Mike O’Connor: My welcome back to a country that’s changed because of the Voice

Returning home from an overseas holiday, I am met with the insistence on Voice truth-telling or rather one group’s version of it at the expense of everyone else’s, writes Mike O’Connor.

Home after seven weeks of overseas travel.

Fifty-one days without sitting through a welcome to country message or acknowledgment of traditional owners past and present.

Fifty-one days without being harangued about the Voice, or being branded an entitled white male for having worked all my life to make a living and being accused of racism for daring to air the belief that I am convinced that the Voice will be bad for my country.

Fifty-one days. What bliss.

Then we arrive home and I immediately hear the demands for special treatment, the cries of victimhood, the insistence on truth-telling or rather one group’s version of it at the expense of everyone else’s.

Historian Geoffrey Blainey has described claims of “powerlessness” by Indigenous people as “a kind of crocodile tear.” Picture: Julian Kingma

The US Supreme Court last week outlawed university programs used to select student applicants on the basis of race that have given black and Hispanic Americans preferential admission treatment.

“Eliminating racial discrimination means eliminating all of it. The student must be treated based on his or her experiences as an individual – not on the basis of race,” said Chief Justice John Roberts.

“These (affirmative action) policies appear to be leading to a world in which everyone is defined by their skin colour, demanding ever-increasing entitlements and preferences on that basis,” said Justice Clarence Thomas.

Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk Picture: NCA NewsWire/Tertius Pickard

Writing in The Australian last weekend, historian Geoffrey Blainey described claims of “powerlessness” by Indigenous people as “a kind of crocodile tear”.

“In the past half-century, Aboriginal groups have been handsomely recognised by their acquisition – under the Fraser and Keating governments – of ownership or certain rights and interests in 55 per cent of the Australian land mass,” he wrote.

“Few Australian voters know this fact.

“It constitutes one of the largest peaceful transfers of land in the history of the world.”

Supporters of the Voice to Parliament referendum at a rally at Trades Hall in Melbourne on the weekend. Picture: NCA NewsWire/Andrew Henshaw

As Blainey says, moves to create a special class of Australians would if successful break one of the golden rules of that democracy: one person, one vote.

There comes that moment at the end of a long holiday when you realise that the sunny shores of the Mediterranean are but a distant memory and that you are back home in dear old Brissie.

It came when I flicked on the telly to be greeted by an image of Premier Palaszczuk trying to defuse the latest government fiasco by announcing with outstretched palms: “I am an honest person. I answer questions as honestly as I can.”

Of course you do, Premier.