Nuance please.
We can support recognising Indigenous people in the constitution if it doesn’t compromise national unity or damage our systems of equality.
We must not constitutionally entrench race-based separatism.
There was to have been a series of government funded Australian Community consultations to discuss these issues from around 2015. Those have never occurred except for one race.
Now it seems there will be an extraction of voters from the Australian electoral roll, based on racial origins, with one race only to be given a second vote. The only race to have been consulted.
It is a black activist proposal that has been pushed too far. On the one hand they say it is just symbolic, on the other they say it will be powerful, hard to ignore and almost certainly dominated by east coast city activists, a forum for point scoring, grand standing and grievance mongering.
Makarrata: a spear punishment to penetrate the leg of a person so they cannot walk or run properly, to maim them.
That’s what the black activists want to do to Australia.
That’s why the statement coming out of Uluru is called the Makarrata.
Who can count how many Indigenous consultation mechanisms there are already?
But …the “whole point” of a Voice to Parliament would be for it to be influential and politically powerful”… (Indigenous leader Danny Gilbert)
They will continue to develop differences that do not exist under the pretence that Aborigines are different to the rest and, perhaps even worse, that they are all the same with the same needs.
There are plenty of successful aboriginal people. In fact they are over represented in the Federal Parliament already with a disproportionate Eleven elected members from just under Three or Four per cent of the population.
Aboriginal Australians are enfranchised equally. In fact Aboriginal women got the vote here before the suffragettes in Britain and were second only to those in New Zealand to do so.
Democracy has always preached one vote one value and since Greek times the franchise has steadily been widened to include all adults regardless of wealth or race, or any other identity for that matter.
Now we are asked to return to a two-tiered society. Where some, based solely on even partial racial aboriginal ancestry will get two votes.
Constitutional amendment is very different to a Statute, an ordinary law passed by Parliament which can be repealed or amended by any future Parliament.
To say that a Constitutional amendment will not affect the Australian Constitution, how Australia is run, simply cannot be true. It will be a transfer of power. One that cannot be changed by parliamentary statutory repeal or amendment.
It will Constitutionally require all future elected governments to comply with it subject to the rulings of, and threats of rulings of, the High Court which is itself frequently accused of being very activist and has already recently said in an immigration case that Australian Aborigines have a special relationship with land, which no other Australians have and which the government cannot overturn by law or policy.
That is a separatist barn door already kicked wide open by an activist High Court.
The Constitutional, political and lawfare leverage for blacktivists will be so enormous that it will amount to a veto of government whenever they choose to exercise it. It will be a third and racist based chamber of parliament in practice.
On that will forever exclude all past, current and future immigrants from being equal with one vote one value ever again.
Even that is not enough. Is merely a step towards a separate Aboriginal State within Australia.
“…The status thus created would be an interim remedy for as long as the Aboriginal ‘nation’ needed to evolve to the point of being able to exercise the right of self determination…”
(National Aboriginal Conference submission, 22 June 1982)
No matter what concessions are made “the demands of the Aboriginal political class will not cease. The do not see this proposed amendment as completing the nation or any kind of closure. They are working towards a separate State, an Aboriginal Race only State in Australia. Governed only by them but with continued financial support by taxation from the rest of Australia.
They hold the position that they are the proprietors of the land and the rest of us need to renegotiate our right to be here.
(See for instance: Unfinished Business of a Black State, 2016 in The Break-up of Australia: The real agenda behind Aboriginal reconciliation) : Windschuttle
Instead of allowing that agenda to progress we must ask what problems are we actually trying to address universally for all Australians regardless of racial origin.
Look at the tragedy of entrenched social problems in the 1200 or so homeland communities – playing out in violent aggressive drunkenness, rape and pillage with the weakest as physical victims, even as I write in January 2023 - in Alice Springs.
We should be recognising that black power was not the answer since it was tried under self-determination which directly contributed to the breaking down of otherwise social norms with things going progressively downhill to the state they are in today.
No Constitutional entrenched empowerment of the Aboriginal Political class is going to fix this. It will merely mean they can never be removed as became necessary with the corrupt and useless Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission (ATSIC)
The separatist approach has not worked. It will be a repeat disaster to entrench the aboriginal industry constitutionally at the expense of the most disadvantaged Indigenous.
“Do not be blindly led into the belief that all Indigenous Australians support the Uluru Statement from the Heart and the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice to Parliament” says (Warren Mundine) who goes on to say that most indigenous people he meets are focused on practical outcomes and do not want others speaking for their particular piece of traditional “country”.
