of any or all of these extras will each be like tacking a sly-grog bar onto that Broken Hill mosque.
The Aboriginal community is not united on ‘The Voice’ either. Significant numbers there also oppose it. QUOTE: “A day after tens of thousands attended Invasion Day rallies around the country, polling shows 80 per cent of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australians support a Voice enshrined in the constitution, despite opposition from politicians, including Victorian senator Lidia Thorpe of the Greens and Northern Territory Country Liberal Party senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price.” ENDQUOTE.
See: https://www.afr.com/politics/federal/indigenous-support-for-voice-at-80pc-despite-protests-by-noisy-few-20230127-p5cfwj
Repossession and Reparations … as we have commented a number of times.
The unearned guilt taken on board by middle-class whiteys for the appalling mess exhibited in Alice Springs (for example) will be sufficient to get the Voice into the Constitution, in my view.
It also seems at least probable to me that the Alice Springs outbreaks are being exacerbated by activists, with their strategy copied from BLM tactics in the US. “The point ? Vote the Voice into the Constitution and we’ll fix this”.
Yet this Hades has been unrelieved for my entire lifetime and before, despite the goodwill of most and the enormous amounts of effort and money poured at the issue. Over 30 years ago, a TV programme on Ch9 called Sunday dared to air a short, factual doco showing the continual night-time violence in Alice Springs. Not only did no other MSM outlet even acknowledge the existence of this violence, the reporters who assembled and aired the doco were treated to an early version of Cancel Culture.
How did we get a “Fir-r-rst Nations” (it must be pronounced with a rhotic accent to avoid cultural appropriation) Ambassador without a referendum? We all know how vitally important it is to have such things embedded in the Constitution.
Once again we see what a bulwark for good sense is our Quadrant editor Keith.
This Yes/No campaign is early on revealing the ideological commitments in the Coalition. The uncommitted are often of the Moderate [or Wet] faction; Julian Leeser, Simon Birmingham, Ken Wyatt. Just recall the names of those who supported M Turnbull to replace T Abbott!
Will reparations be tempered for those receiving great wealth from mining enterprises on traditional land?Will any of those receiving great salaries or benefits from the $4.3bn pa NIAA be asked to take a haircut on reparations. Will reparations be reduced to those formerly naked indigenes who received clothes from the settler society? Will the indigenes who never had a hot drink [they couldn’t boil water before settlers arrived] wave away at least some of the reparations. Just asking.
Have to agree with your comments. Except that you are praising Abbott who still wants Constitutional recognition of Aboriginals when it already covers everybody.
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I want a to live in a nation of equals without any race having special mention.
“They were here first.” Some Voice supporters think this is a sufficient justification. In the debate over whether Germany was justified in annexing Alsace in 1871, some German apologists said its original inhabitants were Germanic peoples. Some French claimed they were Gallic. The French historian Ernest Renan’s comment to the German theologian David Strauss was this: “With this philosophy of history, the only legitimate rights in the world will be those of the orang-outangs, unjustly dispossessed by civilised man.”
Being here first really means their ancestors predated the ancestors of others. At the moment, we are all here together.
I’m sure the UN has some committee working on this, as we speak.
The socialist progressives just love their little identity emblems, don’t they?
Like, what is an African American? Elon Musk was born and raised in South Africa but is now a USA citizen… African American ?? Is the identity to be determined by a percentage of blackness in the skin tone?
We know the USA is the most racist bigoted country on this planet, they divide by a corrupt parasitic identity policy with an outcome that they do not even understand will destroy (and is) their society. The great endeavours of MLK Jr fall flat nowadays.
Albanese fails to uphold the spirit of the Australian Constitution with this First Nations jargon. If there were Nations on this continent before British settlement can someone please show me the written documents to prove their constitutional nationhood?
Somebody once decried “hyphenated Americans”, I decry the idea of hyphenated Australians.
Thanks, Keith, for this important article. One can see why the MSM are coy about this information relevant to the debate. I hope that the points you have made become more widely known in the Australian community, prior to the referendum, but I won’t be holding my breath.
Labor’s Voice is a trojan horse for 52 Territories, abolishing the States?
It will be a disaster for this country if the Yes campaign is successful. Australians will very quickly have a severe case of buyer’s remorse as the reality of the agenda Albanese and the indigenous advisory group unfolds with truth, treaty etc, and the politics of the voice become an everyday feature of our political and civic life.
Albanese presents this as if the governance of Australia will carry on as usual, but just with an advisory body on indigenous affairs. That is completely mistaken, arguably disingenuous. This referendum is about the very foundations of Australia. Indigenous leaders know it, and Albanese pretends otherwise. If the Voice proposal gets up, we will be in a different nation, with different governance, and not for the better. If the Yes case is successful, it will be the biggest mistake in Australian political history, and will very quickly be seen to be so.
