Andrew Bolt: Noel Pearson’s Voice speech leaves $550m question to answer

The key question that should shut up Noel Pearson on the Voice is what happened to the $550m of Australian taxpayers’ money for his entities and policy initiatives?

Really, Noel? Is that speech of yours to the National Press Club — part vengeance, and totally misleading — your best argument for the Voice?

Then bury it now.

Not that the journalists there on Wednesday seemed to mind that Noel Pearson, the prominent Cape York Indigenous leader, was either settling petty scores, or often making no sense at all.

“Empathy is so important but only love can move us now,” he wafted at one stage.

“Not the love of family. Unlike other campaigns, we don’t have the love of family to join our hearts with our heads.”

What the hell does that mean?

But, no, this was a very pro-Voice crowd, very forgiving, and not one journalist asked Pearson the key question that should shut him up.

Noel, what happened to the $550m?

You see, Noel Pearson is Mr Voice. He’s the lawyer and Aboriginal activist who helped draft the Uluru Statement demanding it, was on a government committee which designed it, and is now campaigning for it.

Noel Pearson’s big argument for the Voice is that it would force politicians to listen to Aboriginal people before making decisions that affect them. Picture: Martin Ollman

And as Pearson said again in his speech, the big argument for his Voice — an Aboriginal-only advisory parliament of 24 unelected activists, cemented forever in our Constitution — is that it would force politicians to listen to Aborigines before making any decisions affecting them.

He said he’d spent decades working for “my people”, and “I have learned the hard way … that listening makes it possible”.

But hang on. We already have countless bodies advising the government, not least the Council of Peaks.

More to the point, no Aboriginal leader I know has been listened to more reverentially by our political leaders, from Tony Abbott to Anthony Albanese, than Pearson himself.

Just look at the money they showered on Pearson’s Cape York Partnership, set up to help just 3700 Aborigines in the northern tip of Queensland.

Pearson’s local federal member, Warren Entsch, once counted it all up.

“Since 2005, Noel has accumulated something like $550m of Australian taxpayers’ money – and that’s only what I’ve been able to find – and subsidies for his entities and policy initiatives,” Entsch told Parliament.

“The vast majority of these have been in remote communities in Cape York …and for what? Many of these remote communities that Noel has used as policy experiments remain dysfunctional.”

It’s true. Aurukun, for instance, is the biggest town in Pearson’s Cape York Partnership, and is violence-prone, and poor.

Of the people there, 89 per cent Aboriginal, nearly a third dropped out of school before year 10, and not one owns their own home. Just 31 per cent – including the whites – are in the workforce.

No Aboriginal leader I know has been listened to more reverentially by our political leaders, from Tony Abbott to Anthony Albanese, than Pearson himself. Picture: Damian Shaw

So what happened to the money, Noel? Politicians listened to you like you now demand they to listen to your Voice, but what good did that do?

Pearson seems to hate that being raised, and in his speech got even with Entsch, making him a scapegoat in his only example of how the Voice would supposedly make things better.

Rheumatic heart disease, he said, was a deadly “scourge” eliminated around much of the world but “allowed to fester in the paradise of Cape York”, because it was “a disease of the unheard” that “only a Voice can overcome”.

And who had allowed all this suffering? Why, that Warren Entsch, who Pearson said had not mentioned rheumatic heart disease in Parliament in his decades there until just the other day.

But hang on.

Entsch early last year announced the Morrison government was giving extra money to the National Aboriginal Community Controlled Health Organisation to fight rheumatic heart disease in Far North Queensland.

In fact, Liberal leader Peter Dutton, back in 2014 when he was the health minister, was signing deals with states on a Rheumatic Fever Strategy for Aboriginal Australians.

It doesn’t sound to me that this is a “disease of the unheard” that “only a Voice can overcome”.

So where was Pearson when these Liberal MPs were getting on with the job? Entsch tells me: “I’ve been in the parliament since 1996 and not once has either Pearson or any of his entities approached me — personally or in writing — to raise this as an issue with me.

“Thank you, Noel, for your newfound interest in this issue.”

How strange. And to think this was Pearson’s best — and only — example in his speech of a problem he said only the Voice could fix.

Is that really the best you’ve got, Noel?

Let me ask again: what good did you do with that $550m? Why trust you to have the answers now?