Andrew Bolt: The threat of Albanese’s racist Voice is back and growing

One year on from Australia’s rejection of Albanese’s First Nations’ Voice, its disastrously divisive race agenda – blocked at the door – is now being smuggled through the windows.

Let’s not gloat that Australians one year ago rejected the Albanese government’s racist Voice. Stay alert because the threat is back – and growing.

Professor Megan Davis, who co-wrote the Uluru Statement that demanded the Voice, now admits Yes activists were nagging the Albanese government since Christmas 2022 to censor No campaigners.

“The Aboriginal committees did press upon Labor to pass legislation to protect the referendum from lies and misinformation,” she said last week.

Professor Megan Davis said Yes activists were nagging the Albanese government since Christmas 2022 to censor No campaigners. Picture: Martin Ollman

Ominously, she adds: “It’s important to ask the question, and certainly in relation to referendums going forward, what role the law can play in terms of Australians being able to debate these issues fairly.”

Davis has a sinister definition of “fairly”, given she even complains that the ABC interviewed No campaigners “just because they wanted this balance”.

Yet her extraordinary demand for censorship of her opponents seems to have rung a bell with Prime Minister Anthony Albanese.

Just days after 60 per cent of Australians on October 14 voted against Albanese’s Voice, a kind of advisory parliament just for Aboriginals, he again savaged the No campaign’s supposed lies.

“People can be subject to misinformation which in some cases is just about politics but in some cases can be dangerous,” he fumed.

One year on and Albanese is trying again to pass new laws to stop “misinformation” on social media. Picture: Tim Hunter

Worryingly, the media Left seemed keen to believe him, and to back censorship.

The ABC even ran this headline: “The Voice campaign was infected with disinformation. Who’s in charge of inoculating Australians against lies?”

Just sour grapes, you may say, but what a coincidence! One year on and Albanese is trying again to pass new laws to stop “misinformation” on social media. That’s “misinformation” as defined by people appointed by government, of course.

It’s an assault on free speech which you’d expect only from people who think they’re smarter than the public, yet, curiously, no longer trust themselves to win an argument.

So it’s hard not to see it driven in part by the rage and spite of Voice campaigners who’d rather believe they were cheated than accept they were rejected for good reasons.

In fact, there’s no good evidence they lost the Voice because 60 per cent of Australians are so dumb that they fell for “disinformation”.

Just one week after the Voice was smashed, the Institute of Public Affairs and Advance Australia, which backed the No side, asked 3526 Australians why they’d voted no.

The top reason given was sensible, true and moral: a race-based Voice in our constitution would divide us.

But there’s another reason the “misinformation” excuse is, well, misinformation.

The No campaign was won not by peddling lies but mostly by simply repeating the words of leading Yes campaigners.

For instance, I and others often quoted Thomas Mayo, an ambassador for the Uluru Statement who advised the government on the Voice, who’d boasted it would be “a black political force to be reckoned with” which could “punish politicians”, “abolish colonialist institutions” and get the rest of us to “pay the rent, pay reparations and compensation”.

We quoted Davis herself claiming this unelected Voice would be so powerful it could speak not just to politicians but the “Reserve Bank, ... Centrelink, the Great Barrier Marine Park Authority and the Ombudsman”.

Albanese wouldn’t give the most basic information about his Voice. Picture: Tim Hunter

Meanwhile, Albanese wouldn’t give the most basic information about his Voice – how it would be picked, how it would work, and how it would make any difference when we already had so many Aboriginal voices, including more than 30 land councils, 3000 Aboriginal corporations, 11 Aboriginal federal politicians and the Coalition of Peaks, representing about 70 big Aboriginal agencies.

So it’s dangerously arrogant for Voice activists to still claim they were just beaten by “misinformation”, and the rest of us must next time be stopped from having our free say.

It’s particularly dangerous because the Voice’s disastrously divisive race agenda – blocked at the door – is now being smuggled through the windows.

Victoria, for instance, already has an Aboriginal Koori court and advisory parliament, called the First People’s Assembly, and is now preparing a treaty.

In NSW, the state’s Judicial Commission has even published a new guide for judges, urging that many Aboriginal defendants be considered the traumatised victims of “settler-colonialism”.

How to fix this? The guide suggests the same Voice agenda of race-based separatism: “a measure of self government; local control over health services; policing services” and “the right ... to determine their own membership or citizenship”.

On goes the push for the race politics of the Voice, but this time backed by censorship of those who see it for the dead-end disaster it is.

Originally published as Andrew Bolt: The threat of Albanese’s racist Voice is back and growing