The Voice’s biggest mistake is selling itself as an antidote to history, not the future

Make history. You can’t ignore history. Be on the right side of history.

We’re at the point in the Voice referendum where it has little to do with the merits of a constitutional advisory body. That debate, once preoccupied with dry questions of remit and legal consequences, seems to have given way to a contest over grander narratives of national history and identity. In this, the specifics of the Voice aren’t particularly relevant. The Voice becomes a symbol that allows us to tell whatever Australian story we fancy.

The Voice becomes a symbol that allows us to tell whatever Australian story we fancy.Credit: Getty

Inevitably, it turns out there are different stories people fancy. That’s the problem when you try to anchor a political conversation in history. At that point, the debate isn’t about what happened in the past, but what we’re meant to do with it. And on that score, we’re seeing the Voice break down into three camps defined by three competing approaches to our history: one that wants to escape it, one that wants to bargain with it so we can feel better about what we have, and one that says we’re so ensnared in it that the only option is resistance. These responses aren’t even neatly divided along Indigenous/settler lines.

For the first approach, see Jacinta Nampijinpa Price’s insistence at the National Press Club last week that the only lingering effects of colonisation on Indigenous people were positive ones. Here it’s worth being precise. Price didn’t say – as some suggested – that colonisation itself was a good thing for Indigenous people. That might be Price’s view for all I know, but it’s telling that her stated claim actually avoids that question entirely. It chooses not to focus on history, but on the present as though the two are hardly connected.

“Indigenous Australians right now are experiencing the best that life can offer,” Price added on Monday. “We’re in a country now that absolutely wants what’s best for every single Australian and provides the opportunities to do so”. That is, whatever negative consequences of colonisation there were, they’re now over and we can leave them behind. This allows room for you to believe Indigenous people suffered at the onset of white settlement if you like. It therefore doesn’t require a total denial of history. It just declares we can move on from it. In this approach, while there might be things to lament or even regret, there’s nothing really to reconcile.

That story has a deceptively broad appeal. Obviously, it’s attractive to white Australians who are either uninterested in, or unashamed by the facts of white settlement. It might also appeal to first-generation migrants, who typically arrive seeking a fresh start and new possibilities. They are less likely to see Australia’s historical baggage as their own, and are a step removed from historic guilt because it wasn’t their forebears who dispossessed our First Nations. If it is true that migrants are inclined to vote No, this approach to history may help explain it.

The second approach regards Price’s perspective as simply absurd. The stolen generations saw families severed until as recently as the 1970s. The gap in living standards that refuses to close must surely have something to do with the trauma of that torn social fabric. History is therefore deeply implicated in the present. The trouble is it’s a history that goes to the very founding of the nation.

What to do with that? If you can’t deny or ignore that history, you can choose how heavily you bear it. You might, for example, say it makes Indigenous disadvantage so multifaceted, so devilishly complex, that a serious advisory body made up of the people most likely to understand those complexities is a really good idea. In that way, the Voice to parliament becomes an utterly pragmatic proposition that doesn’t require a much deeper philosophical commitment to anything more than good policymaking.

But once you make the Voice a grand historic moment, you’re asking people to see it as something deeper: a kind of ritual of national absolution. That risks limiting its appeal to those who regard colonisation as more than history, but as a stain on the nation’s soul. In that context, people vote Yes because they want to acknowledge the darker aspects of Australian history, but ultimately integrate them into the national story.

It proceeds from a sense of national guilt, but one that sits alongside a patriotism of sorts. The aim is therefore reconciliation, so a less guilty version of the settler state can emerge. The Voice helps erode the tension between white guilt and patriotism, while leaving things broadly intact. This is the way educated people – mostly but not exclusively white – tend to think. Hence, we’re seeing the Yes vote being slowly reduced to that cohort.

The thing is, you kind of need to believe in the national project to buy this. And that’s precisely the step the third approach to history is unwilling to make. For this group, prominent on X (formerly Twitter) and personified in Lidia Thorpe, the Voice is an unacceptable capitulation. It cedes legitimacy to the settler state.

It chooses accommodation when it should be choosing resistance, and consultation when it should be demanding power. It supplicates when it should seek to dominate. In this view, no bargain is to be struck with history. No white guilt is to be assuaged. You vote No to letting Australia off the hook.

To what end exactly, I’m not sure. A treaty? Perhaps. But a treaty is ultimately an accommodation that confers legitimacy on the settler state, too: it’s just a matter of on what terms. And it is hard to imagine this brand of politics, anchored in resistance and radical rejection, will suddenly agree on which terms make a bargain acceptable. My guess is it will continue to choose critique and resistance because that’s its only real mode. Meanwhile, there’s no knowing how many instinctive Yes voters it has convinced to turn away.

The Voice’s generosity is that it deliberately chooses reconciliation over antagonism. It buys in, rather than resists. That’s an attractive idea to most people, which is probably why initial support for the Voice was so high. To preserve that goodwill through a referendum campaign was always a heavy burden for the Voice to carry. To make the Voice an answer to both the past and the present is to add the full burden of history as well. And that, I fear, is too much for it to bear.

Waleed Aly is a regular columnist.

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