Anthony Albanese and the Labor government are trying desperately to separate the troubled proposal for an Indigenous voice to parliament from the even more controversial and politically damaging ideas of a treaty and truth-telling to rescue the referendum.
It is a dismal failure because, as Indigenous Australians Minister and the government face of the campaign, Linda Burney is incapable of the task.
The Prime Minister happily ridicules claims the voice referendum is ultimately about a treaty with Indigenous Australians and truth-telling, declaring that his wearing a “Voice, Treaty, Truth” T-shirt last year was just a tribute to Midnight Oil at a concert.
Albanese, despite previous statements and the text of the Uluru Statement, has denied the voice had anything to do with treaty because he could see the damage being done to his referendum campaign and the need to separate the two ideas.
Tanya Plibersek professionally parries Coalition questions about any possibility of a controversial WA-style cultural heritage regime and Jim Chalmers says a voice to parliament is “good economic policy”.
But Burney is struck dumb, incapable of shifting focus or moving off an outdated and backward-looking script unsuited for dynamic debate, although circumstances, expectations, claims and facts have all changed.
Her parliamentary responses to perfectly reasonable requests for information about either the voice or, more recently, Labor’s own $5.8m Makarrata commission – which she announced – to oversee treaty and truth-telling, is embarrassing.
Even parliamentary Speaker Milton Dick, who has been good as a parliamentary umpire and has shown great patience and sympathy for Burney when she is under pressure, had no choice but to call on her twice to be relevant to the question in Tuesday’s question time.
On both occasions Burney ignored the Speaker’s ruling and continued to read from the same page she uses for every answer – with every line inexplicably highlighted in yellow – which sets out the barest of outlines of what the voice will be and does not address the devastating linking of treaty to the voice.
When asked if the government still backed the Makarrata commission and what exactly it would do – Labor has already spent $900,000 of the allocated $5.8m on the commission, for which Burney has ministerial responsibility – she read from her unrelated, outdated but highlighted script.
This is about more than just a minister’s inability to justify the spending of almost a million dollars so far on a commission she announced because it continues the nexus between the voice to parliament, treaty and truth-telling.
Burney’s colleagues do their best to support and protect her where they can but her incapacity to frame a cogent political response is doing her and the cause of the Indigenous voice to parliament serious harm.
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