Let’s hear it for equality instead of a voice

Indigenous Australians Minister Linda Burney. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Martin Ollman

If you think the race-based voice will be divisive, just wait until it starts negotiating a treaty to rip apart a nation that we’ve collectively spent generations in trying to unite. As Indigenous Australians Minister Linda Burney was forced to concede recently, a referendum that fails will set back the cause of reconciliation. And she’s right. But that’s why a referendum doomed to fail should not be put up, rather than, as Burney intended, trying to use the prospect of failure as a weapon to shame Australians into supporting the indefensible.

Already the idea that the voice will merely be an advisory body on legislation has been shown up as a lie. The Prime Minister has conceded only a “brave” government would go against its recommendations, meaning it will have a virtual veto over what the government and parliament does. But it’s Burney who has belled the cat on its real work with her admission last weekend that the voice would play a leading role in any negotiations for a treaty or series of treaties between the commonwealth and Australia’s 500-plus Indigenous tribes or clans. This is already happening in Victoria, which has created a First Peoples’ Assembly to be a voice to government and to “design a framework for future treaty negotiations”. The assembly was set up in 2019, although fewer than 8 per cent of Victoria’s 30,000 eligible Indigenous voters cast a vote.

Then, last year, the Andrews government set up a “truth-telling inquiry” to examine the “ongoing effects of colonisation” on Indigenous Victorians. And in August, at the behest of the assembly, the government established a Treaty Authority to “address the racist legacy of invasion” to be funded to the tune of about $20m a year until a statewide treaty is achieved, plus an extra $65m tipped in last month in a pre-election push.

Because the 2017 Uluru Statement from the Heart didn’t just call for a constitutionally entrenched Indigenous voice to the parliament, but also for “truth-telling about our history” and for treaties “between governments and First Nations”, and because what happens in Victoria tends to be the template for other Labor governments, it’s almost certain any federal voice would follow the same pattern. Only a national voice, unlike its Victorian counterpart, would be entrenched in the Constitution, making it effectively impossible to abolish. Once something is in the Constitution, it’s beyond the ordinary reach of our democracy because no parliament can repeal it and no government can ignore it. The precise meaning of anything that’s entrenched in the Constitution is simply what the High Court says it is: seven unelected judges accountable only to their own professionalism, unless, of course, one constitutional change is trumped by a further one.

So, here’s the question: do we really want the relationship between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australia, including the establishment of treaties, the rewriting of history, and eventually reparations for dispossession – because according to the Uluru Statement sovereignty “has never been ceded or extinguished” – to be more in the hands of the High Court than the parliament? If this is too important to be decided by judges, then any Indigenous voice should certainly be left out of the Constitution.

The almost unavoidable consequence of establishing a constitutionally entrenched entity that only Indigenous people can vote for, that only Indigenous people can run for, and that deals with whatever impacts Indigenous people, which is everything, is a form of co-governance.

This is already happening in New Zealand, where the Maori are about 15 per cent of the population and where the 1840 Treaty of Waitangi has always been part of the founding compact.

Only in our case, co-governance would mean that everything our government does for 100 per cent of the population would have to be negotiated with the representatives of just 4 per cent of the population.

Liberal democracy rests upon the equality of citizens. Rich or poor, old or young, male or female, immigrant or native born, religious or not, all have equal standing to vote, equal responsibilities to contribute, and equal rights before the law. This was the principle that human rights campaigners fought for generations to achieve; and finally did, in countries such as ours, over the course of the past century. Now though, if the voice proponents have their way, the old discriminatory hierarchies will be replaced by a new one based on how long a citizen’s ancestors have been in Australia. It would upend decades of multiculturalism that’s told us we are Australian not by dint of time here, but by our willingness to join the team.

Voice proponents say it’s simply a matter of courtesy. We need a voice to ensure Indigenous people are properly consulted over decisions affecting them. But does anyone really think there’s not an abundance of consultation already, especially now there are 11 individual Indigenous voices in parliament ranging from Lydia Thorpe to Jacinta Nampijinpa Price? Already we can see how much their views differ, as they do among non-Indigenous MPs, but somehow this voice will all just agree? It’s racially offensive.

With $2 trillion a year in climate reparations now being demanded of richer countries by poorer ones, the supposed victims of the global West’s environmental vandalism, it’s hard to imagine any voice not soon insisting upon reparations for the Indigenous people dispossessed by settlement. Already federal spending on Indigenous citizens is roughly twice that for everyone else with an aggregate of $30bn a year spent on about 500,000 Aboriginal Australians, as confirmed by the Productivity Commission.

Naturally, the Albanese government will deny that the voice would have any such consequences. But it won’t be up to it or its elected successors. If the voice demands treaties or makes reparations claims, it will be up to the High Court to decide whether the government or the parliament has adequately dealt with them. And make demands the voice most assuredly will.

While it’s conventional wisdom that referendums fail without clear bipartisan support, don’t be so sure on this one. The government will try to shame people into voting yes on the basis that anything else is somehow disrespectful to Indigenous people and perhaps even racist. There will be massive funding for the Yes case from woke public companies and billionaires eager for the public acclaim they think it will bring. Plus, the indications are that the government won’t fund either the Yes or the No campaigns, preferring to fund instead, a supposedly neutral education campaign. This will be end up being as neutral as the government’s recent decision to give tax deductibility for donations to bodies in favour of Indigenous constitutional recog­nition but not those against.

This will leave the No case scrabbling for support from those quiet Australians who could be bothered to send in their modest donations to defend the system that has served us well for over a century and that has made us less racist than ever before and less racist than almost any other country on earth. I can’t think of anything we could do to ourselves that would damage our country more than dividing ourselves by race, and entrenching that division in our founding document.