Andrew Bolt: Eight reasons why the Voice to Parliament is useless and dangerous

Anthony Albanese is keeping the details about the Voice to Parliament secret because the more you know, the more likely you’ll vote against it.

How telling. Anthony Albanese sure doesn’t like being asked to explain how his radical Aboriginal-only “Voice” will actually work.

“People are over cheap culture war stunts,” the Prime Minister snapped on Sunday, blind to his hypocrisy.

Albanese was cross with Opposition Leader Peter Dutton for publicly releasing 15 questions to him about his race-based advisory parliament, written into our constitution.

How would the Voice be run, asked Dutton. Why was the government keeping those details secret from voters ahead of this year’s referendum?

Dutton called this secrecy “a catastrophic mistake”, but it’s actually a deliberate strategy. Just a week ago, Indigenous Australians Minister Linda Burney defended keeping voters in the dark: “What people really want to know is not the nitty-gritty detail.”

This is the true “cheap culture war stunt”. Labor is keeping the details secret because the more you know about this Voice, the more likely you’ll vote against it.

But the problems go way beyond mere “details”. Here are the top eight reasons why this Voice is immoral, useless and dangerous.

Anthony Albanese hasn’t explained how the Voice will work. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Luis Enrique Ascui

THIS IS APARTHEID

Giving Aborigines their own de facto Parliament – albeit advisory – is saying they are so different to other Australians that they must have their exclusive race- based political body.

The next demand is logically inevitable. You hear it already: a treaty, with Aboriginal sovereignty on the table. Apartheid.

Indeed, I once took Burney to the so-called Yidindji Aboriginal “nation” around Cairns, meeting its “Prime Minister”. I asked Burney if she supported this model and she said “yes”.

THIS IS UNNECESSARY

Aboriginal Australians already have many voices to Parliament: a Prime Minister’s Indigenous Advisory Council, more than 30 land councils, more than 2700 Aboriginal corporations and the Council of Peaks, representing 70 top Aboriginal organisations.

Most importantly, 11 federal politicians now identify as Aboriginal. That’s nearly 5 per cent of MPs, when Aborigines make up no more than 3.7 per cent of our population.

THIS ENCOURAGES FRAUDS

Suzanne Ingram, a board member of the NSW Aboriginal Housing Office, complained on SBS last year that 300,000 of the 810,000 Australians now claiming to be Aboriginal were fakes.

In fact, just the past two censuses – 2016 and 2021 – had more than 130,000 people calling themselves Aborigines who hadn’t in the census before.

How can we create an Aboriginal-only advisory parliament when up to a third of the people it represents are actually white pretenders?

Suzanne Ingram told SBS that hundreds of thousands of Aussies were falsely claiming to be Indigenous. Britta Campion / The Australian

THIS DIVIDES, NOT UNITES

This “reconciliation” movement has already failed. After three decades, race relations seem more poisonous than ever. Example: Greens MP Lidia Thorpe.

No wonder. When you give activists power because of their “race”, they must exaggerate racial division to survive and keep the money flowing. Assimilationists get nowhere, and separatists prosper. The Voice will just make that worse.

THIS DISEMPOWERS

Supporters of the Voice must paint Australia as racist and deaf to Aboriginal demands. Else why have this Voice?

But such race propaganda teaches young Aborigines that other Australians hate them, and to get ahead they can just complain and get handouts. How does that help anyone?

THIS IS PERMANENT

This Voice will be written into our constitution, making it almost impossible to remove. It could fail horribly, like the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission, and we cannot sack it.

Senator Lidia Thorpe has been criticised for being divisive. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Martin Ollman

THIS COULD HAVE POWERS YOU CAN’T IMAGINE

Albanese claims this Voice can’t hold up our real Parliament, but his proposed amendment includes no words to guarantee that.

It just says this Voice may “make representations to parliament and the executive government on matters relating to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples”.

But doesn’t every matter before Parliament affect Aborigines, from tax to education? And doesn’t a constitutional right to give advice imply a constitutional duty of the government to consider it?

You can bet this will go to the High Court, which will say, yes, the government cannot act before heeding the Voice.

DETAILS, DETAILS

Then there are the details we don’t yet know, but could make a bad idea even worse.

How will representatives on the Voice be chosen? How can any crooks be sacked?

If it has just 24 representatives, as a working paper suggests, how can they represent the 500 or so different tribes?

What powers will the Voice have? What practical good will it do that isn’t being done already? And what can our Parliament do if it’s a failure?

I’ve listed just eight of the worst problems with the Voice, and it is not a “cheap political stunt” to demand the government give answers.