Well, looks like we’re not going to stop talking about the Voice to Parliament after all. There’s no way to stop, really. Some First Nations commentators and activists have suggested white people stop writing or speaking about it, but what good does that do? Those opposed to the Voice altogether aren’t going to heed that call. And in any case, the referendum is going to be decided, massively, by white votes. There ain’t much alternative but to keep putting in.
For many people on the left, especially progressives, the Voice seems to be some sort of transcendent, heavenly sent deliverance of the nation, emerging from the clouds over Uluru like the product of a syncretic Hand of God, attended by the three wise ones: St Noel, St Marcia and St Megan.
For the rest of us, who are going to vote “Yes”, because it’s happening and a thing, it looks like a trip to the referendum casino, where the odds are stacked against you, to try and win a body that has no power; is dependent on a settler constitution and parliament for its identity, budget and salaries; puts First Nations peoples in permanent petitioning mode to white authority whose legitimacy it thus reinforces; and, as a form of exile from power, offers what exile always does: the magnification of petty differences among petitioners into major division. Sounds great!
Even better, the Voice second-guesses and undermines elected First Nations members of Parliament — and only them, such as Lidia Thorpe, Jacinta Price, Linda Burney, Dorinda Cox, et al. Weird way to shift the power balance away from settler-Australians, I would have thought.
It’s an orphan version of a non-realised corporatism, the political system where defined social groups are represented en bloc. Imagine if we had assemblies for 1948-vintage migrant Australian communities, for Asian Australians, for the disabled, for rural Australians, etc. These would form parallel powers to parliamentary members, but there would be an equality about it.
Labor has gritted its teeth and committed to a referendum on the question this year. There is a strong air about what is essentially a neo-Menzies-style government; it wants to get it over with quickly, take the win if it gets it, and dissociate itself from any loss by 2025. It is trying to stonewall any more detailed discussion of what sort of assembly the Voice would entail.
Planet Janet Albrechtsen and others suggest that its existence in the form suggested would make it justiciable in the High Court, in such a way that it could hold up passage of legislation in Parliament. Albrechtsen’s arguments are thin on precedent or detail, actual constitutional scholars such as Greg Craven say it would not be justiciable, and her response to that has been largely snark about “academics”. So one is inclined to go with the “academics” on this.
But for the average voter, there remain very basic questions as to what powers could be extended to the Voice. Can it have administrative powers delegated to it, and become a de facto ATSIC II? Is that why its advocates are fighting so hard for it? Is that something that Labor doesn’t want to talk about?
This is the sort of detail the Coalition can argue is missing from the whole package, and which may resonate with many people. Whatever position the Coalition takes on the Voice — and it ain’t looking great, support-wise — there will be a well-organised “No” campaign, and they have two great and simple arguments: 1) it will be a third chamber, 2) OK, it won’t be a third chamber, but it will be ATSIC II.
The “Yes” case response to this does not fill one with encouragement. The arrogance and communication of a sense of entitlement are overwhelming. When people ask for detail, they are told to read the 200-plus-page Langton-Calma report, as if there is no middle place between a three-line statement for a referendum question and a report few have the time or expertise to read.
This isn’t how politics works. The request for detail is a reasonable demand for the Voice proposal to be filled out as to its mode of operation, and its constituent form, such as could be encapsulated in an average news article. Like we do for health policy, education policy, submarine purchase and every other obsession of this cracked island. Politics is making a case, not giving us a book list.
There ain’t no way around saying this either: the “Yes” case doesn’t look even slightly ready to take the field for the main event. The referendum is going to be this year. There will need to be an army of volunteers for door-knocking, almost all of them will be white or non-First Nations, and they will need a sort of catechism of responses to not screw up in answering the many questions that people will have.
Maybe the “Yes” case has been doing that secretly in cellars for the past six months, but somehow I doubt it. From a campaign-organising perspective, I reckon the “Yes” case is already running three to six months behind.
The “Yes” case is right to say that there is substantial goodwill in the community for a move like this, and that this might be the sort of audacious referendum move that can push through resistance to change. But they wouldn’t want to overestimate either the extent or the durability of that goodwill either.
The “Yes” campaign leaders have all spent so many decades either in the corridors of power and academia, or among First Nations peoples, or a wider penumbra of progressives, that they may have gained an entirely distorted sense of how much these questions figure in the lives of the vast majority of Australians.
When they think about it, most Australians would now say that the country was founded with violence and dispossession, and that First Nations peoples, more than any other group, are in a separate and special relationship with the land and the rest of us.
But “Yes” case leaders seem to be working off the assumption that it has come to the centre of many, many peoples’ thinking about the country and their lives. It simply has not. We now live in a society where the division between the roughly 30% who participate in debate, media, etc, and the 70% who feel utterly excluded by it, is now near-absolute.
This is the reason, for example, why the tabloid big-guns have lost their power to move things this way or that, as the recent Victorian election demonstrated. This 30% — the knowledge class and various intersecting other elites — are still reading their sites for news, opinion, etc. The 70% are reading for newsy news, entertainment, scandal, and for the very basic old-school political questions regarding budgets, taxes, etc.
What many are interpreting as a generosity to these questions among the 70% is actually an indifference to the debate. When the debate is stirred up, that indifference will not survive. The referendum campaign may bring from passive to active those people who do believe that Australia should be a unitary country, and that a Voice, no matter how much it has been designed to be powerless, will fracture that.
Many such people will be non-white and from the waves of post-1948 migrants. The idea of non-white solidarity on this issue is spurious, BIPOC and other such designations being little more than a progressivist appropriation of indigeneity.
So, hell yeah, there needs to be more detail on the Voice. There needs to be a package that can be trotted out, taught to volunteers, repeated and repeated until people are bored to tears with it.
If Labor won’t give flesh to one, one has to be dodged up. It’s hard to think of a more counter-productive response to reasonable questions than “read the report”, the blithe spirit of academia writ large.
Maybe the Voice will get across the line no matter how badly the campaign for it presents. But you wouldn’t want to go into the campaign relying on that. Trying to win something on what’s owed by history, as opposed to what would work in the future, is about the least successful strategy imaginable.
If you want loyalty, get a dog, the old saying in this business goes. This is politics, and something else entirely.
Do you think there’s enough detail available on the Indigenous Voice to Parliament? Let us know by writing to letters@crikey.com.au. Please include your full name to be considered for publication. We reserve the right to edit for length and clarity.
