Some of the most shameful episodes in Australian politics have involved the leveraging of fear and prejudice for base partisan advantage, and it is happening again in the desperate Coalition campaign to destroy the Voice referendum.
This is both regrettable and reprehensible.
Opposition Leader Peter Dutton has chosen to use the tragic breakdown of social cohesion in Alice Springs as a major reason why Indigenous Australians should not be given the sort of recognition in the Constitution that would give them a permanent say on matters that affect them.
Mr Dutton says he is all for recognition of the special place First Nations people hold in the history of this island continent we have shared with them for just over 250 of the past 60,000 years, but not the acknowledgement they seek through the Uluru Statement from the Heart.
Mr Dutton ignores the fact the 1999 referendum for symbolic recognition in the Constitution’s preamble was comprehensively rejected by the people and again by Indigenous people at the Uluru convention in 2018.
It appears the Liberal leader only wants to give Aboriginal people recognition on his terms. What else can be drawn from his unsubstantiated accusations that child sexual abuse among Aboriginal communities in the Northern Territory is “accepted as normal practice”?
Lip service
Mr Dutton plays lip service to the sensitivities of the Uluru Statement while at the same time trashing the legitimacy its authors have to any claim of a dignified unique place in our nation that gives them constitutional agency.
He says: “In modern Australia we respect cultural sensitivities and Indigenous connection to country, but the rights of the child are above culture and sensitivities.”
The resonances here with the disgraceful children overboard episode in the 2001 election are stark.
Then prime minister John Howard seized on false reports that refugee parents – desperate to have the navy rescue them and bring them to the safe haven of Australia – threw their children overboard.
Mr Howard said: “Anybody who would endanger the lives of their children in that kind of way, I find hard to accept. I certainly don’t want people of that type in Australia. I really don’t.”
Mr Dutton, 22 years later, has the same purpose in the context of a campaign that has as much to do with saving his political hide as anything else.
It is not about immediately winning an election but it is about denying his political opponent, the Prime Minister, a win in the hope of convincing his party he is an effective campaigner they should stick with.
It is as base as that, never mind that all Mr Albanese is doing is progressing an exercise initiated by his Liberal predecessors and asked for by First Nations people.
As The Saturday Paper put it, Mr Dutton is using a racist trope to say: “These people are not like you, these people hurt children. In the context of the Voice, it says: These people can’t be trusted with their own babies, why should they have a say in policy?”
Aboriginal leaders in the Northern Territory are reminded of similar baseless claims made by John Howard and his ministers in 2007 to launch the National Emergency Response, sending in the army to protect children in remote communities from paedophile rings that were found not to exist.
Don’t assume
Mr Dutton’s Coalition colleague, Senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price, was similarly unable to substantiate her claims of “rampant sexual abuse” beyond anecdotal evidence and the “assumption” that worried foster parents and others had complied with territory criminal law and reported their concerns.
The Territory government and its agencies have heard nothing from either politician.
Senator Price, in something of a car-crash interview on Insiders, appeared to run arguments that undermined Mr Dutton’s demonising of the Voice as a “Canberra Voice”.
The Senator said she would support a referendum that would give Canberra sole control of running child protection in the NT – one Canberra voice that is apparently a good idea.
At the same time, she argued that local communities aren’t being listened to or heard and demanded their empowerment – but somehow without new structures or a clear path for access to the federal government that happens to be based in Canberra.
Just for the record
Ms Price, like Mr Dutton, is playing brazen politics hoping no one will remember the Coalition’s record in government.
She was an Alice Springs councillor for six years and for a year deputy mayor that coincided with the period when the Liberals were in power and the statistics for child abuse – only 6 per cent of it sexual – showed the NT with the worst record of all Australian jurisdictions.
In 2019, she ran against Labor’s Warren Snowden for the seat of Lingiari and was comprehensively rejected by the people of Alice Springs, and elsewhere in the electorate.
Mr Dutton was a senior minister in the Coalition governments and for a while had charge of the Australian Federal Police, but there is no record of his current concerns when that government was ripping $500 million out of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander community services and another $80 million from Aboriginal Child and Family Centres.
Former Liberal MP Pat Farmer, as he set off on his 14,000-kilometre run around Australia to Uluru to support the Voice, said, “it’s a no brainer”; and young people can’t understand why “we’re even having a referendum on the issue – it should just naturally be in place already”.
Paul Bongiorno AM is a veteran of the Canberra Press Gallery, with more than 40 years’ experience covering Australian politics
