Andrew Bolt: Why Ray Martin’s Channel 7 appearance on the Voice debate is absurd

Ray Martin’s appearance on Channel 7’s the Voice panel debate as a hand-picked “Aborigine”, because his great-great-grandmother was Indigenous, exemplifies the stupidity of the Yes case.

Ray Martin hasn’t just called No voters “dickheads” and “dinosaurs”.

On Sunday night this media dinosaur also showed why the Voice is a dickhead idea.

There he was on Channel 7 as a hand-picked “Aborigine”, arguing for Labor’s planned advisory parliament for just the Aboriginal race. For Ray’s race.

Does this former TV star realise what damage he’s doing to the Yes campaign just a week from the vote?

Martin’s abuse of No voters was vote-losing enough, after the Prime Minister had him speak at a Marrickville rally.

Ray Martin’s abuse of No voters was vote-losing after he spoke at a Marrickville rally. Picture: Max Mason-Hubers

Talk about the arrogance of the Yes campaign. Martin insisted No supporters were dumb if they didn’t ask for details of this Voice, but also dumb if they did.

I kid you not. He blasted the No campaign’s slogan “if you don’t know, vote No”, saying anyone who repeated it was either “a dinosaur or a dickhead who can’t be bothered reading”, snapping: “If you don’t know, find out what you don’t know.”

Yet in literally the next breath, he suggested you’d be a dickhead to expect any detail on how this Voice would work.

“The No vote organisers also keep asking Albo for the details. What about the details? At this stage of the game, the details simply don’t matter.”

But what Martin agreed to next made him an even bigger symbol of the stupidity of the Voice.

He signed up for Channel 7’s big debate on Sunday on the Voice, alongside Nationals senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price, race-baiting Senator Lidia Thorpe and Labor Senator Malarndirri McCarthy.

Already you’ll wonder: why did Channel 7 add Martin, a white-faced superannuated TV presenter from decades ago?

Because he’s Aboriginal, too, said the debate’s producer, the talented Rob McKnight: “From the beginning, we made the decision that it had to be Indigenous Australians on the panel. We didn’t want white people talking for them.”

Pardon? Martin isn’t white?

Martin insisted No supporters were dumb if they didn’t ask for details of this Voice, but also dumb if they did. Picture: Max Mason-Hubers

Sure, the other panellists qualify as Aboriginal, in a way, although all also have white ancestry.

Price has an Aboriginal mother, as well as a white father. McCarthy has an Aboriginal mother, as well as a white father. Thorpe has a mother of Aboriginal and Scottish ancestry, as well as a white father.

Close enough, I guess. But Martin?

Well, as he once discussed on Who Do You Think You Are?, among Martin’s Irish ancestors was an Aboriginal great-great grandmother, Bertha, a fact he declared “important”.

To be fair, Martin doesn’t go around identifying as Aboriginal, yet his single Aboriginal great-great-grandparent was important enough for Channel 7 to choose him as an “Indigenous man”, and not one of those “white people talking for them” in a debate about changing our constitution to divide Australians by race.

That raises two huge questions about this Voice.

First, of course, what is an Aborigine, after generations of intermarriage? Is Martin, for instance, really Aboriginal in any meaningful way?

Just one of his 16 great-great grandparents was Aboriginal, so why does that one define Martin more than the other 15? Why does that one great-great-grandparent privilege him in a debate, or qualify him to be represented by a Voice to Parliament in the constitution – unlike anyone of any other “race”?

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese attends The West Says Yes event in Marrickville, with Yes Campaign co-chair Rachel Perkins and journalist Ray Martin. Picture: Max Mason-Hubers

What an insult to our individuality to assign people to a victim race because of a single ancestor 150 years ago or even more.

There’s another big question about Ray the Aborigine.

Check again that Channel 7 panel of Aborigines discussing this Voice that we’re told will finally give Aborigines a, well, Voice.

Don’t these four people all have a huge Voice already? Three are senators in our national parliament, including Price, now touted as a potential prime minister. The fourth is one of the most famous TV journalists of his time. Millions and millions of other Australians will never have a Voice as loud as any of these Aborigines have already.

Do we really need a Voice that treats all Aborigines as uniquely voiceless? Uniquely powerless and victimised? How racist. What a grotesque and damaging caricature.

Absurdity piles on absurdity. Ray Martin, this Aborigine chosen by Channel 7 to speak for other Aborigines, could technically be one of the 24 people selected to represent other Aborigines on the Voice.

How mad to divide us by race so crudely that even a Ray Martin could get a Voice in the constitution to speak for him, but not for the 97 per cent of Australians who don’t also have a great-great-grandmother of the “right” race.

What dickhead thought that made sense?