The Voice

How Australia got it so wrong on the Indigenous voice

From the moment the results of the voice referendum started coming in, politicians, advocates and commentators have been trying to rewrite history. The truth? Ultimately, the political right chose not to play ball.

From the moment the results of the voice referendum started coming in on October 14, 2023, politicians, advocates and commentators have been trying to rewrite history.
Pundits called it a “no compromise” referendum. Its failure was the fault of Indigenous leaders and the Labor government who, we are told, stubbornly refused to negotiate or compromise.

According to The Australian, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese had to take responsibility for his government’s mistakes in managing the referendum, while Indigenous leaders needed to “accept their own part in insisting Mr Albanese take the toughest possible stand on the referendum question”.

The whole referendum approach was described as being “crash or crash through” – this phrase was repeated ad nauseamduring and after the campaign. The Labor government and Yes proponents were “pig-headed” and this led to defeat.

This narrative is false, and inverts reality. It points the finger solely at Labor and Indigenous leaders for failing to find common ground with the right.

It exonerates the Coalition for its refusal to negotiate with Indigenous leaders who wanted more than empty symbolism and, ultimately, the Coalition’s politically motivated choice to kill the voice referendum.


Writer Shireen Morris with fellow Yes campaigners Anne Twomey, Stan Grant, author, Thomas Mayo, and Shane Phillips at the Sydney Town Hall for the Voice-City Forum. Picture: John Feder/The Australian.

Indigenous leaders repeatedly compromised to try to win Coalition support. The Coalition never compromised. The right’s failure to meet Indigenous people in the middle cruelled the referendum and, with it, hopes of achieving Indigenous constitutional recognition. Peter Dutton and the Coalition must wear that legacy.

The “crash or crash through” narrative was true only in one respect. As the campaign proceeded, its momentum became unstoppable. It became a freight train, hurtling forward with the force of its own velocity. In earlier years, I had always thought the government in charge would pull the plug if polls showed certain defeat. Yet in the heat of battle, with election promises made, advocates committed, donations received, the date set and hearts on the line, pulling the pin seemed impossible.

The compromise voice proposal, devised with bipartisanship in mind, needed to either float or sink. Australia needed to see itself. And now we will.

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Let me address the perspective from which I write. I occupy a strange position in Indigenous and Australian politics. I am neither Indigenous nor white. My ancestors hail from India, via Fiji, where the British took indentured servants to work on sugar cane plantations. My parents migrated to Australia in the 1970s, towards the end of the White Australia policy. Though I was born here, my migrant ancestry is one perspective I brought to the referendum debate.

I am also a constitutional lawyer whose primary focus for over 12 years, under the mentorship of Aboriginal leader Noel Pearson, was Indigenous constitutional recognition.


“Shireen is not Blak” - Shireen Morris says her advocacy on behalf of First Nations people was regarded with suspicion.

Some will say a non-Indigenous person shouldn’t have been involved in Indigenous constitutional recognition at all. The contemporary trend is to critique who gets to speak, rather than engaging with the speaker’s argument. An Indian Australian can talk about multiculturalism, but not Indigenous recognition.

It was a political reality that the Indigenous three per cent minority would need supporters and advocates from the 97 per cent to achieve their desired reforms.

The Uluru Statement invited non-Indigenous Australians to “walk with” Indigenous people because the country cannot be healed, and the Constitution cannot be changed, by the three per cent alone. As Palawa elder Rodney Dillon observed in 2018: “We’ve been flat out campaigning for the last 200 years. We’ve done well in some places but not well in other places … I think that non-Indigenous peoples’ support and influence can be really, really important to make change.”

