Indigenous voice to parliament: Abuse won’t win new Yes voters

If the referendum does fail, who among the Yes camp will take responsibility? There are many heirs to Hillary Clinton’s ‘deplorables’ strategy.

Marcia Langton will have to assume some of the blame if the referendum falls short, writes Janet Albrechtsen. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Martin Ollman

After the Bay of Pigs fiasco, John F. Kennedy was asked why information about the failed mission was not forthcoming from government. “Victory has a hundred fathers and defeat is an orphan,” the US president told the reporter.

Kennedy went on to say: “I am the responsible officer of the government.”

It is too early to say whether the voice referendum will succeed or fail. It is not too early, however, for Yes activists to start thinking about their positions. If the referendum does fail, who among them will take responsibility?

Certainly, Marcia Langton will have to assume some of the blame if the referendum falls short. Revelations this week that the high-profile Indigenous activist called Jacinta Nampijinpa Price and her mother Bess Price the “coloured help” for conservative think tanks and accused one in every five voters of “spewing racism” cannot have helped the Yes cause. When was the last time abuse won an argument?

It was equally unhelpful to the Yes side when Langton said, last year, that it would be unfortunate if “the debate sinks into a nasty, eugenicist, 19th-century style of debate about the superior race versus the inferior race”. No one has made any such claim.

Langton aside, there are many heirs to Hillary Clinton’s “deplorables” strategy.

Earlier this year Bret Walker, one of the country’s leading silks, described concerns about creating a body in an entirely new chapter in the Constitution as “racist”.

Late last year, Noel Pearson – another of the nation’s most high-profile Indigenous Yes advocates – said Jacinta Price’s strings were being pulled by white people. He said Price had her finger on the trigger of a gun loaded with bullets fashioned by white people. He accused Price of “punching down on other black fellas”.

This rank condescension towards an Indigenous woman who has different views to him has surely not enhanced Pearson’s reputation or helped the Yes campaign. No wonder many Australians are wondering how a new bureaucracy will in any way unite the country.

It is troubling that so many apparently smart people have not learned that being dismissive, rude and hectoring towards people with different views backfires. These Yes activists already have firm Yes voters on side. What part of their well-educated brain informs them that dividing people with offensive epithets will win over new Yes voters?

So, I say to my friend and Inquirer colleague Chris Kenny that my deep concerns about inserting a new chapter in the Constitution does not make me “flint-hearted”. It means only that I disagree with him about the legal, political and social consequences of this new body.

For decades, many on the left have made the mistake of treating critics as immoral rather than wrong. It is one of many polarising forces that has made politics utterly toxic, fuelling the rise of Donald Trump and other populists on the right.

Why on earth can’t we simply disagree rather than having wicked moral aspersions cast on our innermost characters?

Along with Pearson and Langton, other Yes activists should reflect on whether their model was entirely at odds with a democracy founded on equality. Their desire for better outcomes for the most vulnerable Indigenous people is laudable. But polls suggest they are not convincing enough Australians that a new bureaucracy, with no responsibilities but only rights to demand things, can alter the status quo of misery and dysfunction. If solutions are obvious then why haven’t they been tried? Could the hurdle be the mindset of so many Indigenous activists who, in all likelihood, will run this new bureaucracy?

Will the Prime Minister take any responsibility if the referendum fails? Will Anthony Albanese understand that Australians deserved better than a campaign that, from the start, was hamstrung by activists who would brook no compromise, and was laced in deception and emotion until the end?

Will the Prime Minister admit that, even as a supporter of a voice for Indigenous people, he should have been more arm’s-length, objective and curious about the voice model that activists insisted on putting to the Australian people?

Will Albanese recognise that a failed referendum, if that comes to pass, has nothing to do with racism but everything to do with maintaining the fabric of a society premised on equal civic rights for every person regardless of race, creed, sex, or time of arrival on our land? Will the political animal inside Albanese understand that, as he stood teary-eyed at the Garma Festival in May last year, millions of Australian households were already experiencing eye-watering cost-of-living pressures? When Albanese recommitted to the Uluru Statement from the Heart at Garma this year, living costs were at record highs, with most Australians listing it as the top priority for the federal government.

Whether the referendum succeeds or fails, there should be a reckoning for corporate Australia. Will pontificating directors and chief executives go back to the drawing board to determine their real purpose – to act in the interests of all shareholders, workers and customers? Patently, it is not their role to hector these constituen­cies about saying Yes to a highly contestable constitutional change.

Will these preachers for the voice realise that they turned the issue into the perfect vehicle for Australians to vent their frustration about everything that’s wrong with modern wokery?

Long before the voice was on the national agenda, too many causes traded on deception and dishonesty, pressing beloved phrases and motherhood statements into the service of ideological objectives. To take one example, words such as inclusiveness and tolerance are not all they’re cracked up to be in the hands of the censoriously woke. Just ask JK Rowling.

Arguments that the voice is a modest proposal and it is being polite to listen to Indigenous Australians fell flat for similar reasons. There is nothing modest about inserting a new chapter in the Constitution – alongside the one about the judiciary, the parliament and the executive. Politeness is not a reason to alter our system of governance. In any case, Pearson and Langton undermined the authenticity around this call to politeness.

Just as nattering about diversity and inclusion – especially within the big-city headquarters of the taxpayer-funded ABC – means anything other than intellectual diversity, so it came to pass among the Yes brigade.

The treatment of Price and Warren Mundine by so many Yes activists in public and behind the scenes revealed that not all Indigenous people deserve to be heard, let alone listened to politely. Those who worked behind the scenes are well known; they know what they have done to stifle debate and belittle those Indigenous people who didn’t join the Yes side.

The voice captured another common feature of 21st-century wokeness, with its focus on a class of people, to the exclusion of others, showing no interest whatsoever in recognising individual strengths and weaknesses. That translated into a stubborn focus on rights – what can the majority do for this group.

For all of Pearson’s minute-to-midnight return to responsibility, it’s hard to believe that a delicate and necessary balancing act of rights and responsibilities will be pursued by a new elite bureaucracy when none has shown any interest in responsibility over the past 50 years of Indigenous policy­making.

Another feature of modern wokery is the propensity to seek a radical change under cover of warm words. One recent example in the legal system involves talk about being victim-centric while trying to undermine the presumption of innocence.

A similar tactic is being used by voice activists.

Understandably, most people more concerned about cost-of-living and other daily issues have not read the Uluru statement, let alone the swath of academic writings that informs that statement and the voice model.

Just below the surface of the vibe is a radical movement devoted to treaty, sovereignty, reparations. The voice is the necessary first step to giving a small group of Indigenous people the position, boosted by their presence in the Constitution, to make those demands. The co-sovereignty movement has been driven by influential legal academics in Australia, not dissimilar to the critical rights theory originating among high-profile legal academics in the US.

It made sense for Indigenous and legal activists to try to hide this agenda given that many Australians may regard dividing the country with treaties, dual sovereignty and reparations as anathema to our democracy and our governance.

Failure may be an orphan but, if it comes to pass, many people will deserve blame for more than just a lost referendum. Even if the referendum wins, the conduct of many Yes activists has done little to unite the country.