Australia is not ready for the Indigenous Voice to Parliament, Peter Dutton declared on Thursday.
The Opposition Leader has this week raised questions about every conceivable detail in the name of making it so.
Will the advisory body present its views to the Reserve Bank? What about Centrelink? And Melbourne’s cross-city bypass?
Mr Dutton is every bit the details man and his frontbench follows his example.
Shadow attorney-general Michaelia Cash made no fewer than 200 parliamentary contributions on one day this sitting fortnight, the Hansard shows, shortly before the bill enabling the referendum vote on the Voice to be held passed the upper house.
She did not ask about whether the Voice would make representations to the federal government’s Seafarers Safety, Rehabilitation and Compensation Authority – but it’s only June.
Turning off
On Thursday, Mr Dutton claimed that Prime Minister Anthony Albanese was feeling pessimistic about whether the referendum would pass and suggested they sit down to work on a compromise.
“They’re deliberately keeping details from the Australian public,” he said. “I think it’s why people are continuing to really turn off when they hear about the Voice.”
This week ministers continued to deflect the questions, such as whether the Voice would ever make statements about changing the date of Australia Day, so as not to excite Mr Dutton’s enthusiasm.
Former prime minister Malcolm Turnbull did not feel so encumbered.
“So what?” he asked.
“The Voice will be able to express its opinion on just about any public policy issue, because every one of them, one way or the other, impacts on Indigenous Australians.
“Where they will carry weight, and should, is on matters directly or particularly relating to Indigenous Australians.
“Of course the Voice will have a view on Australia Day and it would be very surprising if its view was not to move the date.”
An advisory body
The proposed amendment to the Constitution, going to a vote later this year, would oblige neither MPs nor government departments to listen to the Voice, which is an advisory body.
It would be a brave thing to dismiss its advice out of hand, Mr Albanese has said.
But there is no compulsion to follow it.
During a talkback radio appearance on Thursday, the Opposition Leader even admitted as much.
Mr Dutton and members of his frontbench do not usually fully explore what might happen if the Voice were to choose to offer its advice to this litany of government entities.
But with his favourite interviewer, Ray Hadley, the Opposition Leader went beyond innuendo and laid out the nightmare scenario in chilling detail.
“Sure, they may not have a veto over policy,” he said.
“But they certainly have an implied right to be heard, and the High Court will find that they – having been given a right to be heard – need to be properly considered.”
Earlier this week, Prime Minister Albanese suggested that Mr Dutton’s attacks on the Voice might be borrowed from an old script.
In the lead-up to the 2008 apology to the Stolen Generations (which he boycotted), Mr Dutton pressed the government for new details while using those in the public domain to warn saying sorry could lead to $10 billion in wrongful compensation pay outs.
“I think the Australian people deserve to know the full details of the implications of this policy including the financial ones,” Mr Dutton said.
“It would beggar belief that they would be contemplating an apology that could open the government up to serious damages claims without knowing what those claims would be.”
Sky’s the limit
The Minister for Indigenous Australians, Linda Burney, has accused Mr Dutton of peddling misinformation.
Luckily for her, Sky News Australia is about to roll out a public information campaign.
Rupert Murdoch’s cable news (and opinion) venture is creating a 24/7 channel dedicated solely to coverage of the referendum, The Financial Review has reported.
In a deeply bewildering appearance on that network on Thursday, the former speaker of the House of Representatives, Andrew Wallace, argued that the Voice would become supremely powerful merely because it would be in the Constitution.
That could, he said, even mean exercising authority over the Parliament (which is also in the Constitution and to which the Voice would be explicitly subordinate).
“You can’t out-legislate the Constitution,” he said.
The referendum will be held between October and December.
