Piers Akerman: A Voice to Parliament masks bigger issues in remote Indigenous communities

Those with vested interests in the Indigenous industry, the woke and the wannabe-seen-to-be virtuous have embraced the concept of a Voice inserted into the Constitution, but it won’t impact those that need the most help, writes Piers Akerman.

The unrelenting emotive marketing of the indigenous Voice to Parliament proposal has provoked an unexpected backlash from a number of Indigenous figures for a variety of reasons, excluding the weird endorsement by a multi-millionaire US basketballer.

The principal charge against the Voice’s promoters is that it does nothing to counter the obvious catastrophic dysfunction in many remote communities.

Those with vested interests in the Indigenous industry, the woke and the wannabe-seen-to-be virtuous have embraced the concept of a Voice inserted into the Constitution, putting any further changes beyond reach of the public except through another referendum or activist judges.

The major driver of the separatist agenda is the taxpayer-funded ABC but other media companies have jumped aboard this campaign as they did supporting Malcolm Turnbull and Peter FitzSimons’ 1999 (failed) referendum for a republic.

There have also been a number of attempts by activists to give the capital cities Indigenous names – to the confusion of locals and visitors alike – but these forays into post-post-modern identity politics seem to have gone nowhere, for the obvious reason that there were no permanent villages, towns or cities here before the First Fleet arrived and certainly no nations.

Anthony Albanese is a strong advocate of the Voice to Parliament. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Gary Ramage

This monumental myth-making is at one with the Uluru statement which, for all its flowery language, was not cobbled together by “we” from “all points of the southern sky” but rather a group of academics and lawyers, some Aboriginal and some not, from Australia who drew heavily on ideas contained in United Nations documents and language from both Canada and the US.

Had such “borrowing” been done by others, it may have been condemned as cultural appropriation but apparently such vilification only goes one way when the self-anointed virtuous wokesters make themselves the final arbiters of public opinion.

If you don’t agree, you will be cancelled anyway.

The Uluru statement does not trace a path to a glorious future but is based on the sense of victimhood that was at the basis of the Gough Whitlam Labor government’s treatment of Aboriginal affairs under the stewardship of the Marxist H.C. “Nugget” Coombs, who also advocated the policy of communal land ownership for Aboriginals, effectively locking control of land in remote areas in the hands of dominant Indigenous families and preventing private ownership by individuals, Indigenous or otherwise.

Disappointingly for what might have been a document outlining the strength of the nation and whatever contribution Aboriginal culture may make, the statement refers to the high rate of incarceration of young Aboriginals without exploring any of the significant ingrained problems, exacerbated by ready access to drugs, alcohol and pornography.

As NT Justice Judith Kelly noted in a recent speech in Darwin, everyone is willing to talk about the over-representation of Aboriginal men in prison but the stream of Aboriginal men going to prison is matched by a steady stream – a river – of Aboriginal women going to the hospital and to the morgue.

Northern Territory Supreme Court judge Justice Judith Kelly pictured in her chambers in Darwin.

She said that between 2000 and 2022, two Aboriginal men were shot by police, both times followed by massive press coverage, calls for inquiries and so on.

In that same period, 65 Aboriginal women were killed by their partners and in each case you would have been flat out seeing a small report on page 5 or 7 of the local newspaper – nothing nationally.

“Indigenous women are approximately 10 times more likely to be the victim of an assault than non-Indigenous women, and 32 times more likely to end up in hospital than a non-Indigenous woman victim,” she said.

These facts are missing from the Uluru statement yet it calls for a “Makarrata Commission” to “supervise a process of agreement-making between governments and First Nations and truth-telling about our history”.

Had the framers of the statement not been so determined to build a power base beyond that available to all Australians, they might have been a bit more aspirational and proclaimed that they wished to work against domestic violence, hunger, poverty, desperation and chaos not only in Indigenous communities but for all Australians.

As it is, the Voice does not serve those most in need or the nation.