Land under Aboriginal native title now amounts to 49.3 per cent of the Australian continent, with another 13.4 per cent in the pipeline. Although ordinary Australian citizens will be paying all the bills, under the Makarrata treaties proposed by the Voice taxpayers would nonetheless be trespassers in what was once their own country. With talk of the Voice front and centre, this must be an issue

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Legal academics should know better than to claim Aborigines were denied the franchise before 1967, which isn't true and never has been. They had the vote in NSW, Victoria, SA and Tasmania without any qualification. Only in Queensland and WA, where state governments imposed property qualifications, were they largely disenfranchised, as was the case for impecunious whites

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Voice advocates Megan Davis and Marcia Langton disclosed the question they want put in a constitutional referendum: 'Do you want to remove racist provisions from our Constitution?' If the public fails to approve, they say, the loss would brand Australia as 'racist and self-consciously and deliberately so'. In other words, nice country you have here, pity if something happens to its reputation

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Linda Burney let the cat out of the bag when she admitted 'a complicated referendum question will doom decades of work towards constitutional recognition'. So there you have it: the government does not want to reveal or discuss the details of the Voice’s structure before the referendum is held. If ever there was a case of caveat emptor, this is it

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If 'cultural healing, self-determination and empowerment' become the guiding principles in remote communities, as Voice advocates demand, the disgraceful dysfunction that characterises so many will become even more deeply entrenched. Meanwhile, Aboriginal children will be abused and die by their own hands while elders and white supporters blame anyone but themselves

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The Uluru Statement’s call for a 'truthful relationship with the people of Australia' should start with its chief promoter, Noel Pearson. In the name of that same truth-telling he demands, he could tell all there is to know about the anarchic violence, rapes, rampant drug and alcohol abuse and generational vendettas in his own so-called sovereign state

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If leftists want to continue inventing Aboriginal traditions, they need to lift the quality of research that sees welcome to country incantations consistently misidentify the Aboriginal groups and clans credited as 'traditional owners'. Actually, why bother? Australia would be better off if they simply abandoned the whole tawdry game

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In his first statement on assuming office, our new Prime Minister Anthony Albanese committed his government to implementing in full the Uluru Statement from the Heart that proposes changing the Australian Constitution to give specific recognition to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. This is a view that Quadrant has opposed for more than twenty […]

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Aboriginal leaders and their white advocates imagine the problems self-determination has created can be cured with more of the same. This would likely include the recognition of unwritten 'traditional law', which ordains the subordination of women, fear of sorcery, collective clan guilt and endless feuds sustained by tit-for-tat payback

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Federal and state govern­ments, their bureaucracies, institutions and courts have all shown themselves unable to satis­factorily resolve the question of who is and isn't an Aborigine. Expect a plague of Bruce Pascoe-style pretenders if Labor's referendum to give Aboriginal people their own constitutional platform carries the day

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