Mundine’s persuasive blow knocks out Pearson’s case

Warren Mundine has made a magnificent and devastating intervention in the debate on a ­referendum for indigenous recognition in the Constitution. He has surely destroyed any prospect of the Noel Pearson model of constitutional change getting approved.

In describing Pearson’s proposal for a separate declaration on indigenous recognition, as well as the creation within the Constitution of a special indigenous body that must be consulted on all legislation that affects indigenous people, as the most radical ever proposed for a referendum, as very dangerous and as entering bizarre territory, Mundine has surely ensured this option is dead.

I write these words with something of a heavy heart for I have the greatest admiration for Pearson as a leader and an intellectual. But I agree with Mundine that Pearson’s proposals are dangerous, unpredictable in their consequences and offend basic liberal principles.

Mundine has offered a splendid, historic reassertion of basic liberalism in racial and constitutional matters. He did this in a conversation with my colleague Chris Kenny on Sky TV last Sunday night. With the honourable exception of The Australian, his historic comments have been grotesquely unreported. I would urge everyone to Google these comments and a sensible publisher could do the nation a great service by reproducing the transcript.

When asked about the idea of a special constitutional body to advise on legislation affecting Aborigines, Mundine magnificently declared: “I have a legislative body already. It’s called the NSW parliament, it’s called the commonwealth parliament. I get the chance to vote in elections for those parliaments that make decisions. We’ve had more Aborigines going into state and federal parliament than ever before.”

Mundine, the chairman of the Prime Minister’s Indigenous Advisory Council, also said: “Either we’re all equal under the Constitution or we’re not.”

He classified Pearson’s proposal as the most radical of any question ever put to a referendum, though of course there is no decision yet that Pearson’s proposal will be put to a referendum. Parliamentary secretary Alan Tudge, on this page today, seems to suggest the Abbott government, having indulged some pretty weird and wild fancies, is moving back to a sensible minimalism, which is the only proposition that would have any chance of success.

Mundine argues, incontrovertibly, that the objective has been to get race out of the Constitution and that the Pearson proposal would put race back into the Constitution. He describes the idea not only as radical but very dangerous, weird and unpredictable in its consequences. Mundine has used plain, hard, commonsense language to cut through all the falderal and obfuscations of all the academics and specialists caught up in the debate.

Showing a much better appreciation than anyone else of how referendums are lost, Mundine compares the present moment with the lead-up to the republic referendum in 1999. The recognition crowd is presently following the textbook instructions on how to lose a referendum.

The play goes like this. Under the rubric of consultation, the smallest group of specialists and activists with the most emotional investment in the most ambitious/extreme outcome spends an inordinate amount of time refining the question to be asked. The proposal becomes ever more exotic and rarefied and embodies all manner of negotiated compromises from within the elite activist circles. A team of good-hearted secular, and sometimes even religious, priests is called in to ­deliver benedictions, and the outcome is agreed.

The problem is at this stage the community as a whole has at best a flickering, passing awareness even that anything is under consideration, much less of all the internal and esoteric wrangling about the specific model. At this moment the activists and their elite supporters most closely resemble a medieval papal office desperately trying to suppress heresy.

They try to create the impression the result is inevitable and anyone who disagrees is motivated by bad faith, or in this case even sometimes racism. This is dishonest and illustrates not that the proponents represent the mainstream, but that they have glass jaws. Their position is so weak it cannot sustain serious scrutiny and debate. These tactics will be more difficult to deploy following Mundine’s brave intervention. Mundine used language of such straightforward simplicity and logical strength it would have done George Orwell proud.

If an expansive proposal does get to a referendum, with any provision for a new Aboriginal body in the Constitution, all the “no” case would have to do is print at the top of their leaflet Mundine’s declaration that it is the most radical referendum proposal of all, that it is dangerous and strange, and that it needlessly, indeed harmfully, reintroduces race into the Constitution, when the thrust of liberal principle, and liberal reform, is to remove race from the Constitution.

If you cannot sell this proposal to Warren Mundine, you can’t sell it to middle Australia.

A government distrustful of democracy could try to rig the process. It could provide lavish funding to bodies supporting a “yes” case no matter what the question, but when it comes to the formal referendum fund neither the “yes” nor the “no” case. The Abbott government should not try any tricky manoeuvres. If this is a good change, then it can withstand full scrutiny including through a “no” case funded equally to a “yes” case. Abbott has in the past supported equal funding in referendum questions.

And of course, as Mundine argues, the referendum really has nothing to do with the key issues confronting Aborigines.

“Everyone’s confusing constitutional change with fixing everything,” he says. The real priorities, he argues, are jobs, education, school attendance rates, business formation, incarceration rates, crimes against women and children. None of these requires constitutional change. The truth is, though Mundine doesn’t go quite this far, the more the agenda of ever greater symbolism is ­embraced, the more Aboriginal leaders will be convinced advancement for Aborigines lies in ever more symbolism. This is a sterile and dangerous road.

Mundine also understands land rights better than most. They came about because of common law recognition of continuous land tenure by specific groups of people. They neither need nor imply constitutional change.

Mundine’s comments will not make him popular with some Aboriginal leaders. They took real courage. They are a magnificent reassertion of the universality of liberal principles. The case against a new racial body, which implies racial separateness, is a liberal case. Australians owe Mundine a great deal.