Joe Hildebrand: Healthy debate around The Voice is not racist

High-profile activist figures and their social media minions label people who oppose the Voice as “racist” and even “eugenicist”— both arguments instantly fail, writes Joe Hildebrand.

There are many ways to lose an argument, but the most effective is to abuse your opponent.

And so, as an outspoken supporter of the Voice to parliament, it has been profoundly depressing to see others who claim to support the Voice peddling such silly and self-damaging slander.

Over the past two weeks, we have seen high-profile activist figures and their social media minions label people who oppose the Voice as “racist”, with one suggesting that even debate about the Voice could be “eugenicist” — referring to the repugnant quack theory that some races are superior to others.

Both arguments instantly fail on their merits, as I will show here without resorting to lazy character assassination and name-calling. The argument for the Voice, by contrast, remains as strong as ever.

The “racist” claim was directed at Nationals leader David Littleproud and by extension the entire federal Nationals party room after they announced their decision to oppose the Voice.

I would have thought a more effective approach to these MPs — and their hundreds of thousands of constituents, who will also be voting at the upcoming referendum — might be to understand their concerns and allay them.

The Nationals oppose the Voice. Picture: Gary Ramage

You know, to persuade people, rather than just slagging them off — which is the whole point of actual debate.

Instead, the effective tactic of this particular activist group was to slap a broadly defined proposal in front of someone and say “if you don’t back it you’re a bigot”.

In fact, it turned out that the broader National Party was anything but. One federal MP who was not at the meeting immediately came out to say he, in fact, supported the Voice, as did the WA Nationals and the entire NSW Coalition.

And so the Nats in the nation’s two biggest states by population and geography have come out in support of the Voice while the national party room has been backed into a corner from which they must now inevitably fight.

Think now of just how easy it might have been to change the minds of however many federal MPs in the long months ahead and all the potential campaign allies who have instead been energised to argue why opposing the Voice is not racist. What a waste of political force. What an own goal.

Indeed, the ever-impressive director of the From the Heart campaign, Dean Parkin, said as much when he lamented how unhelpful these random claims of rampant racism were.

Even Dean Parkin has come out against the claims of racism. Picture: Liam Kidston

By contrast, he said, the ordinary people he spoke to every day were overwhelmingly supportive or just wanted to know more. As for the somewhat-bizarre claim that the Voice campaign could devolve into a debate over eugenics, this is less unhelpful than unhinged.

If anyone in this country still believes in this idiotic 19th century pseudoscience, it is a tiny minority of knuckle-dragging white supremacists, some of whom I spent my past journalistic life investigating.

Short version, they are reprehensible but rare. Indeed, I vividly remember a police source once urging me not to even give them any publicity because it wildly overinflated their sense of importance.

Instead, most vocal opponents of the Voice are concerned about what they themselves see as racism — the privileging of one group of Australians over another on the basis of ethnicity.

In other words, far from being preoccupied by eugenics, they are vehemently opposed to it. The notion that one race of people should receive any special treatment over another is abhorrent to them.

It is a fair argument, and one that is prosecuted articulately by Indigenous friends of mine such as Warren Mundine and Jacinta Price — the latter of whom has been subjected to particularly vile attacks.

Senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price in the senate at Parliament House in Canberra. Picture: Martin Ollman

To accuse black people of being racists or eugenicists on the basis of such quintessentially enlightenment principles is every bit as repellent as racism and eugenics itself.

And the undercurrent of such fear-based loathing is that all Australians are such primordially pre-programmed bigots that the slightest democratic door-crack will allow racism to run riot. That we as a nation are incapable of reaching the right conclusion about how best to remedy the problems besetting the world’s most ancient peoples.

This is bull. Australians are overwhelmingly decent, generous and tolerant — indeed the only thing we don’t tolerate is bull itself.

We saw this same argument in the same-sex marriage debate, that certain civil rights were too precious to be left to the mob. And yet the mob, when it was given the chance, voted overwhelmingly to end inequality.

Today there is a new inequality we must face, and that is the grotesque distortion between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians in almost every walk of life — health, education, employment and even life expectancy.

We cannot just shrug our shoulders and accept that in 2022 First Australians still die a decade earlier than the rest of us.

Whatever we are doing now has failed to fix that and if a bit of grassroots advice to the government isn’t the answer to that, then I am all ears as to what is.

People are right to want more clarity on the Voice, and it will come because its whole purpose is to be consultative and democratic. Debate should be celebrated, not condemned.

Meanwhile critics say we don’t need further empty symbolic virtue-signalling and I agree. The Voice is a practical slashing of red tape to replace bureaucratic box-ticking with real-life solutions.

If done right, the Voice will be a glorious legacy for all Australians. And I, for one, reckon all Australians are glorious.

Originally published as Joe Hildebrand: Healthy debate around The Voice is not racist