I don’t see how or why reparations are due. 40% of my DNA is Irish but on this scenario I have a claim on the English for what happened all those years ago. Aboriginal ancestors are the same as my ancestors since they blended with the white settler population. This means they are making demands because of what their ancestors did good or bad. If we need to play this game and decide we are separate peoples then I think there is a considerable debt that must be paid by the first nations so-called. So let us list what was gained from the white settlers we could start with the wheel. The claims are from the children of the mixed race that Australians now are. The plight of remote aboriginal communities has little to do with all this. The voice will install aboriginal activists to gain great advantage over their descendants. I was interested in Clive Palmer’s comment elsewhere that this will block other aboriginals any voice at all.
It is a matter of mathematics. If somebody is 25% aboriginal, that means they are 75% non-aboriginal and they have a net debt of 50% owing to the reparation account.
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Since most claiming aboriginal ancestry are of a minority percentage, we should hear the screams of injustice from a long way off when they are asked to pay reparations.
Working out reparations must include deduction for all the money spent by Australian governments over many years. Also claimants should only be entitled to their proven share of aboriginal ancestry. Will it happen? Hopefully not if only because you cannot cut out future generations crying ‘but we deserve it and our parents have spent it all’. But then the claims are fundamentally immoral – wanting something for nothing.
My thoughts exactly. I’m sure that more than $600 million has been spent on aboriginal schemes for many decades, plus the mining royalties. Aboriginal people have been more than compensated for their lands. With 400 tribes, all with their own language and customs, does not make them a nation – such as New Zealand was – and no amount of obfuscation by activists ( including those non aboriginal people present at the Uluru meeting) will make it so.
In this excellent but bleak article, I did get one good laugh: the US reparations claim of San Francisco’s “international reputation as a shining progressive gem in the west….”
These guys and their Australian counterparts are totally deluded.
Thanks yet again, Keith, for bringing these bizarre developments to our attention. It’s a pretty clear sign that the ALP has gone insane. But I must dissect your: “97 per cent of the population descended from those who came here after 1788”. You’re being too kind. Of that remaining 3%, who claim to be indigenous, the vast majority have European ancestry, which is dominant in most of them. As Brian Boru suggests (3 comments up), surely they can’t expect to gain full compensation for past damages — and should also proportionately contribute to reparations payments. And, with all the box-ticking race-shifters coming out of the woodwork, that 3% is bound to grow in future census figures, especially if the Voice gets up. The inevitable feeding frenzy for lawyers no doubt explains why so many of their representatives are all for this idiocy.
The other aspect of this business which I find frankly mind-boggling is the huge profile given to Torres Strait islanders. They have little in common with mainland Aborigines, being derived from PNG Melanesians (OK, those in the south-western islands have more mainland connections), their total population is ca. 70,000, of which maybe 5,000 still live on the islands, yet their flag gets equal billing with the national flag in parliament! Talk about the tail wagging the dog. And their leaders are seeking damages from us because of rising sea levels (which is the only reason those islands formed in the first place, maybe 8-10K years ago). Is there any hope for our world?
In similar vein to Brian Boru I would suggest that ,God forbid, this ridiculous and dangerous Voice ever gets up and reparations are on the table then it be paid precisely in proportion to Aboriginality. Now some will get less than one 128th of a share. No one, apart from the truly woke bureaucrats and wimpish politicians, is going to allow someone with such a low degree of Aboriginal heritage to claim the full amount. It would tend to alert the general population of the degree to which Aborigines have been incorporated into our society and it would go a long way to prove that the Voice was not needed in the first place.
A great article by Keith Windschuttle.
The American left wants a Utopia to be built on the rubble of a destroyed nation. First the destruction, then the Utopia. The American left is progressing with the destruction. The Albanese gang is copying the American left here. The ‘Voice’ is part of that.
The missions were the best we had, and were destroyed by the Whitlam–Coombs gang. Albanese is going that way.
Sovereignty resides entirely with the Australian Government
I respectfully draw your attention to the following information for your interest and action.
The Aboriginal Voice, Treaties, and Sovereignty are a distraction with no basis in law or international convention. They are attempts to give Aborigines power and control based on bleeding hearts, black-armbands, and ‘feel-good’ emotions.
The modern international law of the acquisition (or attribution) of territory generally requires that there be an intentional display of power and authority over the territory, by the exercise of jurisdiction and state functions, on a continuous and peaceful basis. The British occupied Australia in 1788 and they and their successors have effectively occupied and controlled the country ever since.
