Akerman: The Voice is a farce whose acolytes ignore the biggest questions

The media sycophants of virtue signalling business leaders insist that the Voice is a “very simple idea”, but then resort to bullying and cancelling those who explore the full ramifications of this farcical referendum, writes Piers Akerman.

Supporters of the Voice proposals are either naive in the extreme or wilfully duplicitous.

Their advertising is all about recognition – but almost no one opposes some form of recognition that this continent was inhabited when Europeans arrived.

Indeed, the greatest living former Prime Minister, John Howard, put forward a more than adequate preamble to the Constitution and his able successor Tony Abbott also had a crack at a form of words which would have filled the bill.

Absent from the Yes ads are the rest of their demands from the Uluru statement.

A Yes vote will deliver a new unelected race-based body, with as yet no known form, with a mission that extends to a treaty or treaties and compensation to descendants of Aboriginals.

A Yes vote will deliver a new unelected race-based body. Picture: NCA NewsWire/Tertius Pickard

Why the children of the massive wave of migrants who arrived over the past century, indeed, why anyone, should pay reparations to people who identify as Aboriginal full knowing that they are of mixed ancestry and that they are the beneficiaries of an enlightened Western civilisation which largely displaced the murderous, violent, misogynistic tribal culture which may well have existed for 60,000 years, is beyond ridiculous.

But no, the media sycophants of the virtue signalling business leaders insist that the Voice is a “very simple idea”, so simple indeed that they’ve resorted to bullying and cancelling those who explore the full ramifications of this farcical referendum.

Noel Pearson. Picture: NCA NewsWire/Martin Ollman

Cape York leader Noel Pearson, for whom I had a lot of respect over the past three decades, once preached that “welfare is a poison to my people”, and the recently deceased G.Yunupingu, speaking to the celebrated author Nicolas Rothwell at a Garma festival in August, 2011, on Yunupingu’s traditional land overlooking the Gulf of Carpentaria, called for the abolition of welfare payments to his people – for the simplest of reasons: “It’s a killer”.

Welfare isn’t mentioned today.

Not one of those now abusing Jacinta Nampijinpa Price, other Aboriginal leaders, and rational opponents of the Voice want to explore the roots of the dystopia that exists in remote communities, the lack of employment opportunities, the truancy that destroys attempts to educate children, the utter dysfunction of so many families.

Nor are they questioning the dispersal of the $35 billion-plus that is spent annually through the multitude of bodies administered by Aboriginal-focused groups … again, why not?

The late G. Yunupingu. Picture: AAP Image/Lucy Hughes Jones

Voice co-author Marcia Langton was present at Garma and said of Yunupingu’s words: “If (G.) Yunupingu has taught me anything over 30 years, it is that we must not become dependent on governments, we must teach our children to work and we must reform the education system to ensure future generations will be able to participate in the economy.”

Where did you get lost Marcia?

One of the most insightful scholars, the former Minister for Territories and Governor-general, Sir Paul Hasluck, noted in 1980 after more than half a century’s involvement in Aboriginal affairs: “It seems to me that discussion of rights in recent years has tended to obscure the recognition of needs and opportunities of this minority in the Australian population”.

“If equal rights are not enjoyed, that defect would appear to be due to lack of ‘the corresponding responsibility’ in both white and coloured Australians.”

Presciently, he wrote “today, far too many Australians are taking that easy way out by making speeches and writing reports about rights and not getting down to the hard and exacting problems of analysing and redressing the handicaps of the underprivileged and the disadvantaged. Having a right is an incomplete benefit.

Sir Paul Hasluck, Governor-General of Australia 1969-1974.

“The value of a right depends on the way it is used. So many of the present disadvantages of the Aborigines are not due to a lack of rights but to the lack of care and skill and consideration in the way rights are recognised.

“Thirty or 40 years ago there was a tendency to differentiate between tribal Aborigines, partly detribalised Aborigines and those part-Aboriginals who were living in various degrees of contiguity to and absorption into the general Australian community, and to assume that what suited one group might not suit another.

“Nowadays the fully tribal desert nomad and the person with a tertiary education and only one Aboriginal grandparent are both regarded as ‘Aborigines’, having a common voice and a common future. Policy for Aborigines nowadays covers a population that is large and diverse whereas it used to cover a smaller and more narrowly defined population that was nearly homogenous.”

The Voice proposals don’t recognise the diversity across the Aboriginal community, the mixed heritage of most Aboriginals.

They are racist and divisive, and must be defeated.