If the Voice fails Australia will become more divided | Peter Goers

Everything we really need to know about the Voice to Parliament can be found in place, writes Peter Goers.

Sing with me, “You’re The Voice, try and understand it, make a noise and make it clear. We’re not gonna live in silence. We’re not gonna live with fear”. It’s a great song for all Australians.

The forthcoming Aboriginal Voice to parliament referendum is about a fair go. It’s about justice. It’s about doing the right thing. It’s about hope, unity and the future. It’s about truth telling and it’s about time.

The Voice can’t change the past but it can help heal the past. Voting for The Voice and supporting Aboriginal people is a chance to be on the right side of history. If The Voice fails we will become even less reconciled as a nation. Failure will just continue the oppression of Aboriginal people.

The Voice gives the original inhabitants of this ancient land a constitutionally enshrined voice to parliament so that Aboriginal people will advise and be consulted. That’s it. That’s still vastly less power than our foreign head of state and his representatives have.

The Voice does not divide Australia it unites us as we’ve never been united before.

Recently I read a superb article by Father Jim Monaghan, a parish priest in Port Augusta, in the excellent Diocese of Port Pirie magazine, The Witness.

The good father is right to say that everything we need to know about The Voice is in the beautiful, healing Uluru Statement Of The Heart. It is earthed in the poignancy of hope.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese speaks at the Inner West BBQ for The Voice to Parliament at Petersham Park in Sydney. Picture: Jeremy Piper

Read it. It’s a one page distillation of Aboriginal experience and hope. It is the greatest statement of nation-building in our history.

The few opponents of The Voice are insisting that Aboriginal people don’t always agree with each other, as though white people are always in total agreement. It’s human nature to disagree. Father Monaghan writes, “We know how divided some Aboriginal peoples are. And yet with so many different language groups, and so many competing issues, those same diverse Aboriginal people managed to produce the Statement from The Heart at Uluru, six years ago”.

The statement tells us that “Sovereignty is a spiritual notion…It has never been ceded or extinguished, and coexists with the sovereignty of the Crown…Makarrata is the coming together after a struggle. It continues our aspirations for a fair and truthful relationship with the people of Australia…” Most importantly the statement concludes with “We invite you to walk together with us in a movement of the Australian people for a better future”.

Yes!

White people invaded an ancient black people. The diseases they brought decimated Aboriginal people. We told them they were nothing in an empty land. We massacred more than 60,000 Aboriginal men, women and children. We denied the survivors all rights. We valued sheep more than Aboriginal people and Aboriginal people were denied the vote in a so-called democracy until 1965. We pretended to protect them. We told them they were a dying race as we did our best to kill them. We told them their only hope was to be like us and look like us – to be white. We stole their children.

Aboriginal people continue to suffer appalling rates of incarceration, disease and mortality. We continue to make decisions for them in their own land.

The Voice and truth telling will finally bring justice, respect and dignity. It will bring a desperately needed hope for the future.

The short, satirical film Babakiuerua was made in 1986. You can watch it on YouTube under the title Barbecue Area. It inverts history and imagines Aboriginal soldiers invading a white nation and planting their flag in a place called Barbecue Area.

The Aboriginal invaders then persecute, marginalise and discredit white people and steal their children and call their civilisation worthless.

It seems shocking yet the point is entirely apposite. It makes you think. The film won a UN Peace Prize.

Watch this film and read the Uluru Statement From The Heart and vote with your heart. The Voice needs your voice, our voice, raised together in a glorious affirmation of unity. Yes!

Peter Goers can be heard weeknights and Sundays on ABC Radio Adelaide

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