Catastrophic move that changed voice to parliament
It was a move that was meant to make the Liberty Party more moderate but it did the opposite – and the voice is now in jeopardy because of it.
OPINION
They say that success has many fathers while failure is an orphan. If something wins, everybody lines up to take credit for it, and if something loses, everybody denies having anything to do with it.
Well I think it’s high time failure got adopted. I think it’s time the people who f**k things up finally find that little bundle crying on their doorstep.
Right now there is no bigger winner-takes-all battle on the national stage than the fight for an Indigenous voice to parliament. And the first failure is that this has even become a fight.
The hope was always that the voice campaign would be an overwhelming groundswell of support for recognition of First Australians and a forum for them to offer their own solutions to their own problems.
This is the very definition of individual and community responsibility and indeed a fundamental cornerstone of liberal democracy – which only makes it more bizarre that the federal Liberal party is opposed to it.
The hope was that it would be a natural but far more profound sequel to the 1967 referendum in which more than 90 per cent of Australians voted to count Indigenous people in the census and allow the government to make laws for their benefit – as close to a national consensus as you will ever see.
But critical to this was that the 1967 vote had absolute bipartisan support – proposed by the Coalition and wholeheartedly endorsed by Labor. No referendum has ever succeeded in this nation without both major parties backing it.
This is what makes Peter Dutton and the federal Liberals’ opposition to the voice so catastrophic – not just to themselves but to the nation.
Dutton and the right-wing rump of the Libs are now opposed to their last Indigenous affairs minister, their last shadow Indigenous affairs minister, every state branch of their own party and the vast majority of Australians, but that still might be enough to sink a landmark moment that is as historic as it is vital in the here and now.
That would be a national tragedy. So how on earth did this clusterf**k come to pass?
Enter the Teals.
We all remember – do we not? – the deranged election psychology of the Climate 200-bankrolled millionaire activists: If we kill off all the Liberal moderates and take their seats, then the Liberal party will have to become more moderate!
Oops!
As it turns out, when there are f**k-all moderates in the Liberal party room the party does not become more moderate. It does the other thing.
This is something that would be obvious to the poorest kid in the classroom struggling with remedial maths but is apparently beyond the ken of the most over-educated and over-privileged political operatives in the country.
Indeed, if Josh Frydenberg was Opposition Leader – which would have certainly been the case had the Teals not knocked him off in their moderating crusade – the Liberals would be supporting a voice to parliament right now and its success would be all-but assured.
How do we know this? Because Josh himself told us so.
In August 2021 the then-deputy Liberal leader literally launched the book of outspoken voice to parliament proponent and certain floor-crosser Andrew Bragg, titled: Buraadja: The Liberal Case For National Reconciliation.
While obviously – and rightly – calling for compromise and consensus and respectful debate, Frydenberg openly supported the voice and expressed confidence that it would succeed.
“There is a willingness to enter into the debate to ensure our indigenous Australians – our First Australians – get the recognition and the outcome that they deserve,” he said.
“We really have to focus on what unites us here and not divides. And we must ensure that the change, in whatever form it takes, is bipartisan.”
Now, because Dutton is the leader and not Frydenberg, any hope for that bipartisanship is lost – as could be hope for the voice to parliament itself.
And it is simply a matter of reality, a matter of cold hard historical fact, that the reason Frydenberg is not leader and the voice is on the precipice, is because of the Climate 200 campaign against him and other Liberal moderates led by billionaire Simon Holmes a Court – who appears to have had a particular enmity with Frydenberg himself.
So if the voice fails – which I hope to God it doesn’t and will be campaigning with every bone to prevent it – there is an incandescent arrow pointing directly to the source of its demise.
It would be unbecoming to remind people that I warned of the Teals pushing the Libs to the right, just as it would be false not to admit I was shocked and disappointed by how successful they were. As usual I was right and wrong all at the same time.
But history only asks of us three things: Remember what happened, remember who was there, and remember what they did.
I suspect history will not reward our over-privileged political expeditionaries, but I hope it remembers them well.
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