I took that responsibility seriously, but identity was a hindrance. The observation that “Shireen is not Blak” was sometimes posted or noted in response to my advocacy – sometimes by the same people calling for solidarity with Indigenous causes. The chastisement was not generally applied to the many white constitutional lawyers and advisers involved, perhaps because their non-Blakness was more self-evident. White experts and lawyers seemed revered and respected, whereas non-Indigenous, non-white involvement required special justification (and so) I floated around the edges, in-between and often unseen. I advised Noel Pearson, co-wrote submissions and joined meetings with him, and continued to advocate and persuade, but in later years I was not a key player, strategically speaking. Still, invisibility allows a different perspective and perhaps some objectivity.

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Noel Pearson and I always believed that if we worked with conservatives and created broad coalitions for change, then with hard work and perseverance, a double majority of Australians could be persuaded to vote Yes to a constitutional voice for Indigenous peoples. We had no illusions about the difficulty of this challenge. In the end, the voice referendum did not win a majority in any jurisdiction except the ACT. The failure was comprehensive.

The key killer was lack of bipartisanship, long considered a prerequisite for referendum success. But in an era of sharpening political polarisation, social fragmentation and tribalism – exacerbated by social media’s amplification of disinformation, hate and dumbed-down debate – sensible cross-party policy discussion conducive to bipartisan reform ultimately proved elusive.

Though the voice germinated in collaboration across divides, the referendum became a partisan war zone, with politicians opting for political point-scoring rather than co-operation for the national good.


Writer Shireen Morris as a Labor candidate for the seat of Deakin.

Why did Indigenous leaders and the Labor government persevere with the referendum absent bipartisan support? To put things in perspective, Indigenous people had been waiting 122 years for a government willing to put worthwhile constitutional recognition to the people.

Genuine bipartisanship may never have been forthcoming given the Coalition’s longstanding resistance to anything other than constitutional symbolism.

Lack of bipartisanship notwithstanding, the voice was still viewed as the best chance of finally recognising Indigenous people in the Constitution in the way they wanted to be recognised, and in a way that would deliver tangible improvements to Indigenous communities.

As voice campaigner Thomas Mayo reflected after the referendum was defeated: ‘I don’t have regrets … It was something Indigenous people wanted …. We had to try because this is an urgent matter.’”

They had to try.

I watched the proposal become a political football. I saw first-hand how our radical centre coalition with constitutional conservatives faltered and then fractured under political pressure. The nasty tribalism of our politics ultimately could not be overcome.

In the final few months leading up to the referendum, I was flying around the country to speak at events. I visited Indigenous communities and was reminded how much this meant to them: the urgency of the need for change was palpable. There were communities up north where kids were known to break into houses, not to take laptops or mobiles, but to take food from the fridge. It made me think of my own son: I couldn’t fathom him facing such deprivation.

Those remote Indigenous communities voted Yes in the highest numbers. Their need was greatest. After weathering the cruelties of history, they desperately wanted reform and reconciliation, and were reaching out to their fellow Australians for love and acceptance.

But they were not the focus. The debate I witnessed was mired in polarisation, disinformation, confusion and racism. I heard claims that voting Yes would allow Indigenous people to take away our backyards. That voting Yes would force businesses to give stuff away to Indigenous people. That voting Yes would mean we would all have to pay rent for living on Indigenous land.

None of this was true. Yet these claims went viral on social media and were whispered to voters at the polls.

The referendum was an opportunity for a national settlement of historical wrongs. The problem was many Australians probably did not see this as a settlement of our nation’s troubled history. The historical context was missing. Many Australians voted No in a context vacuum.

Identifying and unpacking mistakes is crucial if reformers are to learn from the referendum’s failure. But acknowledging strategic missteps does not exonerate the Coalition. Ultimately, the political right chose not to play ball. They chose to oppose a modest proposal for Indigenous recognition instead of owning and refining it. The Coalition should have made the voice its own while in government, especially given the concept was co-created with conservatives.

The Coalition should have continued that collaboration with Indigenous people and led a “Nixon goes to China” referendum. Instead, it shirked that historic opportunity for leadership, and when Labor finally took the reins in 2022 it chose to sow division for political gain. The Coalition wanted to derail the referendum to hurt Albanese. Indigenous people were cannon fodder in the ensuing partisan war.

