Why cowardly Labor is scared to debate Aboriginal Voice

The Albanese government is scared of a debate on its racist and dishonest plan for an Aboriginal-only parliament — this is why.

I’m back from Sydney, where I recorded a debate the ABC wouldn’t hold and the Albanese government didn’t want. The cowards.

In fact, the government is so scared of a debate on its racist and dishonest plan for an Aboriginal-only parliament that it broke three agreements to send someone to put their case on this Sky News discussion, screened on Sunday.

Be warned. Labor’s plan for what it sweetly calls “The Voice” is so dodgy that it doesn’t dare defend it even on a panel where supporters outnumber critics, three to two.

Linda Burney, the Indigenous Australians Minister, personally told debate host Chris Kenny, a fellow “Voice” supporter, she’d come before chickening out, claiming she was too busy.

Malarndirri McCarthy, the assistant minister, then agreed – but then also dropped out. Labor Senator Marian Scrymgour told Kenny she’d come, but also wimped it.

This fear is typical. The ABC, our national broadcaster, campaigns for Labor’s plan but likewise seems allergic to debate.

In July, the ABC’s Insiders devoted a show to the “Voice” without inviting one sceptic. The flagship Q&A program then held a “debate” in which all six panellists were for the “Voice”.

Mind you, the debate we filmed on Sky (to be repeated twice next weekend) shows why the Albanese government is scared.

Here are some questions that I and formidable Nationals Senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price asked that none of the three “Voice” supporters could answer.

Jacinta Nampijinpa Price has questions for supporters of the voice. Picture: Chloe Erlich

What powers will this Aboriginal-only parliament have?

How will its members be chosen?

What will it practically do that hasn’t been tried before – and failed?

And why put it in the Constitution, so future generations can’t dump this “Voice” if it fails, too?

Don’t blame the “yes” team for having no answers. Nor does Labor.

Labor instead sells its “Voice” on a lie that falls apart at a touch.

As Burney puts it: we need this Aboriginal-only parliament so Aborigines “have a say on things that affect them”.

The lie is the implication that Aborigines don’t have a say already.

False. Aboriginal Australians, like everyone, already elect politicians to our federal and state parliaments.

What’s more, they also have 11 politicians in federal parliament who identify as Aboriginal, plus more than 30 big land councils, 2700 Aboriginal corporations and a Council of Peaks, representing more than 70 top Aboriginal bodies and already advising governments.

Nor is it true that even more consultation will end Aboriginal disadvantage.

One pro-“Voice” panellist on the Sky debate is Shireen Morris, a law lecturer who worked with Noel Pearson on his Cape York Initiative, covering 3000 Aborigines in four towns.

No Aboriginal leader has been consulted more than Pearson. At one stage his initiative got $150m from governments over eight years, yet Aurukun, the biggest of the towns, remains one of the country’s most dysfunctional. Two years ago, 300 locals fled it to escape armed rioters.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and his government are scared of a debate on its plan for the Indigenous voice to parliament. Picture: Getty Images

Worse, too many Aboriginal organisations excuse or duckshove exactly the crises they should be tackling.

For 15 years we actually had a “Voice”, but called the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Corporation, with members elected from around Australia.

In 2001, this ATSIC was alerted to a report by a task force of 15 Aboriginal women, led by Professor Boni Robertson, examining domestic violence in Aboriginal communities.

I read that report and felt sick. The horror – of children punched, kicked, neglected, abandoned, raped or left so hungry by drinking parents that they sniff petrol to dull the pangs. Of horrific attacks on women, and local nurses often too frightened to help.

One said she’d checked a 14-year-old for venereal disease: “I have never seen a girl so red raw inside. She screamed all the way through the consultation.

“Turns out she had been sexually assaulted since the age of three. (She) was the first person I have ever seen where I thought, ‘There is no hope for you.’ ”

But what did ATSIC do about all this?

It was spending $12m a year on travel, including to the United Nations to denounce white racism, plus $12m on conferences, and $15m on public affairs and media.

But it spent barely a cent on fighting domestic violence. Even after the Robertson report, it could find just $1m.

In 2005, ATSIC was finally sacked for incompetence and corruption, but now Labor wants its new ATSIC, this “Voice”, written into the Constitution to make it essentially unsackable, and with powers it won’t define.

No wonder Labor doesn’t dare join a debate to say why.