Peta Credlin: Australia voted No to the Voice – but the left is ignoring the outcome

The Australian people rejected Indigenous separatism at last year’s referendum but the elites running things don’t take democracy seriously. No means No, writes Peta Credlin.

The Australian people might have voted a resounding No to Indigenous separatism at last year’s referendum but that hasn’t deterred governments, plus the woke establishment more generally, from continuing to enshrine Indigenous grievance and victimhood.

And doing very little in practical terms to fix the problems of youth crime and family dysfunction as we see play out in places like Alice Springs. It’s almost as though the Prime Minister didn’t get his way and, now, he’s giving up.

But he isn’t alone in having a great big post-Voice sulk.

Consider this statement from our incoming governor-general, in a podcast with Julia Gillard late last year: “Frankly, after the referendum I felt completely untethered,” said Sam Mostyn. “I thought perhaps we were a big enough nation and there was enough understanding to make that step … I am horrified to think about what I thought Australia was, growing up with the Captain Cook story and no mention of First Peoples or Frontier Wars. Any of what was hidden from us. It was a catastrophe and I think all of that led to what we saw with the referendum”.

The Australian people voted a resounding No to Indigenous separatism at last year’s referendum. Picture: Brendan Radke

With this sort of thinking front and centre, it’s no wonder that airlines are still acknowledging “country” and that Labor governments are pushing ahead with the “treaty” and “truth” elements of the “Voice, Treaty, Truth” Uluru agenda, as if our referendum rejection never happened.

In its first budget the Albanese Government committed $6 million to a Makarrata (or treaty making) process and, in his recent Close the Gap statement, the PM declared that: “As we take the time needed to get Makarrata and truth telling right, the work of treaty goes on at a state and territory level”.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese is determined to “get Makarrata and truth telling right”. Picture: AAP Image/Lukas Coch

Next month, you can bet that Makarrata will be the first line item I go looking at on Budget night.

Last year, the Queensland Labor government passed treaty and truth telling legislation with a timeline for an inquiry into the “historical and ongoing impacts of colonisation”. Despite Queensland having the strongest No vote in the country, the government remains committed to requests for reparations (taxpayer compensation), joint management of national parks, renaming of places, changes to school curriculums, and pro-Indigenous changes to the health, justice and child-protection systems as part of a treaty-making process.

Meanwhile, the Queensland LNP opposition, quite sensibly, has pledged to axe the whole thing.

Unsurprisingly, because it’s the laboratory for the green-left, the Victorian Labor government is most committed and most advanced in the so-called Treaty and Truth push. Last week, the Allan government published its response to last year’s Yoorrook For Justice report, accepting almost every one of its 46 recommendations. Even the most radical were marked as under “consideration” rather than rejected outright, including the creation of a separate systems for child protection and police oversight for Indigenous and non-Indigenous Victorians.

Victorian Premier Jacinta Allan, centre, with the Yoorrook Justice Commissioners. Picture: X/Yoorrook Justice Commission

Given that even Victoria rejected the Voice last year, where is the support for this? Even among Indigenous people there are serious questions about legitimacy given that just 7 per cent of eligible Indigenous voters (out of a potential pool of 30,000) voted to elect the state’s First Peoples’ Assembly that’s now in charge of Treaty policy.

This situation is also playing out in South Australia where less than 10 per cent of their estimated 30,000 strong Indigenous population voted in elections for the SA Voice to Parliament. And, once elected, these SA Voice members will earn up to $18,000 per annum plus $206 per meeting, as well as various allowances. All for something that South Australians rejected and less than 10 per cent of Aboriginal residents even voted for.

If the public are disillusioned with government, it’s because the elites running things don’t take democracy seriously and don’t understand that No means No.

WE NEED A PROPER COVID INQUIRY, NOT ONE THAT LOCKS THE FACTS DOWN

If you think the Covid pandemic was behind us, sadly you would be wrong. Last week, the Albanese Government released some 2000 of the submissions to the federal inquiry into the pandemic response. Perhaps the most remarkable was that of the federal Treasury, which praised the spending of over half a trillion dollars (or nearly 30 per cent of GDP) by state and territory government on the grounds that it supposedly meant that our post-pandemic recovery “was stronger than expected and more rapid than many other advanced economies”.

It says something about the decline of Treasury as an institution that it seems to have assumed that this “faster recovery” justified spending in excess of $20,000 per Australian man, woman and child; spending that will almost double expected peak debt and for which no cost benefit analysis was ever done.

Even if Scott Morrison was right that – but for his government’s response – some 30,000 further lives would have been lost, that’s a cost to taxpayers of almost $20 million for each life supposedly saved.

Among the non-financial costs of policies to deal with Covid was the long-term damage to people’s mental health from being under virtual house arrest for months at a time. Picture: iStock

Then there’s all the non-financial costs of the policies to deal with Covid: the long-term damage to people’s mental health of being under virtual house arrest for months at a time (especially in Melbourne); the economic and social costs of all the other illnesses that were neglected such as cancer screening; the needless interruptions to young people’s education; high rates of youth suicide; and the lasting damage to people’s work ethic with the ongoing use of “working” from home even today.

To think we spent all this money and stole the liberty of our citizens yet are not prepared in a democracy to have a fair-dinkum inquiry into what we got right and what we got wrong staggers me. Nowhere else in government have I seen billions spent and the truth buried.

The Albanese Government’s inquiry is a joke. Partly because the inquiry chair is a longstanding health bureaucrat; another member is an epidemiologist who supported lockdowns at least until late 2021; and the third, judging by her social media posts, is a mask-enthusiast advocate for even tougher lockdowns. And partly because the inquiry’s terms of reference rule out looking into the actions of the states; even though it was the states’ actions which caused much of the damage with their internal border closures, vaccine mandates, and lockdowns.

In recent days, the Victorian government rejected yet another FOI request to make public all the hotel quarantine documents, even though Daniel Andrews has left office. In a democracy, this is wrong.

We still have emergency workers too, in Victoria and NSW, suffering because of ridiculous vaccine mandates still in place. Just last week, the NSW government confirmed that police dismissed for not complying with a vaccine mandate could not be re-employed because they were guilty of a disciplinary offence.

Underlying Australia’s Covid response was an undebated assumption that almost no spending and no restriction was excessive if it might lead to fewer deaths. But if this remains unchallenged, when another pandemic hits (and there will be another), our Covid-19 response will be the template.

This is why we need a much more extensive and better-balanced inquiry, nothing less than a Royal Commission, with the power to access all documents. Otherwise, our response to the next pandemic will be similarly ill-considered.

And no Australian should accept that.

Originally published as Peta Credlin: Australia voted No to the Voice – but the left is ignoring the outcome