Peta Credlin: The Voice agenda is more than just ‘advice’

There’ll be plenty more soft-sell between now and polling day but the evidence about the real nature of the Voice is absolutely irrefutable, writes Peta Credlin.

From the Prime Minister down, the Voice campaign has now taken to describing the Voice as nothing more than a simple advisory body.

In one interview last week, Indigenous Affairs Minister Linda Burney described the Voice as just “an advisory body” or an “advisory committee” no fewer than nine times. It’s easy to spot the tactic. There’s nothing to see here, so really nothing to fear in voting Yes.

If only that were all. Because simple advisory bodies, which can be taken seriously or politely ignored as the government of the day chooses, are not enshrined in their own special chapter of the constitution. And this Voice would have a constitutionally guaranteed right to make representations to the government on anything and everything at all “relating” to Aboriginal people.

What’s more, a constitutionally guaranteed right to be heard implies a constitutionally mandated obligation on the government to listen and respond – otherwise, what is the point of entrenching a Voice?

If it was merely “advisory”, it could happen now with or without legislation – and the fact that it hasn’t tells you everything.

Pat Anderson, Noel Pearson and Megan Davis when The Uluru Statement from the Heart won the 2021 Sydney Peace Prize. Picture: Britta Campion/The Australian

For the people behind it, the Voice is anything but a simple advisory body, however much they might pretend it is now. While Voice architects such as Professor Megan Davis and Noel Pearson now deny the whole point of a Voice is to validate a future multibillion-dollar Treaty to settle Aboriginal sovereignty claims, this is an 11th-hour change of tune to rescue a referendum that was always going to be in deep trouble once voters grasped what it was all about.

From the start, Voice advocates have had two conflicting messages: one, to the public, that voting Yes is just being polite and respectful to Aboriginal people; and another, to the activists, that the Voice is the first step in atoning for the original sin of British settlement by giving Aboriginal people a special say in the running of Australia.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese at a Midnight Oil concert wearing a Voice, Treaty, Truth T-shirt. Picture: Daily Mail

As the activist mantra goes, it’s Voice, Treaty, Truth. Voice, to give Aboriginal people privileged access to government; Treaty, to secure more money and control over land; and Truth, to re-cast Australia’s history as a story of shame. As the Aboriginal group ANTARS says, a treaty is “more than symbolic recognition … (it) recognises that First Nations people never ceded their sovereignty and creates space for First Nations communities to exercise their sovereignty through a form of self-government”.

At the 2018 Garma Festival, Pearson told his listeners they needed to “wake up” to the real strategy.

Voice, he said, is the “first door”. Treaty is the “second door”. The Uluru Statement from the Heart, he went on “anticipated that following a constitutional Voice there will be a process of treaty. A process of national, regional and local agreement making. Makarrata. And we seek a commission to be established in Australian law to supervise that process.”

Yet again, here’s one of the key Voice architects clarifying for a narrow audience that the Uluru Statement is not the one-page poster that the Prime Minister wants you to think it is.

Indigenous Affairs Minister Linda Burney. Picture: NCA NewsWire/Philip Gostelow

The Voice might not be about treaties when it’s necessary to win a vote; but that will hardly be the case if it passes. In fact, the Albanese government is already spending our money to make it happen with its first budget committing almost $6m towards the establishment of the Makarrata commission that will negotiate treaties.

To date, almost a million dollars of this has been spent. On what, we don’t know, because minister Linda Burney refuses to say.

All she’ll admit is: “We support Uluru, we support constitutional recognition for a Voice. We support Makarrata and funding has been allocated for that.”

There’ll be plenty more soft-sell between now and polling day but the evidence about the real nature of the Voice is absolutely irrefutable.

Vote Yes to a race-based constitution for Australia; or vote No to reject it.

JUNK COVID INQUIRY AS LABOR LETS STATES OFF HOOK

On multiple occasions prior to last year’s election, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese promised “a royal commission or some other inquiry” into the pandemic. But the “inquiry” he’s just announced into Covid won’t hold public hearings, can’t compel witnesses to appear, can’t subpoena documents – and, most notably, won’t investigate any actions by the state governments. It’s a whitewash.

As a broken promise, this is more blatant than his absurd commitment to cut your power bill by $275 dollars, given that much that feeds into power prices is beyond government control.

Yet the holding of a royal commission, or not, and the terms of what it investigates, or not, are entirely within the power of government.

This isn’t a promise he was forced to break. This was a promise he chose to break. And it’s hard to avoid the suspicion that this is basically about letting the Labor states off the hook and stitching up Scott Morrison yet again, just as he was earlier stitched up by Labor’s Robodebt royal commission.

It’s cover-up politics pure and simple and get square politics for Morrison.

And that’s because, sure, the federal government spent upwards of $300bn, basically paying people not to work during lockdowns. And it turned Australia into a virtual prison island by closing our borders for the best part of two years.

But it was the states that made people’s lives hell – in Victoria’s case, by making Melbourne the world’s most locked-down city with curfews, 5km limits on travel, children’s playgrounds closed, and police firing tear gas and rubber bullets at protesters. Plus, the wretched incompetence of a hotel quarantine scheme that cost more than 800 lives.

It was the states that stole two years of young people’s lives by closing schools and universities. It was the states that left old people to die alone because they weren’t allowed visitors. And it was the states that turned Australia from one country into six petty principalities.

Flinders Street Station was almost deserted during a Covid lockdown. Picture: NCA NewsWire/Andrew Henshaw

That fact that they are not even investigating the impact of Covid on our kids – the lost education, the mental health or suicide rates – says it all. Almost every bushfire in this country is subject to a royal commission. We’ve had them into veterans’ affairs, aged care, a juvenile justice centre in Darwin, for goodness sake. But not into the biggest loss of life and largest expenditure of public money since the World War II?

I did my best through the media to hold the politicians to account, especially Daniel Andrews in Victoria, but they used special pandemic powers to bury most decisions and, in Victoria, even shut down the parliament. It makes a mockery of our democracy that every freedom we had stolen from us, every bad decision behind closed doors, every twisted bit of health “justification” will now remain secret.

I get that the pandemic was a miserable time that most of us would prefer to forget. Me included. I lived every day of it locked down in an apartment in inner-city Melbourne. So, believe me, I get it.

But there will be another pandemic. It’s not if, it’s when. And next time we must handle it better – and it’s just criminal that this junk inquiry is about what’s best for Labor, not what’s best for our country.

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