Indigenous voice to parliament will shatter spirit and progress of 1967, says Nyunggai Warren Mundine
In 1967, the Australian people voted resoundingly for all Australians to be treated equally under the Constitution. The 1967 referendum brought an end to the state and territory racial segregation regimes and to the control of Aboriginal people by their “protection boards”, mission managers and bureaucrats who dictated every facet of Aboriginal people’s lives.
Anthony Albanese’s Indigenous voice to parliament will reverse the 1967 referendum. Segregation will be back. The voice will be like a great big protection board embedded in the Constitution, overseeing a vast array of constitutionally guarded mission managers and bureaucrats.
Every Australian should understand the details of the voice before they vote on whether to overturn the 1967 referendum.
The voice will have a constitutional right to make representations to the executive government on matters relating to Indigenous people. And the Prime Minister has promised: “The commonwealth parliament and executive government will need to seek written advice from the voice early in the development of proposed laws and policies”.
The executive includes cabinet and every minister, department, public servant, independent statutory office and agency at a federal level and, indirectly, at the Northern Territory and ACT levels as well since the entire government apparatus of the territories exists under commonwealth legislation and oversight.
Matters relating to Indigenous people include matters relating to every Australian. This has been confirmed by three members of the Constitutional Expert Group for the voice – Greg Craven, Megan Davis and Noel Pearson. Davis has said it will have a right to speak to the vast array of agencies, naming as examples Centrelink, the Great Barrier Marine Park Authority, the Ombudsman, and even the Reserve Bank.
Craven, Pearson and Davis have given examples of matters the voice will have the right to speak on as including tax, welfare, education, environment, climate, criminal law, conduct of elections, submarines, parking tickets and interest rates. Pearson has said there’s “hardly any subject matter” on which the voice won’t want a say. And parliament cannot alter or limit that. To quote Davis: “It can’t shut the voice up.” It’s the voice to everyone on everything.
Craven has described Albanese’s voice as a “fatally flawed” proposal that “absolutely guarantees judicial intervention”. He has now quit the Constitutional Expert Group.
The government made a last-ditch effort to frame the voice as more limited in the second reading speech of the bill, which will function as an explanatory document to aid future constitutional interpretation. But the devil is in the detail.
For example, the second reading speech lists two types of matters the voice may make representations on – those specific to Indigenous people and those affecting all Australians but which affect Indigenous people differently. These are set out very prominently in bullet points, so you might miss the word “include” that comes before them. It’s no limitation. And it’s no accident that Albanese wants you to think it’s a limitation.
Unless they want to risk their decisions or policies being overturned by the courts, or at least years of litigation, every commonwealth minister, public servant and agency will need to worry about what a group of unelected people think. Not elected by the Australian people. And not even elected by Aboriginal people; but appointed by consensus of local Aboriginal community groups whose memberships makes up a tiny, tiny fraction of Aborigines.
It’s very clear the voice will be a radical, powerful body that the full apparatus of the commonwealth government will need to cower to, be engaged with or worry about before doing anything.
What’s not been made clear are the details of the voice’s design and operations. Albanese doesn’t want to reveal this until after Australians have agreed to it in the first place. But the details have been hiding in plain sight in the 2021 Indigenous Voice Co-design Process Report to the Australian government by Tom Calma and Marcia Langton.
The report makes for turgid – and terrifying – reading. Over the past few weeks, I’ve distilled what the voice will be, how Australia’s system of government will be transformed if Albanese has his way, and how on earth we got to this point in the first place.
But the one, overarching message that screams out from the report is that voice will not just be a few blackfellas having a talkfest in Canberra who no one needs to listen to.
No one should be under any illusions that the voice is just some nice thing to do for Aboriginal people that they’ll never have to think about again. Every Australian will be impacted every day by what the voice has to say. Every Australian will be dictated to by this new protection board. If the voice referendum succeeds, it won’t just be blackfellas back on the mission.
Australia will become one, giant mission. And Aboriginal people will be doubly disadvantaged.
Nyunggai Warren Mundine is director, Indigenous Forum, Centre for Independent Studies, and president of Recognise a Better Way. Acknowledgments to Vicki Grieves Williams, academic, historian and Warraimaay woman for her research and contribution to this series of articles.
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