Events and thoughts

Dear ,

It’s been a while since our last newsletter. A lot has been happening.

As you’d know from other emails we have three functions coming up that I can tell you about, because we at least have dates. There are a number of others that we don’t have dates for yet so I can only give you general indications.

One will be the launch of our first book. Covid-19 and Australian Federalism: The first year: our grand experiment with 21st-century governance. Written by Brendan Markey-Towler it compares the performance of the state governments to each other during COVID through the lens of federation and concludes that it delivered a better outcome than a unitary system would have (imagine if Australia had been all Victoria).

Another significant book launch will be Gary John’s Burden of Culture. This will be a function in support of the No campaign for the Voice.

We are also working on functions around housing affordability, defence and energy.

I was booed when I told the audience of the ABC’s Drum in the run-up to last election, that this might be a good election to lose. This was predicated on what I could see as being hard economic times with stagflation, high interest rates, and a housing crisis pending.

But that is what we got.

Yet the current Labor government seems as unprepared as the ABC audience to deal with it, as last week’s Productivity Commission report shows, doing almost everything it can to make things worse.

Even now, with international banks collapsing around our ears, the seriousness of the times does not seem to have dawned on them. So they are proceeding with a referendum to institute a Voice to parliament for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australians.

There is a No vote campaign under the banner of Recognise A Better Way, which is chaired by Warren Mundine and involves Gary Johns, John Anderson, Yodie Batzke, Ian Conway, Peter Gibbs and Bob Liddle. I’ve become involved in providing campaigning and other assistance.

I’d like to run through some of the reasons why I am opposed to The Voice as a way of clarifying things for me, and for you to understand my position.

First is that we would be changing the constitution. I don’t need final details to know that this is a bad thing.

I checked how many committees are instituted in our constitution. It’s not many. There’s the parliament with its two houses, the executive council, the courts (but only specifically the High Court), and the Interstate Commission (this now seems to be defunct).

Many of the committees that are basic to running modern Australia are not there. Local government, for example, the Fair Work commission, for another, and nor should they be.

Why not? Because those things that are in the constitution are not just essential but foundational. If a body is instituted in the Constitution, then it has a status above the mere machinery of government.

Nothing can be added to the constitution, or subtracted from it, unless it is decided by a majority of voters in a majority of states. Things that are in the constitution can’t be easily adapted to meet change or be metamorphosed into something else because of circumstances.

If Albanese’s Voice doesn’t work, we will be stuck with it. A permanently embedded ATSIC. And it is likely it will not work. We’ve already had 7 organisations meant to fill a similar role – this will be the 8th  - and implicitly they have all failed or we would not need this Voice.

This also means that any ruling the High Court is asked to give will start from the premise that The Voice is more significant than most other parts of the machinery of government, and therefore needs to be taken more seriously. Whether this will ultimately amount to a parallel parliament, who knows, but it’s not a risk that ought to be taken, given the weirdness of some of the recent HC decisions.

Second is creating two different classes of Australians. We used to talk about Reconciliation, but The Voice will be the end to any prospect of that ever being achieved because it institutionalises a “them and us” situation, which is the opposite of what Reconciliation means. In 100 years, there will be a Voice to Parliament, even if we “close the gap”.

Third is the denigration and disempowerment of those Aborigines who have taken the steps to become influential voices to parliament and the executive by getting themselves elected. There are 11 of them, and they make up a larger percentage of the parliamentary population than Indigenous do of the general one. Just as we are accepting each other as equals, the opportunities that brings are being wrenched away, creating a situation where Aborigines are again treated as less capable of being involved in our democracy and community than other groups.

They are not the only voices who will be gazumped. As AIP member Bryan Phillips points out “We already have The Prime Minister’s Indigenous Advisory Council, over 30 Land Councils, Council of Peaks representing 70 Aboriginal organisations, more than 2,700 Aboriginal corporations…”

The Voice will purport to represent all of these, but it can only do so by compressing their voices, and at best speaking for the average. That is on the assumption that The Voice is functional. Experience says it will most likely be dominated by a few voices who will prosecute their own agendas.

No wonder more and more Aboriginal and Islander people are coming out against The Voice.

Fourth is the further processes this will put in place. We are to have “Truth telling” and a “Treaty”. On the basis of the “Bringing Them Home” report, the truth telling will consist of convenient oral histories, slanted by the teller, and bearing little relation to the realities of colonisation. Real truth telling has been done, and is still being done, by historians. The reality of colonisation can be confronting for Europeans as well as Indigenous, but it does not need to be weaponised.

A treaty is essentially an impossibility. Not only is there no Aboriginal nation with which a treaty could be signed, because we are all Australians and members of the one nation, but there never was an Aboriginal nation, just a patchwork of tribes. This is recognised in our Native Treaty Agreements, which are essentially a myriad of treaties themselves, made with one tribe, but where courts have oftentimes had to choose between competing Aboriginal land claims.

What do treaties cover? Normally they are primarily territorial, and they may also contain some matters about reparations, and also restrictions on things one or the other of the parties may do, like have a standing army. We’re long past the stage where reparations are appropriate, and it is not even apparent to me that there haven’t been more benefits than costs from colonisation – how is there a gap if European colonisation didn’t bring something that was lacking in indigenous culture? So these land agreements which recognise prior use, and a continuing cultural connection are better as treaties than anything else.

Jacinta Nampijinpa Price says “We don’t need a Voice, we need ears”. I’m not sure that she’s right. We certainly don’t need another Voice, but the secret to Aboriginal fulfilment has to lie where it does for all people.

And that’s in the sorts of policies that we advocate for – the right to own property, free speech, freedom of association, civil society before government.

These are not things that exist in a significant way in Aboriginal culture, and the lack of them explains most of the misery being experienced in the areas where maybe 70,000 Aborigines still live in communities.

But they are present in the communities where the other 730,000 with Indigenous heritage work and live enjoying a standard of living and health that is indistinguishable from everyone else in contemporary Australia.

Thanks for your support in advancing those policies, and I hope for your support in the No vote campaign.

GRAHAM YOUNG
EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR