Labor’s plan to remake Australia at heart of resistance to the Voice
Progressives have been conducting a quiet guerrilla war against the symbols and traditions of ‘old’ Australia. That’s why so many people are resistant to the call of the Voice, writes James Morrow.
Opinion
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Anthony Albanese’s Voice to Parliament is suddenly seeming less fairy tale than Frankenstein.
Having been given life by the prime minister as a clever ploy (a cynic would say) to wedge the opposition and secure his legacy, his refusal to answer basic questions or fund both sides of the debate is feeding suspicions that his basic plea for “good manners” is hiding something a whole lot worse.
And that is before we even get to Lidia Thorpe’s spectacular fragging of the Greens party room, a move that in the process reminded voters that Uluru has three parts and if you vote voice you’re getting a treaty – whether you like it or not.
No wonder that despite a majority – 56 per cent – of Australians nationwide saying they support the Voice, much of that is soft, with only 28 per cent saying they are “strongly” in favour.
Combine that with the likelihood that this national majority is being skewed by big concentrations of pro-Voice types in states like NSW and Victoria and it quickly becomes clear that the hurdle of a majority of voters in a majority of states is looking more doubtful by the day.
By now the PM (and Voice supporters everywhere) would be well within their rights to ask themselves how they got here.
After all, wasn’t this supposed to be a feel-good constitutional fix heavy on vibe that would barely touch the machinery of government – yet at the same time succeed in closing the gap where billions of dollars and as many good intentions have failed? Well, perhaps.
But allow me to suggest that the problem is less with the Voice – though there is plenty to worry about in the idea of giving people an extra avenue to petition government dependant on their race – and more with voters’ suspicion that it is part of a much broader program to fundamentally remake Australia.
The prime minister belled the cat on this the other day when he accused the Voice’s opponents of being culture warriors.
This is of course a magician’s distraction, and exactly the charge politicians and activists with one revolutionary agenda or another throw at anyone who has the audacity to challenge their agenda.
Ever since Labor took office – and, really, since long before that – progressives have been fighting their own guerrilla war to undermine and overturn the culture of what might be called “old Australia”.
Much of this fight occurs more in the realm of symbols and traditions than in the arena of policies and law.
Consider that in just the past fortnight we have seen local councils allowed to skip citizenship ceremonies on Australia Day and commonwealth public servants encouraged to choose another day to take off, the Reserve Bank announce that instead of King Charles III future $5 notes will be adorned with First Nations, and Foreign Minister Penny Wong throw shade at her hosts on a trip to Britain over Empire.
Albanese, with his legendary three childhood faiths of the Catholic Church, the Rabbitohs, and the ALP, knows exactly how symbols and traditions work, and how once you replace one set with another you can change not just the nation but its consciousness.
The regular acknowledgment of elders past, present, and emerging has become the official blessing of this new state religion, similar in form if not substance to beginning a meal or a mass in the name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit.
The subtle undermining of Australia Day (celebrate if you really must), the changing of the currency, and the fact that it is now an incredible act of gauche bigotry to mention Australian history without a long preamble about all the terrible stuff that happened after 1788 is all part of this program.
Readers will have plenty of examples of this phenomenon from their own lives. A friend recently related how his kid’s pre-school did a whole day of activities around the Lunar New Year (great!) but studiously avoided any mention of Australia Day until his local representative got wind and came up with some flags (not so great).
Anzac is sure to be next with the brewing fight over how to mark the “Frontier Wars”.
And our modern heretics are those like the Gold Coast Council which decided that this little ritual was just symbolic and time-wasting and copped a pasting in the media for its efforts.
All of this amounts to a sort of soft revolution, though thankfully the only gulags are on Twitter and LinkedIn.
But it is revolutionary nonetheless, and can only be seen as an effort to remake Australia in progressive Labor’s own image.
Former ALP minister Craig Emerson seemed to admit this the other day when he wrote that demographics meant that “dwindling number of conservatives among the Australian people will have neither the power nor the numbers to force Australia to cling to its colonial past.”
Maybe, but as the fight over the Voice shows, the “old” Australia still has some life in it after all.
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