If we vote Yes to the Voice, are we helping reconciliation? That’s affirmative

Recently in these pages, journalist Nick Bryant sounded the alarm that rhetorical and campaign devices used by American conservatives were being deployed to derail the campaign to establish an Indigenous Voice to the Australian parliament. Bryant was right to highlight the many parallels between the No campaign’s key messages and the “exaggerated, inapposite and polarising” rhetoric of US conservatives, but he understated the threat they pose to establishing the Voice.

The No campaign is undoubtedly propagating Trumpist misinformation designed to scare voters, but it is also garnering crucial support by using the same strategies that have most recently destroyed affirmative action measures in American colleges and universities. Unless those imported strategies are directly confronted and repudiated, it is likely the Voice referendum will fail.

Opposition Leader Peter Dutton has opposed the Indigenous Voice to parliament.Credit: AAP

Last Thursday, the increasingly conservative US Supreme Court overruled long-standing precedent by ruling in a 6-3 majority decision that affirmative action measures designed to reduce racial inequality by ensuring that more students from minority racial backgrounds were admitted to universities were unconstitutional.

For more than 40 years, under such measures, universities were able to consider race or ethnic background together with scholastic achievement and other criteria in determining whether students were admitted. Since 1978, the US Supreme Court has repeatedly found that affirmative action policies for students from under-represented racial and ethnic backgrounds promoted “beneficial educational pluralism”.

The court’s recent ruling requires universities to treat students from different racial and ethnic backgrounds equally in a country in which admissions to the tertiary education system are characterised by profound inequality of access and outcome. In other words, the court has mandated that universities should pretend racial inequality in the US education system doesn’t exist.

It is also the culmination of decades-long right-wing campaigns in the US against affirmative action policies, which commenced shortly after their inception. The key rhetorical tool is to turn the language of equal opportunity and affirmative action on its head. Thus, laws or policies designed to mitigate gender inequality are derided as “discriminatory against” men, while those targeted at reducing racial inequality are derided as “anti-white” discrimination.

The Voice is an affirmative action measure. It is intended to recognise the special role of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Australians in our history and also the unique and distressing reality for far too many within that community: chronic disadvantage. It would establish a consultative body of Indigenous representatives who have the right to consult with government about policies that may impact the Indigenous community. It is intended that such a consultation process will improve the effectiveness of policies and mitigate the disadvantages suffered by the community.

When Opposition Leader Peter Dutton attacks the Voice, he uses the same strategy invented by American conservatives. He has claimed that the Voice would create a country in which “some Australians are more equal than others”. As Bryant noted, Dutton borrowed directly from the US conservative playbook by invoking Martin Luther King when he stated: “The great progress of the 20th century’s civil rights movement was the push to eradicate difference – to judge others on the content of our character, not the colour of our skin.”

Similar rhetoric can be found across the different strands of the No campaign – particularly the mantra that the Voice will “divide us by race”.

The challenge for the Yes campaign is to confront and address the superficial allure of this rhetoric. Of course, all racial and ethnic groups deserve equal treatment, but to suggest that we live in such a world is a fantasy.

The reality is that the No campaign encourages Australians to lie to themselves; to deny reality. To pretend that the disturbing inequalities currently suffered by Australia’s Indigenous population – in life expectancy, health, education, income and rates of incarceration – don’t exist. To deny some of the most disturbing parts of our history. To pretend that Aboriginal Australians were not treated as non-citizens for many decades, were not deprived of the vote, were not separated from their families and were not subjected to massacres and violence.

It also asks us to eliminate from our minds that a special legal doctrine was created and used until 1992 – called “terra nullius” – which pretended that Aboriginal Australians were not occupying the land when white settlers colonised it and took it away from them. The No campaign tells us to forget about all of it and pretend it never happened or mattered.

Contrary to this dismal discourse, our history shows that Australia divided Indigenous Australians because of their race. The legacy of that history and policies that haven’t worked is that the Indigenous community does not enjoy equality of opportunity or outcome with non-Indigenous Australians. There is not a single non-Indigenous Australian clamouring for equal opportunity of life expectancy with Indigenous Australians.

If politicians respond to protracted inequality experienced by different groups by continuing to treat them as equals, they perpetuate that inequality. This reality can be seen in the chambers of federal parliament. The federal Liberal Party has adopted such a gender-blind approach to gender inequality in its parliamentary ranks, with the result that women are under-represented. By contrast, in 1994 the ALP adopted an affirmative action measure, a quota system in recognition of long-standing gender inequality, and women now constitute 53 per cent of its federal caucus.

The Voice provides a critical opportunity to confer constitutional recognition on Australia’s First Peoples and establish a modest consultative mechanism that seeks to close the gap in measures that divide us by race. It would be a tragedy to see the referendum brought down by regressive propaganda techniques imported from the US.

Josh Bornstein is a lawyer and commentator.

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