Acknowledging failures on both sides of politics cannot completely exonerate the Australian people for the choice we collectively made. At the end of the day, we decided. A significant majority of Australians voted No based on the information we had before us. We had the Yes and No booklets. We heard the basics of what was proposed. Whether we chose to seek out the facts or rely on lies was our choice. We exercised our democratic rights. Australians, too, must wear that legacy.

I don’t accept the truism, repeated by politicians after the defeat, that “the Australian people always get it right”. The quip incorrectly insinuates that anyone who respects democracy must endorse all outcomes of democratic processes. It reveals political cowardice: “I’m too scared to acknowledge that Australians made a poor decision in rejecting the voice, in case they reject me too, so I’ll pretend they got it right.”

I take a contrary view. The Australian people, acting through our democratic procedures, do not always get it right. We did not get it right when our policies and laws enabled Indigenous Australians to be paid unequal or non-existent wages during the protection era, nor when our democratically endorsed decisions sanctioned the forcible removal of Indigenous children from their families, the banning of Indigenous languages, and the denial of Indigenous property rights. We did not get it right when we enacted legislation that denied Indigenous Australians the vote in some jurisdictions right up until the 1960s.

The Australian people got it wrong in the voice referendum. We chose fear over love. Though voting Yes would have cost us little, we fell for nitpicking and division over a chance at reconciliation.

That was our right: our collective decision was, of course, democratically legitimate. But we made a mean and miserly choice. The ask, after all, was small.

After everything Indigenous people have been through in this country – the discrimination, the dispossession and the bloodshed of the past – all they were asking for was a guaranteed advisory voice. Theirs was a hand of friendship extended, asking only for the ability to have a say in decisions affecting them, and we slapped it away. We couldn’t find it in ourselves to give them even that.

We can reflect that Australians were misinformed or confused or distracted, that the Yes campaigns were ineffective and the No campaigns too effective, that social media favours lies and hate, and that lack of bipartisanship killed it – and that may all be true. But these are also excuses. Whatever the myriad reasons for failure – and we must learn from them – Australians said No to our nation’s best opportunity to settle our fraught founding history. The chance to achieve Indigenous constitutional recognition has been lost, likely forever. I know many Indigenous people will be experiencing pain for a long time.

This is an edited extract from Broken Heart: The True History of The Voice Referendum, published by Black Inc on August 19. The author, Shireen Morris, is director of the Radical Centre Reform Lab at Macquarie Law School, and a former Labor candidate for the Federal seat of Deakin.

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JohnDe said:

Here we go again. another voice telling us the wrong reasons and that we were wrong.

Acknowledging failures on both sides of politics cannot completely exonerate the Australian people for the choice we collectively made. At the end of the day, we decided. A significant majority of Australians voted No based on the information we had before us.​

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The Australian people got it wrong in the voice referendum. We chose fear over love. Though voting Yes would have cost us little, we fell for nitpicking and division over a chance at reconciliation.​

Shireen Morris, the majority voted No because there of unanswered questions and the danger of a change to our constitution. The majority of Australian's would have voted yes to Recognition of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples. However, they refused to change to alter the Constitution to allow an unelected body to have powers of change -

(i) there shall be a body, to be called the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice;​

(ii) the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice may make representations to the​

Parliament and the Executive Government of the Commonwealth on matters​

relating to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples;​

(iii) the Parliament shall, subject to this Constitution, have power to make laws with​

respect to matters relating to the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice,​

including its composition, functions, powers and procedures.​

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At every meeting of the Victorian Bar Council, president Georgina Schoff acknowledges the traditional owners of the land on which the meeting is held and pays her respects to elders past, present and emerging.

At a recent meeting, I decided to acknowledge all Australians. I posted the minutes on social media and was promptly labelled a “racist”, a “visitor” and an “introduced species”. I was publicly condemned by two of my fellow Bar councillors and was told by the Indigenous Justice Committee that I had brought the Victorian Bar into disrepute.

