Who Speaks for the Voice? Connect the Dots

Proponents of a Voice to Parliament declare that a “Yes” result in the imminent referendum will bring great benefits, such as that of all Australians walking together towards reconciliation and equality.  Particularly, the Voice is to be the key agency in closing the gap in health and welfare disparities between those of mainstream society and those of Aboriginal descent living in disadvantaged remote communities and on the fringes of outback towns.

Valid questions have been raised by the more conservative and cautious of the voting public as to how the Voice will accomplish the task of effectively closing that gap, given the complete lack of detail provided by the “Yes” proponents.  All the advocates of the Voice have ever said is that a method will be created which will serve as a conduit of information connecting the disadvantaged Aboriginal people at the “grass roots” to the Parliament in Canberra, so that laws will be made and executed based on the directly communicated needs and wants of the very people that will benefit from those laws and policies.  It sounds an obviously simple and effective process. Who wouldn’t want to support its implementation, particularly when it can purportedly happen by the simple act of voting “Yes”?

In lieu of details or any feasibility assessment of their plan, the jubilant “Yes” campaigners have generated a positive vibe supporting their concept of the Voice, but, this is not about a “vibe”, this is about making a fundamental change to the Australian Constitution, and people have a right and a necessity to be informed by asking questions and receiving answers.  If satisfactory answers are not forthcoming, then a “No” vote is the only responsible choice in the matter. It follows, ipso facto, that the “Yes” campaign, with the support of the Labor Party in government, is being irresponsible in not providing the adequate and relevant detail which would allow the voters to make an informed decision.

Let us return now from this digression to the subject of this article, which is the process of listening to the voices of the Aboriginal people living at those “grass roots” in isolated and remote dysfunctional communities, as well as at the fringes of modern Australian cities and towns.  The concept of empowering the people at the “grass roots” is actually an old trope of the socialist left, being the ideology of “direct democracy” which is held to be the fundamental principle vitalising socialist or co-operative society. 

The proposed Voice to Parliament has a resonance with the far-Left concepts of the Anarcho-Communists, who have a Utopian vision of people living within self-sufficient bio-regions, much like traditional Aborigines. The basic social structure of this Utopia would be a group small enough that the people can meet in a circle, with everyone having an equal opportunity to express their opinion, leading to consensus decisions being made on how they will co-operate as a community.  When it becomes necessary to communicate with neighbouring groups or other bio-regions, delegates are appointed by unanimous decision, and this process of delegation would continue on up to a continental and, ultimately, to a global forum, depending on what level at which a decision needs to be made.  The key point is that delegates carry the decisions of the people that made them to the next level of meeting, rather than being representatives, which are empowered to make their own decisions at the remote forum.

Or so the theory goes!  The practice, however, tells a different story.  Inevitably, people vary in personalities, abilities and skills, and starting at the most fundamental level, there are those who have better rhetorical skills, powers of persuasion, charisma, etc, that enable their opinions and ideas count more than others. Then there is the “will to power” some individuals may possess, or a propensity to manipulate and control others.  Some individuals thrive within the decision-making forum, and they wish to have as many meetings as possible, whereas others find the process stressful and unpleasant, and so avoid coming to meetings.

Within the context of remote Aboriginal communities, this concept of communication from the grass roots to Parliament fails from the start due to the nature of traditional Aboriginal culture — riven with perpetual clan conflict, a judicial system based on “pay-back”, inherent family violence where women are the victims, and a propensity for the group to be led by a “big man”.

So, even if every individual Aboriginal person had a smart-phone connection straight to Parliament, that wouldn’t work either  because there would be thousands of uncoordinated and disparate voices on numerous subjects from numerous places. Therefore, some kind of delegation process will be necessary, and that is where the grass roots model of direct democracy breaks down, and the political class of the Aboriginal Industry comes into its own.

At an even more fundamental level, the proposed Voice to Parliament fails because it is based on the belief that the cause of Aboriginal disadvantage is the consequence of invasion, racism, genocide, stolen children, stolen land, stolen language, etc, all perpetrated by the alien white colonisers. The solution is to be the resurrection of Aboriginal culture, religion, etc, on Aboriginal sovereign lands, which is a kind of voluntary apartheid reminiscent of the creation of the so-called “Bantustan” homelands in the Republic of South Africa of that era. The more viable solution takes the opposite approach and sees Aboriginal culture and life in remote “on country” settlements as the problem, not the solution. A pathway into integration with mainstream Australian society should be the obvious solution to closing the gap.  It must be said here that integration is not the same as assimilation; the former is about the inclusivity and equality of peoples of different identities, whereas the later implies absorption and dissolution that would extinguish identity.

Essentially then, the process leading up to the 2017 Uluru Statement from the Heart and, following that, to the referendum proposing a Constitutional amendment that would give the Aboriginal people the Voice to Parliament and access to the executive government is but the brain-child of the well-funded and extensive Aboriginal Industry, which itself was not informed by listening to the voices at the grass-roots, but rather through a process of top-down selected delegates at the thirteen First Nations Regional Dialogues, the majority of those regions being urban.

Rather than the Voice to Parliament being the voices from the grass roots of the Aboriginal people living the most disadvantaged lives, it would most likely be the voices of that same cadre of activists which constituted the Regional Dialogues, and we know from reading the 14 documents from the National Indigenous Australian Agency (via FOI), exactly what those voices have to say!

The examination above has revealed that the proposed Constitutional amendment to establish a Voice to Parliament is based on nothing but an ideological fantasy of the Left-leaning Aboriginal Industry, lead by an emotional “vibe”.  Hardly the cautious and rational reasoning that a proposed change to the Constitution requires!