UPDATE:

The Voice Referendum was lost by a sizable margin. The extent of this loss is yet to be determined, but a lot of people who were rabidly anti-Voice are gloating now, a bad tactical move, I suggest. The real opposition to the Voice came from some rather misguided perceptions about the long term impact of the Voice. Even until the last minute, social media was still advocating untenable and irresponsible positions, declaring that the entire country would become the province of First Nations and everyone else was going to miss out.

There was so much utter nonsense, people couldn’t tell the difference, so in their uncertainly, they overwhelmingly voted “No”. The international media also picked up on the misinformation as “factual” and declared these were the reasons people voted the way they did. One UK paper declared that First Nations people in the Northern Territory all voted “No”. There has yet to be an adequate analysis of the impact of social media on the result, but I suggest it is not going to be flattering.

I also suggest that after this, Governments around the world are going to be scrutinizing the role of social media in politics far more deeply than they have in the past. As Umberto Eco said: “Social media gives legions of idiots the right to speak when they once only spoke at a bar after a glass of wine, without harming the community … but now they have the same right to speak as a Nobel Prize winner. It’s the invasion of the idiots”

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The Voice

In Australia, we are discussing our relationships with our First Nations people. This is not an easy conversation for any number of reasons, but I will outline some of those reasons that I believe are responsible for that difficulty. Then I will look at what the proposal is that we are discussing now and air a few of my thoughts.

When the First Fleet arrived in 1788, Aboriginals were seen as “primitive” and “savages”. Note that we didn’t give them a title, like Indians, or Maoris, or Inca, or Aztec, or Zulu, or Ashanti or anything like that, we just used the generic term of “Aboriginal” to designate the original inhabitants. It has only been recently that we have considered another name, with “First Nations” seeming to be the generic name and “indigenous” to denote that in the more singular form. The trouble is there are more than 300 different tribal communities so providing a specific name is not easy. Most such names have become derogatory, and have, rightly, been expunged from decent vocabularies, becoming the province of the racists that inevitable appear.

As a kid growing up, I learned nothing of First Nations culture or history apart from three major “facts”. All Aboriginal culture stemmed from “The Dreamtime”. That Aboriginals were non-Christian primitives. That they were all criminals, alcoholics and violent with no idea how to live good white man lives. Sound familiar?

In school we learned that it was expected that Aboriginals would be extinct in the next century or so because they were unable to adapt to the modern world, that’s how primitive they are. What we were never told was that Colonial Administrators and farmers and cattle ranchers had been actively making sure this was true. One such urban myth in my home town, my neighborhood in fact, was that a farm that used to operate near where I grew up had some sheep stolen and slaughtered by a local indigenous family. To set this right, the farmer and his hands rounded up the family, drove them to the bank of a stream shot them all and buried them. That burial site is now the Adelphi Terrace Reserve in Glenelg North, Adelaide. Whether that’s true or not, I don’t know, but I do understand that a lot of such actions were essentially ignored by colonial authorities at least until the second half of the 19th Century right across the country and I doubt SA was any different.

White society has always been dismissive of “primitives” no matter where they were in the world. In places like India, China, Japan, they have been culturally strong enough to resist much of the depredations of a virulent European colonialism, retaining much of their own culture. They have not been entirely successful, but at the same time, the West has been influenced by many of their customs, their languages; from individual words to cultural practices, some we now wouldn’t recognize as originating outside of Europe.

Be that as it may, it has been an almost total dismissal of “primitive culture” in Australia that had dominated white thinking of our First Nations people. That has been forced to change over the last fifty years as a lot of the Tribes, or Mobs, are standing up for themselves.

We have, like many other nations, an over-representation of our indigenous people in our prison systems, shorter life expectancies, higher levels of unemployment, alcoholism, domestic violence, right across the whole range of negative social indicators. I suspect this is the response to a society under huge cultural stress. White settlers undermined the very pillars of indigenous social structure and mythology with completely different social, religious and economic practices, forcing First Nations to accept our rules, our way.

Do not for a moment consider this is the “black arm band” view of colonialism and post-colonial Australian history, it is simply a matter of history. History is not there to make us comfortable at all, but to confront us with a truth than makes us decidedly uncomfortable at times. Other nations in similar positions are having to come to terms with these same issues, so we are looking at each other wondering if what they’re doing there for that, whatever “that” is, could work here.

In Australia, an agreement was reached called The Uluru Statement from the Heart. It is a simple one paged statement, an agreement, between Black and White Australia that we are going to try to do it better. One part of that is finding a way to develop better communications between the two Australias. To do that, it has been determined that a Government Advisory Body, called “The Voice to Parliament” be set up to discuss any legislation that impacts First Nations peoples.