Australians are told that acknowledgments of country are about showing respect to “First Nations” people and the rich cultural history and connection to country they have developed over more than 60,000 years of living on this great land.

However, in my view, acknowledgments of country are not about respect, as most people would understand that word. We show respect to Indigenous Australians by celebrating their culture and language, by valuing their historical knowledge, and by holding them to the same standards as all other Australians, not by making ubiquitous acknowledgments of country.

When we are told that acknowledgments of country are about showing “respect” to First Nations people, what is meant is respect for Indigenous Australians as the true sovereigns of our land.

The term First Nations deserves attention. A nation is a distinct political society. Therefore the term First Nations suggests there was once a number of distinct political societies, separated from the others, that lived upon our land and were the first nations.

While the existence of tribes or clans at the time of British settlement is an established fact, the notion there were “nations” by any definition cannot be established. The idea has also been rejected by the High Court of Australia and is accordingly wrong in law: Coe v Commonwealth [1979] HCA 68 at [12].

The term First Nations is wrongly used to strengthen the claims of the “sovereignty was never ceded” and “always was, always will be” movement, and to give some Indigenous people of today, who seek to make treaties with the states of Australia, the appearance of some kind of legal standing.

The chief executive of the Victorian Aboriginal Legal Service has recently stated: “I am looking forward to the day when the First Peoples’ Assembly sign a justice treaty with the state of Victoria, so that we can transform the legal system so that it respects the oldest continuous cultures on Earth and delivers real justice for our people.” This is serious stuff. Based upon the September 2023 recommendations of the Yoorrook Justice Commission and article five of the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, what is being sought is some kind of Indigenous-only legal system that operates within, but separately to, the legal system of the state.

Not only would such a two-tiered legal system be antithetical to equality and the rule of law, but the real-world consequences are unknown, would be without precedent and are not currently the subject of any public discussion.

Indigenous people don’t live their lives in a bubble; they interact with non-Indigenous people as they go about their lives. What would happen if a non-Indigenous person was accused of a serious crime against an Indigenous person or vice versa? Which criminal justice system would apply and how would this be determined? Who would be the judge and how would the jury be selected? Would concepts such as the onus of proving the charge beyond reasonable doubt and the right of the accused to remain silent apply? Such questions are not limited to the criminal justice system; similar considerations would apply to civil disputes.

In Australia, we are the beneficiaries of a legal system that has been developed over centuries and which is arguably one of the best and fairest in the world. I accept that the imprisonment rate is significantly higher for Indigenous Australians than non-Indigenous Australians. But this fact alone comes nowhere near close enough to proving our legal system is the main causal factor, or that a radical change to it by creating a two-tiered system based on race would close this gap. The reasons people commit crimes are complex and multi-factorial and are generally skewed towards economic, social and environmental factors. One thing I hope we can all agree upon is that race is not a factor.

Acknowledgments of country are not about showing “respect”. They are political statements signalling support for a two-tiered system based on race. They have no place in the law, including in our courtrooms, and the average Australian instinctively knows this. A colleague recently told me that when court commenced with an acknowledgment of country, their client immediately felt the judge would take a view against them and lost any notion of receiving a fair trial. This is what happens when the legal system infects itself with politics.

For as long as people continue to make political statements by way of acknowledgments of country, I will continue to acknowledge all Australians, signalling my support for an Australia where we are all equal and subject to the same laws regardless of our race.

Lana Collaris is a barrister and member of the Victorian Bar Council.

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Yes campaign bloodletting shows how deluded they all remain

There was a time when the Yes side infuriated me with the shallow quality of their “debate”. Now the Yes side bores me. It has been 10 months since the proposal to change our Constitution failed, and its proponents still have not moved past the second stage of grief. They are now wallowing in anger. Why did this happen, who is to blame? Someone, please wake me up when the bloodletting stops. Even better, let’s hope they get to the final stage – acceptance – soon. Please.