Native Title Holders already have systems in place to consult with government. They have land use agreements, joint or majority management of local national parks Native Title Rights and regular processes for their voices to be heard already.
It is simply not true to say that Traditional Aboriginal Owners do not have a voice already. Who can count the number of ways they already engage with government, government agencies and others.
There is simply no need for another layer of bureaucracy on top of all the conversations already being conducted and traditional owners will not want to be spoken for by city aboriginal industry players. “most traditional owners would find that unacceptable” (W.Mundine)
Australia has never spent more than it does now trying to help Indigenous Australians. So much so that no one knows how much. Billions for sure, with no measures for success and roughly double is spent on each Aborigine, around $45,000 a year compared to around $24,000 each for the rest of us.
We cannot turn back the clock and we must not try. It is racist to assume that all Indigenous Australians have like needs and think alike, or that any other Australians do.
We cannot allow one racial group to veto laws or policy that are otherwise reflective of our one vote one value elected Government. The basic needs of Indigenous people are not different to other human beings. It is racist to say that they are. They do not constitute another Country and we must not let the activists take us down that path of racial separation.
This is not an election. You cannot vote Yes and give it a try and see if you don’t like it and change your vote in four years’ time. It is a Constitutional amendment that you will be stuck with forever. Imagine if we could not have got rid of the corrupt and useless ATSIC.
The Federal Government is not even providing information to set out both sides of this argument. They are refusing to provide any information for the debate.
Tokenism, and dangerous tokenism at that, is the face of the “vibe” of the government induced, ABC, SBS and social media campaign.
The danger of yielding to this tokenism is that nothing actually gets done.
See Alice Springs on fire with aboriginal dysfunctional violence even while Aboriginal Activists claim a great victory with the cancellation of Melbourne’s Australia Day Parade. It is as though that is more important when it is not.
Makarratta to Australia Day celebrations, tokenly spearing them in the thigh while ignoring the really disenfranchised who are being brutalised on the streets of Australia while the city activists celebrate their petty win in lieu of doing something about the real problems
All citizens need to be treated equally under the law. Are you convinced that entrenching a race-based power for Aboriginal Politicians is a good reason for breaching that principle of one vote one value?
The detail really doesn’t matter. It is a bad idea in principle.
And it is not necessary in practice. There are already systems set up for grass roots native title holders, and aboriginal people, groups and communities more broadly, to be empowered in their own lands and there are already 11 Aboriginal Federal Members of Parliament.
Just what is it the activists want to say that they don’t already say? It is not about having a say. It is about taking power and dictating their separate Aboriginal State objectives.
The proposal is not simple. It is a politically expedient lie to say that it is simple.
It is radical. It is a shift of power. A racist divide. A step on the long campaign to separate our Country on the base of race. To empower the few black race activists in the Cities while doing nothing for, and never likely to on track record, do anything for those most in need.
It will be expensive, dysfunctional and fail to provide better outcomes. And it will be impossible to get rid of.
Political equality is one of the most fundamental values we have.
The government has no business, it is a bad business, to try to entrench distinctions between one citizen and another by ethnicity, heritage, culture, religion or race.
These things might well shape a personal life but they are not relevant to the rights of citizenship where we demand the same weight for each of us in the process of political decision making for the whole community.
Divisions and representation based on race, purported collective representation – being elected to represent a certain or designated group brings about the terrible result that only the most fanatic and narrow views get represented as though their group is sacred and it undermines every reasonable effort to reach any agreement.
Rather than build bridges it will build walls. It will increase, and entrench and empower, the pressures for even more forms of separatism.
Constitutionalising inequality will not promote equality and enshrining separateness will not promote unity.
But that’s not what the black activists want is it?
They have already said it is not enough. Constitutional amendments are not their objective. They are a means to an end to a separate State.
I have plagiarised freely. It would make tedious reading of an article such as this if I referenced everyone whose ideas or expressions I have extracted, stolen or borrowed. You will find many in the recent book “Beyond Belief – Rethinking the voice to Parliament. Edited by Peter Kurti and Warren Mundine AO. Connor Court Publishing 2022 which itself has 14 distinguished contributors. I do apologise if I have inadvertently mis-represented anyone. I take responsibility for doing so but ultimately my errors and the views I express here are my own.
My CV is available here: https://johnwbolton.weebly.com/
And here https://www.linkedin.com/in/john-bolton-4020aa83/