Andrew Bolt: Lidia Thorpe exposes the Voice is not about national unity

The government says don’t worry about the Voice, it will have no power, but in reality it will be a de facto Aboriginal parliament, just waiting for Aboriginal nations to represent.

Senator Lidia Thorpe did us a big favour on Monday by quitting the Greens. She exposed the great con of Labor’s Voice.

Forget the kumbayah about the Voice – a kind of Aboriginal-only parliament – that’s now preached at children in our schools. How it will leave us reconciled while angels sing.

Thorpe makes clear the end game is not unity but apartheid – “black sovereignty”, she calls it.

She said she was quitting the Greens because “this country has a strong grassroots black sovereign movement, full of staunch and committed warriors, and I want to represent that movement fully.”

The Albanese government will be furious that she’s sabotaging their crusade by flaunting what it’s trying to hide. You see, even Labor agrees with much, if not all, of Thorpe’s separatist agenda.

Lidia Thorpe exposed the great con of Labor’s Voice. Picture: AAP

The government is saying don’t worry about this Voice. It will have no power. It will just advise.

False. It will be a de facto Aboriginal parliament, just waiting for Aboriginal nations to represent.

The logic alone dictates it. If you tell Aborigines they are so different they must have their own parliament, how can you insist this Aboriginal parliament have no real power?

But it’s not just the logic that says this Voice is a Trojan horse for apartheid.

Judge by the words of a government that’s already appointing our first Aboriginal ambassador to represent Aboriginal interests internationally.

Last July, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese announced: “I reaffirm my government’s promise to implement the Statement from the Heart at Uluru, in full.”

That statement demands apartheid: “(Aboriginal) sovereignty … has never been ceded or extinguished, and coexists with the sovereignty of the Crown … With substantive constitutional change and structural reform, we believe this ancient sovereignty can shine through as a fuller expression of Australia’s nationhood.”

Indeed, I once drove Indigenous Australians Minister Linda Burney to an example of this “black sovereignty” – the Yidindji Tribal Nation which black activists have declared around Cairns, with its own prime minister.

I asked Burney if this was seriously a model for our future. With shining eyes, she replied: “Yeah, I do approve of it”.

That’s why Labor isn’t satisfied with Aborigines already having a voice – a vote in elections, 11 Aboriginal politicians in federal Parliament, more than 30 land councils, 2700 Aboriginal corporations, and around 70 big Aboriginal organisations.

No, that’s still not enough because none of that can form a black parliament of Aboriginal nations in apartheid Australia. That’s the real vision. Ask Thorpe.