Sovereignty, therefore, resides entirely with the Australian Government. The Aborigine, therefore, has no rights other than those allowed by the Australian Government. The Australian Government must act to terminate all actions about the Aboriginal Voice, Treaties, and Sovereignty, or forever be responsible for the racial division of Australian society and the destruction of its democratic unity.
The following is an extract from, THE DOCTRINE OF OCCUPATION AND THE FOUNDING OF AUSTRALIA by Jan Rudnicki (Assistant Professor, Chair: Group of European Legal Tradition, Faculty of Law and Administration, University of Warsaw):
“Colonisation of Australia coincided with the finalisation of the formation of the classical doctrine of effective occupation. A legal title to the whole continent was created by the British only by taking it into possession as a no-man’s land. No treaties were signed with the indigenous peoples of Australia, nor were any regular military operations against them undertaken. The British title has never been contested and no other power has ever tried to establish colonies in Australia. All these facts set aside problems of cession, prescription or conquest as modes of acquiring sovereignty over the Continent. The practice clearly shows that the whole title is based solely on occupation and remains perfectly valid according to classical theories of international law. As was highlighted above, there have not been many cases of acquiring a legal title to territory merely by occupation and almost all of them concern lands that are either small or completely uninhabited. Undoubtedly, Australia stands out among all those examples.”
“The unintended consequences can only end in sorrow.” More so the intended consequences. But there will be no sorrow from me. The stupendous levels of ignorance, stupidity, self-seeking and corruption at every level of government in this country are infuriating. The governments of Australia will end by destroying everything of value, leaving only the collapsing monuments of their own folly, and the remains of an imaginary Aboriginal ‘culture’.
No, I will not be sorry. For me, Australia has long since ceased to exist, and in its place there is a bizarre, continental version of Luna Park, complete with funny mirrors and a ghost train. The people apparently think it’s great. To me, it is at times annoying, at times ludicrous, but not something one cares to be associated with, except under sufferance, when the children need an outing. Forget the sorrow.
Thank you for this. No letter has spoken more strongly to me than this, or with which I agree so totally. Now 80 years of age, I also no longer know my own native land , of which I have hitherto been so proud. I have seen the decline of a once relaxed, funny, hard-working, common-sensical nation into one of unbelievable stupidity, gutlessness, and mindlessness. The Australians I remember would never have allowed themselves to be gulled into craven compliance with the sheer lunacy of the politics dished up at them centred around the despicable concept of “wokeness” and “feelings”.
Poor fellow my Australia. R.I.P.
Sadly, Stephen, I’m starting to feel the same way. Will schadenfreude be sufficient compensation for our suffering in the face of such abject stupidity? Although the children won’t be needing any outings, as long as they have access to their small screens . . .
Presumably the newly appointed ambassador, acting in conformance with the govt-endorsed UNDRIP, will be advocating self-determination for the Indigenous people’s of West Papua, Bougainville and the French Pacific Territories. Agree Minister?
I was pondering the question of why the commentator Chris Kenny was supporting The Voice. This question has been raised in Quadrant and elsewhere. I had a lightbulb moment. A quick check revealed that Mr Kenny is a strong supporter of the “republic”.
Consider this – If the government backs and concedes and does whatever it takes to get The Voice through a referendum, then it is certain that there will be an open-ended republic referendum in short order. Strike while the iron is hot. Now, a successful open-ended republic referendum would necessitate a wholesale rewrite of the Constitution. Any garbage that is inserted into the Constitution via The Voice would become essentially irrelevant. Certainly, there would be all sorts of further nonsense raised to go into the new constitution and there would be immense debate and argument about all manner of things. But, the “republicans” would be holding the trump card: – the fact that the people had definitely voted to create a republic. The creation of a republic and its constitution could not be delayed forever.
The Voice can be simply seen as dress rehearsal for the republic referendum. Its actual form is immaterial. The critical point is to get an open-ended question passed at a referendum.
Funny you might think that, Greg. I’ve been wondering if the growing public histrionics by the likes of Noel Pearson, Stan Grant and others might be some kind of jostling for position in the race to become First President of the Republic of Oz. We inhabit interesting times . . ,
But I suspect the Voice is intended more to serve as a springboard to Treaty, which will bring unbounded wealth to the Chosen People, via reparations and rents in perpetuity.
Given the current worldview of the Albanese Government, where a man who”feels” that he is really a woman in a man’s body is able to officially identify as a woman, will it also be possible for a person of 100% European descent, who “feels” aboriginal, to be officially recognised as an aborigine?
Oh yes. And thank you as ever, Keith Windshuttle for this careful and detailed setting out of the present situation on the vexed question of reparations. The situation is far worse than I had been aware of. The western world is going to be in a terrifying mess if sanity does not prevail at some point, and I fear it will not.