A world of division awaits if indigenous referendum succeeds

The Australian Constitution should be colour blind, race blind and heritage blind. Citizenship should be universal and all encompassing as the only basis on which full rights are conferred. These ideas are so obvious it’s surprising they need to be defended.

The great success of Western societies since World War II has been in wiping out the idea of racial, ethnic or heritage-based entitlements or prohibitions.

Recently a number of Western societies have been heading down a destructive and dangerous road, reinstituting identity politics at the heart of civic society.

These days this impetus is seldom linked directly to race but to some other term, functionally coterminous with race but providing some disguise, such as culture, ethnicity or heritage, or in some societies religion.

In Australia these dynamics play out as a push for constitutional recognition for Abor­igines and to create an Aboriginal consultative body within the Constitution. These are terrible ideas that strike against basic liberal principles. I oppose them not because I am a conservative but because I am a liberal.

I have always hated racism. A person’s race is the last thing I want to know. It is the least interesting or useful bit of information you can provide me. It is because I want our government to have no business distinguishing between Australians on the basis of race that I oppose these propositions. But there is a severe danger that anyone defending liberal principles will be labelled a racist.

On these issues I agree with the overall arguments put by Andrew Bolt, the News Corp Australia columnist. I don’t agree with him on every point and I would use different words from him. But the principles of non-discrimination that he is arguing are liberal principles that are precious.

There is an unhealthy and undemocratic attempt to preclude debate on these matters.

First, the language is so dishonest. Slogans around the Recognise campaign say it is an attempt to include Aborigines in the Constitution. Aborigines are already included in the Constitution. Every citizen is fully included in the Constitution. An ethnic Hmong hill tribesman from Laos who is an Australian citizen is every bit as much an Australian citizen as me or any other Australian citizen. The moment we introduce classes of citizenship we are entering extraordinarily dangerous territory.

Marcia Langton represents the zeitgeist when she says that if a no case is even included in the ref­erendum it will fail, and she would rather the referendum were not put.

Yet if there is not a no case, or if the yes case receives government funding and the no case does not, this would be wicked in principle and profoundly undemocratic.

Senator Cory Bernardi has done the nation a service by saying he would vote against referendum legislation to ensure there is a no case.

Bernardi has no prospect of frontbench promotion in the near future and has carved an identity as a contrarian. But many people in the Coalition have profound reservations about this issue. I would not be surprised if there were frontbench resignations from the government if an expansive referendum proposal is put.

I have been a bit shocked at the silence of liberals in the Liberal Party, unwilling publicly to defend basic constitutional and political principles.

This is partly a result of another debating trick by those who would censor debate. Because no specific proposal has yet been finalised, it is held that anyone who opposes it now is displaying narrow-mindedness because it ultimately might be a proposal they could live with.

This is grievously dishonest, as though mounting a case, in principle, for civic equality that ignores race, ethnicity and heritage, which has always been the liberal position, is intrinsically unreasonable.

If a proposed referendum cannot withstand sustained scrutiny and a serious no case, then it cannot withstand normal democratic procedures and it does not deserve to succeed.

The countries that most obsess about identity and symbolism today are the countries that are least successful.

This referendum would not complete the Constitution but open the way to a world of division. Those activists who want to challenge undivided Australian sovereignty, and ultimately have a treaty between the Australian nation and the Aboriginal nation, a profoundly divisive and illiberal idea, are being sold this referendum on the basis that it is a way-station that brings divided sovereignty closer.

I am not part of the anti-­Aboriginal brigade in Australian life. Historically, Aborigines suffered terrible injustices. I don’t think I have ever written a single word diminishing any aspect of Aboriginal culture. I want nothing but success for Aboriginal Australians. Proponents of this referendum — and they are apparently not narrow-minded for backing it even though no formal proposal exists — mount an unconvincing and contradictory case.

They say that it will have no consequences for the way Australia is governed and that activist judges will not be able to misuse it for judicial activism. They then say it will have enormous symbolic significance. Yet if it has no practical effect it is not worth doing.

If it does change our way of government it is a perilous misstep. And symbolism, which we have in spades already, has been a dry gully in Aboriginal policy.

There are race-related elements of the existing Constitution. But they are not used in any negative way. You could remove the race power and replace it with the power to make policy regarding indigenous people if you like. But many good constitutions around the world contain anachronistic clauses that the great experience of lived government has decided to ignore. To live with meaningless anachronisms that truly have no practical effect is a small price to pay compared with the shocking political disaster of positively embracing racial, ethnic or heritage-based rights and obligations in a new measure.

If it would be useful to have a new consultative body for Aboriginal policy we should create one, but not in the Constitution.

An elected body in the Constitution would mean some Australians vote for one parliament and some for two, based on their heritage. Is it really necessary to spell out why this is such a bad and dangerous road?

The idea of racial inheritance has a long and horrible pedigree in Western life. For hundreds of years many Christians thought that the Jews of today carried a collective guilt for the killing of Jesus. This was such a serious and mainstream belief that the Second Vatican Council of the Catholic Church felt obliged to denounce it explicitly and trenchantly.

Historical injustice cannot be righted by unequal constitutional treatment today.

I do not want an Australian government to have to work out anybody’s identity beyond the magnificent identity of citizenship. Liberalism on race is out of fashion today, but it is still the best guide to principle and to policy.