‘Had a shocker’: Big thing Yes campaign got wrong

Amid the noise of both the Yes and No Voice to Parliament campaigns, the Yes crowd has got something terribly wrong.

OPINION

It seems impossible to talk about anything but the Voice in the current political climate, which is a shame because perhaps the biggest threat to the Voice is people constantly talking about it.

And now here I go again, so apologies for that. However it will not be what you expect to hear.

Amid all the noise and obfuscation and claim and counterclaim from both sides of this debate something has been conspicuously absent, and that is the truth.

There is a lot of talk about truth-telling from the Yes side of the campaign – the side I am on – but it is high time we told the truth about ourselves.

And the truth is that we have had a shocker. We’ve gone from a position where almost two-thirds of Australians supported constitutional recognition through an Indigenous Voice to Parliament to a point where even some leading campaigners are bracing for defeat.

This would be terribly sad for ourselves and our country but should it eventuate it would be a catastrophe of our own making.

The Yes campaign has had a shocker so far. Picture: Aaron Francis/NCA NewsWire

But first we should pause and thank God for small mercies: The Voice is not yet a lost cause. It can be saved if those of us who champion it do some truth-telling of our own.

The first thing to admit is that the optics haven’t been great.

The Voice exists only as a proposed amendment to the constitution. It is an incredibly modest and elegant form of words that grants the Parliament of Australia absolute authority over it and thus guarantees the People of Australia the same.

Here it is in full and every Australian should know it:

“In recognition of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples as the First Peoples of Australia:

• there shall be a body, to be called the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice;

• the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice may make representations to the Parliament and the Executive Government of the Commonwealth on matters relating to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples;

• the Parliament shall, subject to this Constitution, have power to make laws with respect to matters relating to the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice, including its composition, functions, powers and procedures.”

The Voice is not a lost cause, says Joe Hildebrand. Picture: Steve Pohlner

As is explicitly clear to any layman, and as innumerable legal experts – including the last High Court Chief Justice – have clearly stated, the only power in this amendment resides in the Parliament. All the Voice can do is “make representations” – i.e. say what it thinks.

But it is also true that a bunch of the usual excitable activist types, including some associated with the Yes campaign, have been busted on social media bragging about how this is just step one in a push to accumulate further power and rights for Indigenous peoples.

This is depressingly unhelpful and also utterly wrong. Whether you agree with their lofty ambitions or not, there is only one rational response: How?

There is literally no facility, no capacity for the amendment to do that. All the Voice can do – appropriately enough – is speak.

And if it tried to extend beyond its remit of merely providing advice whatever parliament or government the people voted in at the next election could turn the Voice inside out at the stroke of a pen.

And so if anything the Voice is incentivised to be as in keeping with community standards and expectations as possible because if its advice is seen as reckless or opportunistic it would encourage parliament to dissolve and reconstitute it.

This power is written there plain as day in the final line of the amendment: The Parliament has total control over the Voice’s “composition, functions, powers and procedures” – in other words, who is on it, what it is able to do and how it is able to do it.

And so whatever some douchebag says on social media doesn’t matter. Only what the amendment says matters — and the amendment is constrained, conservative and clear.

Voice campaigners must also be honest about the other millstone hanging around the neck of the campaign, and that is the perception that this is another top-down elitist push of woke values on ordinary working people who have the real world to worry about.

This is completely understandable given the innumerable nauseating virtue-signalling crusades that are constantly drummed up by overprivileged hectoring types.

The problem is that the Voice is not one of those things. Unlike the empty feel-good rhetoric of other causes this is something that has the potential to make a real material difference for some of the most underprivileged people on the planet.

And so while the cry may sound familiar, this time when the boy is crying wolf the wolf is real.

Indeed, it is in many ways ironic that many of the faces of the Voice are among the most successful Indigenous people in our country. That should be welcomed but it does not make them typical, nor are they the people for whom the Voice is intended.

The harder truth is that Indigenous people die almost a decade sooner than the rest of us and that in many remote communities the levels of disease, violence and unemployment would be simply unrecognisable as Australia to most of us.

These are the people who need a voice. These are the people we should be listening to. And it is for these people that the Voice to Parliament was conceived.

The bleatings of the chattering classes might be what most people hear and that is exactly the problem the Voice is trying to fix. It would be too cruel if those who were voiceless were denied that chance just because others didn’t know when to shut up.