A vote for Yes will deliver division
FORMER Prime Minister John Howard spent more than a decade trying to make Australians feel “relaxed and comfortable”. Current PM Anthony Albanese and his team, however, have accomplished that in just nine months.
Why, under Labor’s gentle command, we’re becoming worryfree. The government is liberating us from nagging concerns about having too much retirement money, and previously panicked parents of the mathematically sub-educated are now happily aware that their kids can become treasurers.
As well, Albo’s campaign for the Voice to Parliament is rapidly generating the sort of national unity not seen since America in the early 1860s. Granted, it’s a form of unity that has us at each other’s throats, but coming together as a people needs to start somewhere.
That campaign, though, could use some fine tuning.
Like many Australians, I’ve been called a racist so many times that the word has lost any power. Being threatened with yet again being called a racist if I vote “No” isn’t exactly the motivation some Voice activists imagine it to be.
“When you go into that polling booth on your own with your moral compass on, you will know what you’re voting for,” federal Indigenous Affairs Minister Linda Burney told 2GB last week. “Those people that are against this are going backward.”
Three cheers for unity. But what about the blatant racism embedded in Burney’s beloved Yes campaign?
According to From the Heart, the Voice will “enable Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people to provide advice to the Parliament on policies and projects that impact their lives”. And according to the federal government’s own Voice-promoting site, the Voice will “provide a permanent means to advise the Australian Parliament and Government on the views of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples on matters that affect them”.
Matters that affect them? Projects that impact their lives? These ridiculously exclusionary lines appear to have been drafted by a Baptist missionary 80 years ago.
Why would anyone assume, in 2023, that the interests of Indigenous Australians would not include matters of interest to the broader Australian population? The way the Yes case is framing things, it sounds as though any legislation other than that involving possum skin storage, smoke creation from gum leaves and the aerodynamic properties of bent sticks would be set aside rather than be put before the Voice.
Let’s hear from the Yes campaign, then, about what matters might be specifically eliminated from Voice consideration. Is superannuation, for example, too much of a white fella deal to require Voice input?
What about legislation to do with electric vehicles? Could the Voice’s representatives offer something about decoupling from China and increasing trade with Taiwan?
If anyone from the Yes side of the argument can present even one parliament-worthy issue that our Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples have absolutely no interest in, I’m up for hearing it. I’m also up for hearing why that call wouldn’t carry seriously racist implications.
With that task underway, our Yes friends are invited to consider a few words on the topic of societal commonality.
“People are all exactly alike,” the late US satirist P.J. O’Rourke wrote in the 1980s. “There’s no such thing as a race and barely such a thing as an ethnic group. If we were dogs, we’d be the same breed. George Bush and an Australian Aborigine have fewer differences than a lhasa apso and a toy fox terrier. A Japanese raised in Riyadh would be an Arab … people are all the same, though their circumstances differ terribly.”
All essentially true. Speaking of different circumstances, our already appointed colour-based parliamentary wing – the teals – have lately encountered their first significant political challenge.
Being from wealthy electorates, the teals are all about climate. But now they’re dealing with a government that wants to eat into wealth via superannuation changes.
Warringah MP Zali Steggall, the original teal, isn’t having it.
“It is very important that people can trust the rules around investing in their future through superannuation,” Steggall said last week, “and it is damaging to investor confidence for the government to want to suddenly change the rules.”
Interesting. Steggall and her fellow teals aren’t so worried about sudden rule changes or damaged investor confidence when they’re calling for rapid government action against reliable and inexpensive power sources. The teals – far from comfortable and relaxed when faced with economic realities – should ideally be confined to their own Voice-like mini-parliament. After all, they are interested in and informed about much less than is your average Indigenous Australian.
If rich teals were limited to commenting only on “policies and projects that impact their lives” and “matters that affect them”, we’d never hear from them again.
Meanwhile, when it comes to voting on Anthony Albanese’s Indigenous Voice, please weigh your options carefully.
Vote no and you’ll be called a racist. Vote yes and you’ll be one.