One of the most significant things said this week about the referendum on an Indigenous voice to parliament didn’t come from Canberra.
It came from the handful of strong Gomeroi yinarr (women) who spoke up about a “divisive” meeting on their country in Tamworth, where they heard things that scared them deeply.
Amy Hammond was one of a dozen Gomeroi people silently protesting outside the forum, which featured speeches by active no campaigners Pauline Hanson, Barnaby Joyce, Alan Jones and Gary Johns.
Before the meeting, Hammond said, there were a few negative comments directed their way, but afterwards those comments escalated. One person said: “The whites will win.” Another said: “The dingos have been here longer than you.”
Gomeroi woman Kisani Upward said “there were such racist comments, such as saying there’s never been a civil war in Australia, that we’re not ‘real’ Blacks.”
“If it had been an information session, like they advertised, it would be a different story.
“Everyone’s entitled to a voice. And our voice keeps getting squashed.”
The views of “grassroots people” are often invoked whenever a politician wants to claim authority to speak on an issue. We tend not to meet these grassroots people, or hear from them directly, but we know what they think because the politicians tell us.
And so it was on Wednesday when the Liberals finally declared their opposition to a voice to parliament – not a “hard no”, the deputy leader, Sussan Ley, said, but a series of “yesses”. Unfortunately, they were “yesses” to proposals like symbolic recognition and legislated local and regional voices, which don’t appear in the Uluru statement from the heart and have already been rejected by Indigenous consultative processes at various points over the last decade.
Ley reflected on a trip to Alice Springs where she saw a family living on a concrete slab in the “dirt, the heat, the dust”. She was “very upset and angry” by how they were forced to live. A voice wasn’t going to help them.
When the opposition leader, Peter Dutton, announced he would actively campaign against the voice, he also invoked grassroots Aboriginal people he had met. On a visit to Alice Springs, there was “one Indigenous lady” who told him she did not want the voice.
“We have had a number of private conversations with Indigenous elders, and I feel very confident I must say in the position we have adopted,” Dutton said.
But as one member of the referendum working group said later, private conversations aren’t a good basis for public policy.
“Oh, that old chestnut,” Thomas Mayo said. “This is one of the reasons why we need to establish a voice. Here you have a person announcing a decision about a major proposal to improve Indigenous lives and he’s quoting anonymous people and saying that he’s been to that community once and he knows what Indigenous people need. It’s not transparent. It’s not genuine. It’s not informed properly.
“We’re sick of politicians playing these games with our lives.”
And the games are already having real-world consequences. After the Tamworth meeting, the national race discrimination commissioner, Chin Tan, said he was deeply concerned about statements at the forum that he described as “demeaning and based on misinformation”.
“Such comments can reinforce racist stereotypes and inflict harm,” Tan said.
He urged all those involved to be more respectful in future contributions to conversations around the voice referendum.
To be fair, Dutton also said he wants the debate to be civil. Dutton said he wants Indigenous women and children to feel safe in Australia and free from violence. But the meeting in Tamworth is evidence that not everyone with the microphone is going to stick to those rules.
The Gomeroi women who attended said they did not feel safe, and they are worried about how an active no campaign will affect their children’s safety.
“I’m extremely worried about other events that they’re going to be holding around the country.” Upward said. “It’s scary, the racism that they’re inciting.
“It wasn’t safe. It was not safe for our children to be there. It wasn’t a safe place for Aboriginal people to be in attendance.”
Now that the Coalition has finally declared its hand, we will see exactly how fair, respectful and safety-conscious of vulnerable Indigenous grassroots people the campaigners will show themselves to be.
