Peta Credlin: Voice to Parliament threatening to be most divisive referendum in 70 years
Anthony Albanese wants us to believe the Voice to Parliament will be a benign body, but it will be a dramatic change in the way we see ourselves as Australians.
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Last Thursday, our country moved a big step closer to dramatic change in the way we see ourselves as Australians, and ultimately how we’re governed, with the introduction to the parliament of enabling legislation for an Indigenous Voice referendum to be held later next year.
Not only will we be asked to change the constitution, but – for the first time in our history, if this bill is passed – we’ll be asked to vote in a referendum without the benefit of an official “yes” and “no” case, sent by the Australian Electoral Commission to every household to inform voters’ decisions. The government insists that this is no big deal because advocates on both sides can send out whatever they like online.
In fact, the government’s failure to fund both a “yes” and “no” case is blatantly one sided and unfair because also passing the parliament last week was a change to the law to give tax deductibility for donations to organisations campaigning for a Voice but no such support to any organisation opposed to it.
On top of that, there’s $235 million set aside to fund the referendum and out of that, we learnt last week, will be a massive “educational” campaign to “counter misinformation” about what the Voice means.
The legislation doesn’t specify what “misinformation” means and the government is strangely silent too, but the experienced adviser in me says this will be taxpayer money used to shut down any arguments against the Voice lest voters work out it isn’t the benign, symbolic-only change the PM claims it is.
In a sign of the ugliness to come, we saw an illustration of what Voice advocates regard as the “misinformation” that the government wants to re-educate us about. In response to the federal National Party’s decision formally to oppose the Voice, on the grounds that it’s wrong to divide Australians by race in our founding document; and that the Voice is more likely to foster a “them and us” grievance than practical improvements in Aboriginal people’s lives, Indigenous leader and activist Noel Pearson unleashed a spray at fellow Indigenous leader Senator Jacinta Price, which seemed designed to intimidate her into silence.
It’s online, search ABC radio and listen for yourself: I defy anyone to say it was fair or reasonable.
Pearson, who supports the Voice, said that Price – who describes herself as a proud Celtic, Warlpiri Australian woman – was only against the Voice because she’d been manipulated in a “redneck celebrity vortex” and was being used to “punch down on other black fellas”. He couldn’t accept that she’d made up her own mind, and argue against her on the merits, but had to play the “Uncle Tom” card accusing her of being brainwashed into hurting her own people.
With the Prime Minister declaring that support for the Voice is just being “polite” and implying opponents of the Voice are disrespectful of Aboriginal people if not actually racist, this is threatening to be an even more divisive referendum than the bid to ban the Communist Party 70 years back.
Will government-funded education include formal denunciations – Pearson-style – of any Indigenous person, like Price and like the former ALP national president, then Liberal candidate Warren Mundine, brave enough to stand against the mob on this issue?
This sense of unfairness associated with a bid to make some Australians more equal than others based on whether some of their ancestors were here before 1788 will only be inflamed if the government looks like it’s giving a leg up to just one side, and doesn’t play fair on something as important as constitutional change.
Unlike normal legislation, that can readily be changed by an incoming government, any change to the constitution is for keeps. Short of further change, backed by another referendum, once something is in the constitution, what it means is determined by the unelected and unaccountable High Court rather than by the elected and accountable government of the day. So, if this referendum is carried, there will be an Indigenous Voice to advise the parliament and the government on anything that affects Indigenous Australians; it would take a “brave” government, in the PM’s words, to ignore its advice; it can’t be abolished; and exactly what it all means will have to be sorted out from time to time by the judges of the day. As confirmed in recent days by Indigenous Affairs Minister Linda Burney too, the Voice will be the body that gets to work and negotiates a treaty between Aboriginal Australians and the rest of us, and likely financial reparations too.
Wake up Australia, is this really want you want?
Libs must head west if they want to win
The Liberal Party is less to blame for losing last week’s Victorian election than it is for failing to put up a fight. Labor should have been very vulnerable: for the authoritarianism that made Melbourne one of the world’s most locked down cities but made no improvement to virus death rates; for the botched hotel quarantine that ultimately led to over 800 deaths; for politicising institutions such as the police and public service; and for conniving at corruption in its own ranks.
But the opposition was never able to pin this effectively on the government, partly because it never had any clear alternative policies and partly because too few of its senior members seemed hungry to win.
The problem with the Liberals main election pitch, to spend $20 billion more on hospitals and to cut all public transport fares to just $2, was that it didn’t particularly reflect Liberal values.
The Liberals had no credible plan to pay back Labor’s debt or to improve government services other than spending more money on them. And the Liberals’ fear of the Teal vote meant they had a more hardline climate policy than federal Labor.
In a stunning denial of the obvious, former federal leader Malcolm Turnbull declared this week that the Liberals had lost because they’d been taken over by the “hard right”. The Victorian Libs were so far from being “hard right” that they pre-emptively banished a candidate from their party room simply because her father belonged to a traditional Christian church and had voted to support an Aboriginal treaty process plus arbitrary gender changes on birth certificates without a whimper.
So while Victorians now have to endure another four years of a Labor government that’s much better at playing politics than it is at governing; the Liberals have to fashion an alternative approach that’s more than sitting back and hoping for Labor to lose.
The Liberals lost votes in its leafy heartland, and gained them in the aspirational suburbs, but not enough to win extra seats. That’s because the Liberal Party is still led from the east even though its votes come increasingly from the west.
To win, it has to get out into the outer suburbs and choose candidates that reflect the people it hopes to win over.
And, show some bloody ticker!
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Originally published as Peta Credlin: Voice to Parliament threatening to be most divisive referendum in 70 years
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