Piers Akerman: The Voice to parliament brings race into politics

Abhorrent racial profiling in WWII universally condemned yet we are now being urged to accept race as a determinant for education, health, welfare, housing and political representation, writes Piers Akerman.

There is more confusion in the woke camp. The Voice to parliament supporters are on a collision course with those pushing for a republic.

As the largest virtual crowd in history followed the funeral of a cherished woman who exemplified leadership courtesy of her inheritance of the British monarchy and the resurgent Commonwealth, the republican movement with characteristically abusive language challenged the whole notion of heritage.

The Voice fold, assisted by the High Court, meanwhile backed in their claim that there is an inherited spiritualism in the DNA of those who identify as Indigenous. Presumably, they would also believe in the divine right of kings.

Genetic spirituality and inherited culture require a patent stretch of the imagination by anyone with an IQ above single digits, but not to the virtue-signalling woke folk and those who appear to have put the installation of the Voice as a cause more pressing than ending physical and sexual abuse routinely dealt out to women and children in remote Indigenous settlements.

Former West Australian treasurer Ben Wyatt, who identifies as a Yamaji man, doesn’t say what other elements may be included in his genetic makeup nor do most others who claim links to distant Indigenous relatives.

Identity politics has no place in liberal social democracies, nor has race, as both Martin Luther King Jr and Nelson Mandela so fervently preached.

Senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price is more than happy to include her Celtic heritage as part of her makeup but what is it about the delicate psyches of all the other Indigenous Australians who list numerous tribal affiliations but cannot bring themselves to identify the other races which contributed to their existence?

In a thoughtful piece in The Australian, Wyatt, who now sits on the boards of Rio Tinto and Woodside, wrote that corporate Australia gets the need for a Voice to parliament because it would “remove one of the great business risks existing in Australia”. That’s not an endorsement of the opaque Voice proposition. It’s a warning to both sides against the well-founded concerns of average Australians.

Identity politics has no place in liberal social democracies, nor has race, as both Martin Luther King Jr and Nelson Mandela so fervently preached.

Perhaps no political party has stumbled so publicly in its attempts to cloak itself in designer kangaroo or possum skin cloaks (remember that the art of tanning hides came with colonists to Australia) as have the NSW Greens who have now been forced to apologise three times for their claim that Greens Upper House candidate Lynda-June Coe would be the first Indigenous Australian to be elected to the NSW parliament.

If Coe stumbles in, she would in fact become the third, behind Linda Burney who served in the NSW Legislative Assembly from 2003 to 2016 and Lynda Voltz, who served in the Legislative Council from 2007 to 2019, and now sits in the Legislative Assembly.

Not only economically illiterate, the Greens have shown themselves to be historical dunderheads with zero knowledge of Indigenous representation in NSW politics. Believe their claim to understand Indigenous issues at your peril.

Insisting that culture and spirituality is inherited should require its own scientific investigation but those who most vehemently argue this is so are also passionately opposed to any form of DNA testing.

Abhorrent racial profiling in the last world war was universally condemned yet we are now being urged to accept race as a determinant for education, health, welfare, housing and, through the Voice, additional political representation.

This is cockamamie stuff and should be brought to a swift end before it further and irreconcilably divides the nation.