If there’s a slippery slope in the Voice referendum around treaty, we’re already slip, sliding away
The question will read, “A Proposed Law: to alter the Constitution to recognise the First Peoples of Australia by establishing an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice. Do you approve this proposed alteration?”
It requires a yes or no answer. A tick may suffice for a yes but a cross for a no won’t. The question of ticks and crosses has been met with howls of outrage from the No group but these rules were first implemented in 1988 when a four question ballot was put to the Australian people including an uncontroversial proposal to constitutionally recognise local government.
The confusion over whether affirmative ticks or negative crosses should be counted wasn’t an issue back then. The No advocates of the Voice should take heart that all four questions were defeated with a resounding no in all states with the affirmative ticks receiving less than 40 per cent of the vote across the country.
With the date of our new referendum now confirmed, the laziest response came from the Opposition leader, Peter Dutton.
“I don’t think people should be bullied into a position. If you don’t understand, if you don’t know the detail, if you don’t really have your questions answered in relation to the Voice,” he said.
“If you don’t know, vote no.”
This is akin to saying, if you can’t read, be happy you can look at the pictures.
Surely, the correct response is, if you don’t know, find out. The Australian people have six weeks to inform themselves as to what the Voice is.
Playing voters for mugs is a time-honoured tradition in politics but I’m not sure it works these days.
On Wednesday when the referendum date was announced, Dutton put his name to a Liberal Party fundraising email requesting donations from the rank and file to fight the Yes case.
“Can you help us with a donation today?” Dutton wrote in an email sent from Liberal Party headquarters.
Odd really, given that many members of the federal parliamentary Liberal Party, including Dutton’s former Indigenous Affairs spokesman, Julian Leeser, are actively campaigning for the Yes vote.
On the night the Matildas played England and with one eye on the play, I had an exchange with a mate on the Voice. He opposes it. I support it.
He’s an intelligent and thoughtful former member of the ADF and a former political staffer with the Liberal Party.
If the polls are accurate and the Voice is defeated and constitutional recognition of indigenous Australians is kicked down the road, I asked him where he thought this would leave the progress of reconciliation which I described as an open, weeping sore on national identity.
He agreed with my characterisation because it is impossible not to. On any metric you can think of – life expectancy, health and education, incarceration rates – the gap between indigenous Australians and all other Australians remains a national disgrace.
His reply was that there needed to be a focus away from indigenous culture with a push towards academic and economic achievement.
In other words, more paternalism. Back to square one.
But the craziest take on The Voice this week came from the other side of the no debate by none other than Lidia Thorpe. Senator Thorpe claims to represent what she calls the Progressive No campaign (she refers to the campaign led by Warren Mundine and Senator Jacinta Nampijinpa-Price as the “Racist No campaign”).
In an incoherent ramble on the Op-Ed pages of Nine Media published on Thursday, Thorpe referred to “the colonial parliament” deferring accountability on indigenous affairs to the Voice.
Um, I hate to remind the senator that she is a member of the “colonial parliament.” I would have thought the free business class airfares and the Comm car would have been dead giveaways.
Moving on, Thorpe claimed that indigenous Australians “do not want to be in your Constitution. Your Constitution was designed to erase our existence and for us to be recognised in it with a token Voice does not empower us, it is another step in the process of assimilation.
She hurled the collective possessives about in much the same way as the royal ‘we’. As a former Green - now independent, God only knows what constituency Thorpe represents.
Treaty and truth or her version of it, would be ignored, she claimed. Indeed, this is one of the No campaign’s pushes, alluded to by Peter Dutton. It’s thin edge of the wedge stuff - that most appalling of all logic-free arguments, that somehow the Voice will lead to the oppression of the general citizenry with land titles obliterated.
Remember the postal plebiscite or whatever the hell it was on same sex marriage? Remember how certain nay-sayers claimed that same sex marriage would sooner or later lead to people marrying their pets? Same thin edge of the wedge, slippery slope deal.
You see, almost every state and territory government in the country are currently in negotiations with indigenous elders over treaties. Right now. Thorpe should know this because she, wait for it… opposes the Victorian Government’s approach to a treaty where just two months ago, 7000 indigenous voters elected the First People’s Assembly of Victoria.
Western Australia has been slow off the mark but it does have a treaty, in fact the first treaty ever created in this nation’s history, if we don’t count John Batman’s land grab for a few trinkets in 1835.
In 2015, the Liberal Barnett Government came to an agreement with the Noongar people of the state’s southwest, to extinguish historical native title claims. The Noongar people received a $1.3bn payment along with detailed rights and responsibilities over resources management. The treaty recognises the Noongar people as the traditional owners of the south west of the state.
That was eight years ago. The sky did not fall in and indigenous Australians have not made claims over Perth resident’s backyards, pitching tents near the Hills hoists.
If there’s a slippery slope in the Voice referendum around treaty, we are already slip, sliding away.
We have had land reform in this country. It’s called the Native Title Act and it has been in existence for 30 years. Some of us of a certain vintage recall the scare campaign that ran against it back then.
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