Drop the rage and find better path to agreement
In our enlightened digital age, the question is fast becoming not who wins big public debates but whether we are even capable of having them. At a time where there are no longer any media gatekeepers it is both fascinating and disturbing to see that all our technology and progress has had no civilising effect whatsoever.
Instead it has just created a new Colosseum, a new Red Square, where people tear each other apart in public. This is not what liberal democracy was supposed to be.
Surely it is possible, for example, to criticise or lampoon the ABC’s coronation coverage without hurling racist abuse at Stan Grant.
Surely it is possible to disapprove of the now infamous Jesus joke on The Project without threatening the family members of Sarah Harris.
And now we have our Race Discrimination Commissioner worried that the Voice debate will descend into a “racial bun fight”. Possibly a bit late for that.
And against this sewer of political discourse we have the spectacle of Lidia Thorpe accusing the Greens of racism. She really is extraordinary value for the taxpayer dollar.
And it is perhaps this little gem that illuminates what is really going on in political discourse in the West.
At the same time as activists and armchair critics make no hesitation before hurling the vilest insults, they are equally quick to claim offence and even demand restitution for the mildest perceived transgression against themselves.
Thorpe is the perfect case in point. Among her debasements of the parliament are an unspeakable slur against a female Liberal senator, allegedly reducing one Aboriginal elder to tears and yelling at another – and yet she claims to be the victim of some amorphic racism by the party that put her at the top of their Senate ticket before she betrayed them.
Other examples on the extreme left abound of course, from the violence of Antifa in the name of peace and harmony, to the online decriers of hate speech who are megaphones for abuse. But the extreme right is just as up to its armpits in hypocrisy.
It rails against cancel culture and demands free speech – as do I – and yet when its own world view is challenged it demands inquiries or sackings or shows to be taken off air.
In other words, for all their talk, both the hard left and the hard right are incapable of tolerating views that conflict with their own — which is the essence of liberal democracy.
This brings us to the biggest debate our democracy is having right now: the Voice campaign and its descent into a “racial bun fight”, as the Race Discrimination Commissioner put it.
It is not a charge that should be thrown around lightly.
Introducing race into a debate is equally fraught. The minute we are categorised by colour or ethnicity we are atop a very slippery slope.
And here we have the extreme left and extreme right almost as bad as each other: the right resorting to racial abuse and the left reintroducing race as a social marker through the often absurd prism of identity politics.
This has led us to the unbecoming spectacle where many Yes campaigners accuse No supporters of being racist while No campaigners make the absurd claim that the very proposal of the Voice itself is racist.
In fact the argument – indeed the pressing need – for the Voice is far more powerful when you take race out of the equation altogether.
Take away the racial lens and all you see is a group of people who by the numbers are living in far more disadvantage and die far earlier than the rest of us.
This is in part the legacy of those of us who came after them and in part the circumstances in which they live and are governed today.
We cannot do anything about the former but we have a historic chance to fix the latter.
Take race out of the debate and this is something any clear-eyed Australian would embrace.