Just being Australian is good enough for us all

Malcolm Turnbull was right in principle, as well as politically, in decisively rejecting the proposal by the Referendum Council, arising from the Uluru Statement from indigenous leaders, for a constitutionally mandated national indigenous representative assembly to become a so-called “voice to parliament”.

This episode contains deep lessons for the nation. For the Libs, the main take-out is that they need to be much more upfront about the principles of constitutional change they will support or oppose.

Hand-wringing equivocation, the government’s position before the Turnbull decision, is no good. It connives in using taxpayers’ funds to build a big social movement against basic liberal values.

These social movements will seldom win enough support to pass a referendum, but they can inflict harm on Australia, on Aborigines and on the Libs. They create an atmosphere among urban elites that Liberal principles are illegitimate. Such an atmosphere encourages business, which is typ­ically unsophisticated in these issues, to go along with an agenda to avoid offending the zeitgeist, and in the worst case suffering boycotts. And in so far as the Libs are tempted to sell out their constitutional principles, they lose votes on the right to Cory Bernardi, Pauline Hanson and others.

Turnbull deserves no criticism here. He inherited constitutional recognition proposals from John Howard and Tony Abbott, and sensibly has managed them down.

The government’s statement on the latest proposal says it “does not believe such an addition to our national representative institutions is either desirable or capable of winning acceptance in a referendum. Our democracy is built on the foundation of all Australian citizens having equal civic rights — all being able to vote for, stand for and serve in either of the two chambers of our national parliament, the House of Representatives and the Senate.

“A constitutionally enshrined additional representative assem­bly for which only indigenous Aus­tralians could vote for or serve in is inconsistent with this fundamental principle. It would inevitably become seen as a third chamber of parliament. The Referendum Council noted the concerns that the proposed body would have insufficient power if its constitutional function was advisory only.”

The government’s main objection is a principled one. This proposal has now been explicitly and personally rejected by Malcolm Turnbull, Barnaby Joyce and Tony Abbott (and the best Lib backbenchers) — both wings of the Liberal Party and the Nationals. Warren Mundine also rejects the idea in principle.

I have changed from being a supporter of some constitutional recognition, through a preamble before the Constitution, to now on balance opposing any of the ideas on offer. The more radical ideas, such as a separate, constitutional body elected only by Aborigines, are much worse than the more modest ideas. The original thought was there would be a preamble, with no legal force, which would recognise that Aborigines were in Australia before European settlement, and affirm the nation’s esteem for Aboriginal culture and heritage.

I think it is good to affirm Aboriginal culture and heritage and I’m happy for governments to spend money supporting this. But I have become convinced there is no need to do this via the Constitution. Seeing Aboriginal advancement as a constitutional question is gravely mistaken.

It is wrong in principle because it means the state distinguishes the civic status of one Australian from another, whereas the universal civic identity we should all enjoy is citizenship.

It doesn’t matter that other nations such as the US or Canada may have other constitutional arrangements. No country is a model for Australia in indigenous policy or constitutional policy.

I have often written admiringly of the power that the creedal nature of US citizenship provides for integration. You become an American by desiring to be American. This is infinitely more beneficial than any special status in the constitution.

In our more low-key way, citizenship has played the same role in Australia.

The great thrust of liberalism throughout the 19th and 20th centuries has been to remove all distinctions or gradations of civic status based on ethnicity or race. To reintroduce such distinctions in the Constitution now is bad in principle and will yield increased trouble in the future.

One reason I moved away from cautious endorsement of recognition through a preamble back to the natural liberal position of wanting absolute civic equality for everybody is because it became clear that the advocates of introducing constitutional discrimination saw no end point to the process. Howard and Abbott sold recognition on the basis that it would complete the Constitution.

However, I could never get an advocate of constitutional recognition, in any of its mooted forms, to say on the record that there were no claims beyond this change. Many advocates wanted many other things — treaties, dual sovereignty, vetoes and much else.

That kind of endless agenda is utter madness. The Liberals were at grave fault because they would never identify their own bottom line.

I remember when Alan Tudge was parliamentary secretary to the prime minister, responsible for indigenous affairs, conducting an excruciating TV interview for 15 minutes in which he would not say in principle whether he was in favour of, or opposed to, a treaty. Yet opinion within the Liberal Party is overwhelmingly against a treaty, and for good reason.

The Liberals will never win any political debate if they start from pre-emptive cowardice. They will lose their own supporters, lose debates of principle and ultimately disappoint even the forces they try to appease. The battle of ideas is still a battle — sometimes you get bruised.

Noel Pearson’s reaction to Turnbull’s decision was contemptuous and unreasonable. He gratuitously labelled Turnbull weak and Abbott bitter and destructive, similar to a bizarre and dishonest rant he wrote against me after a column on this issue a couple of months ago. In reacting to the Turnbull decision Pearson defined anyone who disagreed with his radical ideas as being people lacking goodwill.

This is profoundly dishonest but I fear it is deliberate, an attempt to morally intimidate anyone who reasonably disagrees. This is a disturbing sign of some Aboriginal leadership increasingly going down the polarising and destructive path of American identity politics. If you oppose some aspect of Black Lives Matter rhetoric you are equated morally with slave owners. The object is to disallow legitimate debate. Whereas Martin Luther King’s liberalism envisaged everyone enjoying the same civic identity, today’s perversions of liberalism ask for endless differences of treatment based on identity.

The Liberals will be disproportionately damaged by these destructive tendencies if they don’t learn to argue the strong case for their essential liberal principles.