Unfortunately, there has grown in recent years a movement similar to MAGA here in Australia. It too is a blend of Far Right, angry young men and conspiracy theorists. They have a number of names, none of which I would sully this post by naming, but like MAGA, it is a fiercely nationalistic, racist, homophobic, transphobic, “anti-everything-I-disagree-with”. They too have been emboldened by Trump and MAGA, and a growing Far Right (Murdoch) media, and infected with the same blinkered bullshit as their American counterparts.

When the idea of a referendum on the Voice was first announced, these nitwits immediately dismissed it as “woke bullshit”, “taking our country away from us” and a range of other equally stupid and outrageous excuses to vent their inner hatreds.

Unfortunately, the Conservative non-Government political parties, the Liberal Party and National Party have both come out in opposition to the Voice, giving the nay-sayers legitimacy they do not deserve. The opposition of the Conservatives is more about not allowing the Labor Government a political win. rather than a genuine opposition to the Voice in principal, I suspect. The Leader of the Opposition, Peter Dutton, has already demonstrated his unsuitability to be Prime Minister, not because of the Voice, but a long time prior to the Voice becoming an issue for Referendum.

In Australia, like many other European colonized nations, our First Nations people are over represented in all the negative social metrics we apply to measure the health of our society. Unemployment, life expectancy, alcohol and substance abuse, under-educated, domestic violence, imprisonment and anything else you can name here.

Will the Voice fix these issues? I strongly doubt it. These issues have been a part of the cultural landscape of Australia since Federation, 123 years ago, and colonial Australia before that. There is no magic wand that can fix those problems but the Voice is a way of giving First Nations a hearing in matters that directly affect them at both a Government and Administrative level.

Seems though that for the nay-sayers, this is enough to create “a super class” of people who’s concerns will override everyone else’s. Pure hysteria and downward envy, I suggest, and that is disgraceful.

Some letters I have written to the local press, “The Advertiser”, another Murdoch paper.

Dear Sir,

At last, Opposition Leader, Peter Dutton, has come out with his inevitable stance on the Voice. I would point out here that all through the initial discussion Mr Dutton and the Liberal Party has been considerably less than positive in their commentary. A shame really as it paints a very wrong image of the Liberal Party.

It will be far too easy to describe the anti-Voice stance as being ‘racist’ or ‘racial vilification’ or whatever, but the truth is far more simple than that. Mr Dutton’s stance is just to deny a Labor Government a political win.

The ‘questions’ that are raised, like will the Voice stop domestic violence, criminality, alcoholism are no more than childish nonsense. We all know that none of these things will improve in the short term but who can tell what longer term impact on First Nation’s culture will occur. These ‘questions’ are meaningless, but will justify the nay-sayers anti-Voice vote and that’s all.

We have to start genuine Reconciliation sometime so if not now, when? If not us, then whom?

Yours sincerely,

Dear Sir,

Now the the Voice Constitutional Amendments have passed both Houses of Parliament, we can see just how misleading the No Campaign has really been.

The Amendments recognise the role of First Nations peoples, not as separate from the rest of us, but as an integral part of the real story of Australia, from long before 1788. Another part of the Amendment gives Parliament the power to create, to define and empower a body of representatives from the First Nations to advise Parliament on issues connected to First Nations peoples.

In short, the Amendments have nothing to do with the actual operations of The Voice, that is controlled entirely by Parliament.

Under those circumstances, the No Campaign is barking up the wrong tree.

Those people calling for a Treaty though, should now take a breather and think it through. A Treaty with whom? One Treaty or a different Treaty for every Mob in the country?

Yours sincerely,

Dear Sir,

It is disheartening to see so many correspondents asking how the Voice will impact on rates of alcoholism, criminality or domestic violence among First Nations people. The answer is obvious, it won’t in the short term. That, however, does not mean that the Voice is not worth pursuing.

A major part of the reason why negative social indicators are so high among First nations people is that this is what happens to people when they are largely excluded from mainstream society, when their traditional values are derided, ignored, belittled as they are not our traditional values. We have sufficient evidence of this among the non-Indigenous community, if we care to look for it.

We should to be discussing the Voice on its merits, not making up spurious argument to oppose it.

Yours sincerely,

Ultimately, we have to determine how far are we prepared to go to make a genuine Reconciliation agreement with our First Nations peoples. This proposal may not necessarily be the the only way to achieve that goal, nor the most advantageous to all, but it is the best we have at the moment.