Mike O’Connor: Momentum is shifting on this divisive Voice

OPINION: It’s difficult to see how adding another level of bureaucracy – the Voice – will achieve a brighter future for young Indigenous people, writes Mike O’Connor.

If you feel yourself slipping into a blank-faced coma and have to be restrained from crawling under the doona at the mention of the Voice, you are not alone.

Battered by escalating rhetoric and biffed by claim and counterclaim, you could be forgiven by clapping your hands over your ears and screaming “Enough!”

I’ve emerged from the doona for just long enough to notice that the conflict between Yes and No becomes more strident by the day as it becomes increasingly obvious that the initial attempt to present the proposal to Australians as a matter of simply “doing the right thing” is unravelling.

Your average voter, it seems, is a bit smarter than the federal government thought and has failed to roll over and accept Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s paternalistic assurances that “she’ll be right, mate,” and “don’t you worry about that”.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese with Yolngu people during the Garma Festival 2022 at Gulkula in East Arnhem. Picture: Getty Images

Sitting around the nation’s kitchen tables, mum, dad and the kids could not but help reach the inescapable conclusion over recent months that someone is being economical with the truth or to put it less politely, telling porkies.

It is difficult, for example, to accept the assertion that it really isn’t such a big deal and that we should just vote Yes and let the experts work out the detail.

Changing the Constitution is a very big deal which is why the founding fathers ensured it could only be altered if the changes were approved by a majority of voters in a majority of states.

So is it about giving Indigenous people a fair go?

There are hundreds of bodies presently dealing exclusively with Indigenous issues and the federal government spends billions of dollars a year a year on supporting Indigenous causes, spending more per capita on Indigenous Australians than on non-Indigenous Australians while Indigenous people are overrepresented in federal parliament on a per-head-of-population basis that suggests they get more than a fair go.

Then Greens senator Lidia Thorpe takes part in a Melbourne march for a Treaty Before Voice Invasion Day Protest on January 26. Picture: Getty Images

We’ll soon have a pamphlet outlining both sides of the argument to discuss around the table after the PM, having refused to consider publishing one, suddenly agreed to do so when it became obvious that this refusal was damaging the Yes case.

A fair go for both sides? Only when forced to do so by public opinion.

You might like to think, in a moment of supreme optimism, that the creation of the Voice will see the beginning of an end to the alcoholism, domestic violence, sexual abuse and lawlessness that plagues many Indigenous communities.

I think I can speak for all Australians in saying that we would like nothing better than to see a brighter future for young Indigenous people and greater protection for Indigenous women but change like that has to come from within.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese in Canberra this month. Picture: Getty Images

It is difficult to see how the creation of another level of bureaucracy will achieve this, somehow discovering the silver bullet that has eluded the best efforts of the well intentioned and lavishly funded for so long.

The issue of black sovereignty has now been tossed into the mix but no one seems to know what this means.

According to Oxford Languages, it is “the authority of a state to govern itself or another state”.

Any suggestion that the ultimate aim is the creation of a separate Indigenous state with separate powers should be enough to cause people on both sides of the argument to pause for thought.

It seems to me that the Voice has the potential to forever divide the country along racial lines and destroy the concept that we are all Australian citizens and are all equal.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese on Thursday Island with Indigenous Australians Minister Linda Burney and Labor senator Nita Green. Picture: PMO

It’s a concept that is the very essence of our system of democratic government.

We elect this government, all of us, in this hugely diverse electorate composed of people from every racial background on the planet.

There have been some good governments and some ordinary ones but the system has served us well. It seems to me that creating a special class of Australians based on race with special privileges that are unavailable to the rest of us is to chart a dangerous course and one which once embarked upon, cannot be reversed.

In the context of the Voice, we should look to the common good and reassert the deeply held view that we are all in this together or risk the creation a permanent them-and-us society which would serve neither side well.