Peta Credlin: Voice’s echo to shake us to core

As Anthony Albanese has kept detail out of the Voice debate, most Australians don’t really know what it is about nor understand its likely reach into non-Indigenous lives, argues Peta Credlin.

For most people, just trying to keep their head above water with mortgage rate increases and supermarket costs and power bills skyrocketing, the upcoming vote on Labor’s indigenous Voice to the parliament seems a long way removed from day-to-day life.

After all, the Prime Minister has deliberately kept the detail out of the debate so most Australians don’t really know what the Voice is about and don’t understand its likely reach into their non-aboriginal lives.

Throw in the fact that most of us have a lot of goodwill towards reconciliation, and you can understand why the Albanese Government just wants to get this across the line on the goodwill ‘vibe’, rather than be forced to tell you about the Trojan Horse that the Voice really is and the radical changes it will bring to how our country is run.

The term ‘Trojan Horse’ is an old one. It goes back to the Greek classics and the story of a huge wooden horse that the Trojans unwittingly pulled into their hitherto protected fortress city, and as they slept that night, out of the horse came a small band of Greek soldiers, who then opened the gates and let in the rest of their army, destroying Troy and winning the Trojan war.

Anthony Albanese speaks at the Garma Festival in July last year in East Arnhem. Picture: Tamati Smith/Getty Images

The government is trying to make it’s Voice sound safe; that it’s not a big change to the rights of one race of Australians over another; that it is, as the PM often says, ‘just good manners’. Only a mug would believe that, especially given this government’s record on broken promises.

Indigenous Australians Minister Linda Burney, Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus, Senator Pat Dodson and Indigenous leaders addressing the media about the voice in Adelaide on Friday. Picture: Supplied

The whole reason you are not being given the detail is because if you really knew how far this Voice will reach into your daily lives, you wouldn’t vote for it. That’s why the true extent of its powers are being kept secret from ordinary Australians and why those pulling together the final wording for the referendum question are fighting among themselves.

At the heart of the issue here is how big the Voice should be, how far it would reach into our system of government, and what sort of capacity the Voice might have to sue anyone – politician or public servant alike – who didn’t take its “advice”.

The Aboriginal lobby want the Voice to be as big as possible; to cover not just advice to the parliament, but also the government, the cabinet, the national cabinet of state premiers, indeed, the whole of the public service. That was also the PM’s original plan, announced at the Garma Festival last July, but as polls show public support for his Voice continuing to decline, he’s trying to wind back the aspirations of his indigenous working group. Only it’s not working, hence the impasse.

The PM said on Friday that even though there’s no agreement yet on the words for the Voice referendum, he’s pushing on anyway with the legislation coming into the parliament, he says, in the next fortnight. As it stands, the Voice is already expected to be a lawyer’s picnic, with any advice that the government rejects subject to reconsideration by the High Court. It could turn out to be a re-run of Covid, where the elected MPs felt compelled to accept the ‘expert health advice’ of unelected outsiders.

Part of a nationwide advertising blitz for The Voice referendum ‘yes’ campaign.

Consider this: a group of Aboriginal people, elected by Aboriginal people only, providing advice over laws that impact all Australians, that the government of the day will feel morally bound to adopt. Even where a government was brave enough to say, for instance, that the Voice’s advice contradicts election commitments made to everyone, you could bet your house on the matter heading straight to the High Court, meaning millions in litigation costs and years in limbo.

Not only will aboriginal people get two votes in our democracy under this model – one for the parliament, as we all do, and another for the Voice – but the Voice will inevitably be drawn into giving advice on laws and policies that affect everyone, not just indigenous people. Now how does fit with our democratic sense of fairness?

So far, this debate has largely been inside the Canberra bubble. By refusing to fund both the “yes” and the “no” cases for the Voice, the government has deliberately tried to suppress debate; and by giving tax deductibility to donations to one side of the argument only, the government has unfairly tried to tilt the playing field.

The nearer the Voice proposal comes to a vote, the more engaged the public will be and that’s when a massive “yes” marketing push can be expected. Sure, only eight out of 44 referendum bids have passed, but the big-spending ad campaign hasn’t yet started so no one should assume that the Voice is bound to fail – even though, by changing the way we’re governed, it’s the biggest constitutional change we’ve ever been asked to make.

A recent case in the NSW Supreme Court, where a non-indigenous family’s bid to adopt two Aboriginal children they have fostered for many years has stalled, because it hadn’t been approved by the relevant indigenous bodies, is the harbinger of things to come on a much larger scale should the Voice be approved. Here, the need to persuade an intransigent group of indigenous activists had created a tragedy for one family.

Having to persuade a grievance-focused Voice on how the country is governed could mean gridlock on a monumental scale.

Watch Peta on Credlin on Sky News, weeknights at 6pm

Originally published as Peta Credlin: Voice’s echo to shake us to core