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Notes -
Culture War Update on my previous post on Australia's Voice to Parliament.
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has finally released the wording of the question that will be proposed in the referendum as follows:
He has also release the proposed provisions being added:
Parliament is expected to vote on the wording of the referendum question in June.
Some brief comments:
The proposed question is a leading question, by implying that the recognition of the 'First Peoples' necessarily requires the establishment of the Voice. There could easily be two separate questions here:
One for a constitution recognising Indigenous people in the Australia Constitution, a symbolic gesture, something that has been suggested many times in the past (which I still don't support but is still far less contentious that setting up a new government body).
One question for the establishment of the Voice itself.
The proposed amended provisions don't actually outline the structure or powers the Voice will have, which is still a major concern of many Australians. Instead, it allows for the Australian Parliament to define it through regular legislation. While this is being touted by Labor as a smart or good or effective way to go about it (perhaps disingeniously) because it allows the Voice to be adjusted with regular legislation, I see this as concerning for two reasons:
Firstly, in order to pass any legislation in the Senate, Labor needs the support of the Greens. Supposing this referendum does pass, and the Labor government tries to pass the first legislation to establish the Voice, they would need to negotiate with the Greens who have an even more radical and woke conception of what the Voice would be
Secondly, I can easily see how these provisions can be abused by woke legal activists through the High Court, getting them to extend the Voice through implied powers. The wording 'make make representations to Parliament and the Executive Government' could easily be made to mean any number of things, 'representations' is a pretty malleable word (you could quite sensibly, if disingenuously interpret this to mean they should have representation in the House of Representatives, for example). The ability to 'make representations' being in the Constitution could easily overrule any regular legislation made by judicial activism to give certain de facto powers to the Voice (perhaps this is the point). The other provision is 'relating to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples', which given that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples are in fact Australian citizens and are affected by literally everything in Australian politics from taxes to trade, one can easily see how this provision means 'everything'.
I strongly oppose the term 'First Peoples', which would bake a woke/progressive terminology and worldview into the Constitution.
And the thing that perhaps annoys me the most of all this, is when the Voice turns out to be a disaster in one form or another, which I'm nearly certain it will, there will be no way to actually get rid of it, now being constitutionally enshrined. This will be ATSIC 2.0 but there is no actual way to get rid of it and the corruption, even assuming the culture and media is actually conducive to it. There is no way that another referendum will occur in my lifetime to repeal this amendment. This is what annoys me so much, that this is a social 'Tesla valve' (or Cthulhu only swims left, or the slippery slope), if this does pass there is no reversing it. Reversing it would require a mass genuinely reactionary popular sentiment (on the level of Orban at least) to happen in Australia, which won't happen, and even if it did happen would introduce new different problems of its own.
Is it a referendum on whether voters think Labor is cool, or is there bipartisan support?
The collapse of ATSIC seems like it would have soured an entire generation on the concept. I'd expect the opposition to be harping on this, unless there's some way it could be credibly shown different.
There isn't bipartisan support. The Nationals, the smaller, regional, conservative member of the Liberal-National Coalition, has openly opposed the Voice. The Liberal Party has yet to take a position on the Voice, playing coy, and simply continuing to ask for more details. Word on the street is that there's a strong internal division in the Liberal Party over the Voice, though Peter Dutton, the Opposition Leader, clearly doesn't support the Voice for anyone who knows anything about Australian politics.
I would say it's mostly a vote de facto demonstrating how large white guilt is in Australia
No one is talking about ATSIC. It's like it didn't exist. It's not in the public consciousness at all. Whether this is just the result of it fading from living memory or part of a deliberate effort from left-aligned media to suppress it, I can't say. You can barely find any mention of it anywhere, least of it in the mainstream media. There are a couple of throwaway mentions in a few articles, but no one is seriously criticising the Voice by making comparisons to ATSIC. I think David Littleproud, leader of the Nationals, mentioned it once in a speech recently. That's about it.
Not claiming this is necessarily representative, but look at this rubbish blog post from Monash University 'Voice to Parliament: Debunking 10 myths and misconceptions'.
Yes because ATSIC was a completely corrupt and mismanaged fuckfest, as are most of these politically motivated self interested Indigenous bodies! The ability to abolish these organisations is a feature and should remain a feature it's not a bug!
I'm reading the Monash University article, and it's incredible just how terrible a lot of the argumentation is:
This is puzzling, to say the least. Advocating for a piece of legislation, then arguing that the proposed piece of legislation "will not give First Nations peoples any special rights" and won't grant them the ability to do anything regular Australians already couldn't is incredibly strange and contradictory. Stating that it creates no special preference for the Indigenous is basically stating that the amendment is useless, and if so, then why advocate for it? Clearly "permanency" is a special right granted to Indigenous people here (and also there's the fact that the Voice will be explicitly and specifically enshrined in the Constitution on the basis that Indigenous people have a special status as the "first peoples", which at the very least gives the Voice's representations a de facto legitimacy that those made by other Australians will not).
Then there's this:
Oh, thank God.
So we actively permit racial discrimination, and that law has only ever been used to benefit one ethnic group over others. I somehow do not feel comforted by this fact.
"Amending the Constitution to provide First Nations peoples with a Voice to Parliament does not offend notions of equality; rather, it just gives an implied special status to them based on a permanent ethnic claim over land."
It's really hard not to be flippant here because of just how slippery and condescending all the argumentation is. If you're going to support something, at the very least fully stand behind the principles that underly your preferred policies, instead of constantly hedging and denying any of the more contentious implications of these policy decisions in order to make your positions seem more agreeable than they really are.
My personal (least) favourite is Myth 5 - "Too much detail will lead to confusion, and many people will likely not want to read a lengthy document. "
"People are too stupid to understand what they'd be voting on anyway, and if they did get the details they might cause them to vote against it!"
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