Vikki Campion: In spitting distance of divisive and big problem

If a Yes campaigner spitting at an opponent is an indication how united we are now just talking about the Voice, imagine what is waiting beyond, writes Vikki Campion.

Spit foams from ANU professor Denise Ferris’ lips, the glob landed squarely onto a person daring to hold a different opinion, perfectly encapsulates the utopian Voice dream. This is the station called Referendum, and what a sad town it is.

If this is how united we are now just talking about the Voice, imagine what is waiting beyond the platform.

The Voice will be risk-free, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese assures us. So why has his government delayed a key committee blueprint into how it will work?

For 13 months, a joint standing committee has been investigating an international agreement called UNDRIP, the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, but the committee, which was due to issue its final report in July has refused to release its findings after evidence it heard from around the world did not back up the utopia of treaty, reparations and compensation.

Nordic countries that have fiercely promoted UNDRIP gave evidence of Indigenous electoral rolls being swamped in an “overwhelming” race to be on Sami voting registries, while racism and divisiveness have soared.

Prime Minister, Anthony Albanese meets locals along The Parade in the eastern Adelaide suburb of Norwood. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Brenton Edwards

Dividing people by race instead of character and treating one person differently from another due to heritage has created big problems. International evidence provided to the committee has yet to offer a detailed circumstance of a single life made better by UNDRIP’s articles, which include state financing functions of Indigenous “self-government”, and states redress “for any form of forced assimilation or integration, any action which has the effect of dispossessing them of their lands, territories or resource or their integrity as distinct peoples, or their cultural values or ethnic identities”.

It further states that Indigenous peoples have the right to restitution or compensation for the lands, territories and resources they have “traditionally owned or otherwise occupied or used and which have been confiscated, taken, occupied, used or damaged without their free, prior and informed consent”.

In practice, Samediggi (the Sami parliament of Norway) president Silje Karine Muotka gave evidence that when human rights were breached, people became more racist to Sami people. A large wind power plant built in the grazing areas of the Fosen Samis disrupted traditional herding and the High Court ruled it was a breach of human rights.

“What we have seen since the Fosen case and the ongoing human rights violation is quite a dramatic rise in hate speech and racism against the Sami population,” she said.

The former Finnish Ombudsman for Minorities told the committee that UNDRIP had become “rather a divisive issue in Finland” with “hate speech against the Sami and vice versa. So ethic relations have become very tense”.

Others in the Sami parliaments said they had been inundated with claim from individuals from families that have traditionally been considered to be “Finnish families (and) are now claiming to be Sami”. In Canada, the native Indians have discovered a new race that they have termed “Pretendians”.

It’s almost as if you offer certain people special rights, other people will want to be treated equally to them.

The same rush to be recognised as Indigenous is occurring in New Zealand since former PM Jacinda Adern, under the cover of Covid in 2019, sneaked in a Mechanism on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.

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THE NZ EXPERIENCE

In NZ, the UNDRIP is manifesting in Maori-only health wards, in Maori ethnicity given priority on non-emergency surgery lists, on special tax rates for Maori business, as well as the renaming of places, control over school curriculum, and Maori farmers given unhindered ability to water and fertilise, while non-Maori farmers are supervised by drone to ensure they don’t do so much as plant a crop without prior council approval. Why wouldn’t anyone want to be a Maori?

On the same day Australians go to the polls to decide whether to insert race in our constitution, New Zealanders are in polling booths to privately express their true feelings towards a creeping implementation of an international agreement they never voted for.

In Australia, the real question is who gets a voice. Overseas, you must speak the native language to be on official registers. This is unlikely to happen in Australia where we get a manufactured Welcome to Country in English and are asked to accept it as authentic.

The committee actually heard that there is no parallel for the Voice anywhere in the world. In other countries, treaties are mentioned in the constitution, but political toys such as the Voice, a committee entrenched in the constitution, is not even mentioned.

Pro-Voice stakeholders failed to articulate at all how people would benefit from UNDRIP. Take this quote from the Native Women’s Association of Canada adviser Lisa Smith who gave the example as: “Let’s think about the First Nations person on reserve who is disabled, who is transgendered. How is this person going to be affected by a certain policy?

So we ask policymakers: ‘Come on. Let’s think about colonialism. Let’s be trauma-informed and put all this stuff in your policy so that no one is left behind.”

It’s little wonder the Labor-dominated committee reopened a closed process to take submissions from hand-picked stakeholders such as UNDRIP-supporting state governments after evidence as profound and informative as that. But it doesn’t matter how many “facts” the committee collects. The evidence is on the record that UNDRIP-style articles have not healed divisiveness but fanned hate-speech, racism, and a rush to be registered as Indigenous, even if people are not.

The Voice only gives a right of representation to a race of people – not to the genuinely disadvantaged in that cohort. If the second question post-referendum is “are you Indigenous?”, they may be surprised at how many decide that is not a bad choice to make.