Andrew Bolt: Why the Voice is really a dud and fake solution

Experience around the world proves the Voice is a fake solution — so it’s astonishing Anthony Albanese never gets asked this most basic question.

I’m stunned that Anthony Albanese never gets asked the most basic question about his Aboriginal Voice and treaty. Prime Minister, where’s the proof that your racist plan will work?

In fact, experience around the world proves his magic bullet is a dud.

Yet Albanese on Friday again spun his fantasy that this Voice would help Aborigines lead healthier and wealthier lives

Speaking in Arnhem Land, he listed some of the things it would change: “An eight-year gap in life expectancy … A suicide rate twice as high … Shocking rates of disease …”

But let’s look at the evidence, shall we, starting with the one example Albanese claimed on Friday to have found – the Voice in action already!

Experience around the world proves Anthony Albanese’s magic bullet is a dud. Picture: Getty

“I’m glad to be here to listen to the Dilak Council,” he gushed, referring to a council in northeast Arnhem Land representing 13 clans.

“See and feel and touch the success of what a Voice will look like!”

True, this Dilak council boasts it’s already doing what Albanese wants from his Voice, meeting “regularly with the federal and territory governments to set priorities and policies on health, housing, education and economic development and more”, so local Yolngu people get “proper agency over their lives”.

But where are the results?

Take the Yirrkala School, in the hometown of the Yunupingu family that’s dominated the Yolngu, and had a powerful say over how mining royalties have been distributed.

Anthony Albanese speaks at the Garma Festival. Picture: Pema Tamang Pakhrin

Just 54.6 per cent of its 112 children actually turned up on any average day of first term last year.

If you can’t even get your kids to school, what hope for the Yolngu?

More statistics: compared to other Northern Territorians, Yirrkala Aborigines are 50 per cent more likely to have diabetes, and twice more likely to be unemployed. They have a third of the median income.

But around the world, it’s the same. Albanese’s race politics – treating Indigenous peoples as a race apart, needing their own race-based self-government – is a disaster.

When Albanese’s Government last week admitted it still wanted a treaty as well as the Voice, ABC presenter Hamish Macdonald burbled: “New Zealand, Canada, Sweden, the US have all negotiated treaties with Indigenous peoples. Why is it such a drama to discuss one in Australia?”

Well, it’s a drama to divide us by race, but also to push such a fake solution.

Take New Zealand, which has had a treaty with the Maori since 1840. Where’s the success there?

Maori are still more than three times more likely to be jailed, twice more likely to be unemployed, twice more likely to have children in poverty, and three times more likely to have children in care.

They also die, on average, about 7.3 years earlier.

Same story in Canada, which has signed ever more treaties with “First Nations” tribes since the first, in 1763.

Yet Indigenous children are seven times more likely to need foster care. Adults are seven times more likely to be in jail, and 50 per cent more likely to be unemployed.

Anthony Albanese meets with Yolngu Elder Mr. Djawa Yunupingu. Picture: Getty

What’s more, the more “self government” they get, the worse the outcomes.

“First Nations” people living on their own reserves earn half what Indigenous people off the reserves do. Here, too, Aborigines in outback settlements tend to be poorer and unhealthier than those assimilated into cities and towns.

No difference in the United States.

American Indians also 40 per cent more likely to kill themselves, and 38 per cent more likely to be jailed. The men tend to die five years younger than white men, and are nearly twice more likely to be unemployed.

Again, it’s worst where they live in more “Indian” ways, governing themselves.

The Navajo Nation is the biggest of America’s 326 Indian reservations – larger than Tasmania – and boasts that 82 per cent of its people “still practice the traditional Navajo lifestyle”.

Yet despite its oil, gas, uranium and casinos, unemployment is more than 40 per cent, and 40 per cent of families live below the poverty rate. The Navajo are twice more likely to kill themselves.

Albanese can blame colonisation all he likes, but Indigenous culture also counts.

If you want Western wealth and health, you need Western ways. Tribal ways don’t cut it.

And Albanese’s Voice will fail, because a race-based advisory parliament will hand power to Indigenous activist who trade on being different and being owed. Aborigines who have assimilated and don’t rely on race-based perks to get ahead won’t get a look-in.

So ask Albanese: where has your Voice and treaty actually made lives better?