Caleb Bond: Anthony Albanese wants us to vote on an Indigenous Voice to Parliament before we know what it means

The Prime Minister wants us to vote for an Indigenous Voice to Parliament before we know what it means, or what it could do, writes Caleb Bond.

Anthony Albanese is taking the Australian people for mugs if he expects us to vote for an Indigenous Voice to parliament without any idea what it actually is.

The Prime Minister has openly admitted this is part of the design. We’ll all be asked to vote to change the constitution – the most important legal document in the land – to create this “Voice”, whatever it actually is, and then the parliament will determine all the details.

“One of the things I’m trying to avoid here … (is) people looking for all of the detail and saying … if you disagree with one out of the 50 but 49 are OK, vote no,” Mr Albanese said during the week.

“What I am not going to do (is) to go down the cul-de-sac of getting into every detail because that is not a recipe for success.”

It’s not about treating the voting public with the respect they deserve, it’s simply about designing the referendum to win.

And the government’s plan to do that is to tell us as little as possible about what we’re actually being asked to vote for.

Because, you see, the devil is always in the detail.

We would essentially be signing a blank cheque that allowed the government to, potentially, make sweeping changes to how the country operates.

It does not bode well for the success of the planned referendum if Mr Albanese is already worried that the detail of the proposal will scare people off. What does he have to hide? There are serious questions to be asked – including by those who feel they would be generally supportive of a Voice to parliament.

What powers would it have? Who would comprise the membership of this Voice? How would the members be chosen?

Does it open the door to reparations? On and on it goes.

But the Prime Minister would rather these questions went unanswered – presumably because we might be scared by the answers.

It was 55 years ago, under the Holt Liberal government, that 90.77 per cent of Australians voted to remove race from the constitution, putting Aboriginal people on the same legal footing as all other Australians and allowing them to be counted in the Australian population.

It was a momentous shift towards equality. Half a decade later, the Albanese Labor government wants to insert race back into the constitution.

A constitutionally enshrined Voice would be a significant change.

It would put one race on a different level from all others, with its own separate representation to parliament.

Changes like that should not be made without detail.

Proponents of the Voice will attempt to frame sceptics as racist for daring to ask questions.

But no policy or proposal should ever be waved through without proper scrutiny.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese at the Garma Festival in the NT. Pictures: PMO, Garma