In recent weeks, some losers on the Yes side have displayed tedious self-indulgence, blaming everyone except themselves for the loss. The recent contributions of Shireen Morris and Greg Craven tell you something about the lack of insight and the shoddy analysis that have marked much post-referendum contributions by voice supporters. What we’ve learned most clearly is how deluded they remain.

It might have helped the nation better understand the voice if the violent disagreements among people on the Yes side had been aired in public in full and before the referendum rather than behind closed doors after the referendum. Only towards the end of the campaign did we see even the hint of cracks emerge in their facade.

Instead, with completely ineffectual exceptions, the Yes side presented itself publicly as a solid phalanx of moralising custodians of the path to righteousness. Now they are more like Moaning Myrtles, shouting over metaphorical toilet cubicles past each other.

Craven made his last-gasp concerns particularly irrelevant by saying the defects of the voice proposal could be ignored. He would still vote Yes because it was the moral thing to do. The radicals picked their marks superbly. They didn’t need to compromise because all those who might have had sufficient influence to speak up and seek a workable compromise were already locked into whatever the radicals served up.

Morris writes in her extract from Broken Heart: A True History of the Voice Referendum that “Indigenous leaders repeatedly compromised to try to win Coalition support”. This is barmy stuff. As someone who followed this debate very closely, I know numerous compromises were offered – and categorically rejected by the Yes side. Both Father Frank Brennan and barrister Louise Clegg bravely put forward proposals with more moderate constitutional wording aimed at narrowing the voice’s operations. Both were ignored.

Indeed, according to another Yes supporter, Damien Freeman, Morris stopped working with the group Uphold & Recognise, the moderate voice supporters, after they held a forum in February last year that included Brennan and Clegg. “She objected to the fact that we allowed Clegg and Brennan to raise their concerns about the constitutional draft amendment that the Prime Minister announced … at Garma. Morris believed we should have put up only speakers who made the case for the Garma amendment,” Freeman wrote last weekend.

No signs of compromise there.


Member of the First Nations Referendum Working Group Marcia Langton at Parliament House.

Others, including me, suggested that any constitutional provision include a “non-justiciability” clause to ensure that a future High Court could not soak itself in social and political activism with the new voice provisions. In fact, for many years Morris assured us “a First Nations voice was specifically designed to be non-justiciable”.

Alas, there was no compromise. When the Prime Minister released the proposed wording at Garma, non-justiciability was tossed aside. Leading Yes activist Marcia Langton laid bare the radical demands: “Why would we restrict the voice to representations that can’t be challenged in court?” And, according to Freeman, Morris didn’t want any critics of the High Court’s major role speaking at the Uphold & Recognise forum.

Others suggested the proposed wording of the voice be limited to advising on acts of parliament so that it would not reach into every part of executive government, including every move by a bureaucrat. That was ignored, too.

Morris is wrong about another more fundamental matter. It is, in my view, almost certain that the voice, even if all the various compromises had been accepted, would have been defeated.

At its core it was a bad idea for the simple reason that Australians would never accept a two-tier Constitution, where one group of people had special rights permanently entrenched in the Constitution. Dividing groups by race made a bad proposal worse. Acceptance of this simple yet powerful truth will be the final stage of activists dealing with their loss. However, some of the compromises at least would have moved the voice closer to success than the firm rejection it finally received last October.

So, failure doesn’t rest with the political right, as Morris alleges. The failure is twofold: a bad idea that was badly prosecuted.

The voice proposal was, in large measure, a vibe thing, packaged up as this undefined goal called reconciliation, along with a reaching out, hands in friendship thing, and so on. The only clear part of the proposal was that if you opposed the voice, you could expect abuse (we were racist), ridicule (we were too stupid to understand it) and mocking labels (we were Chicken Littles). What stood out was the deep disrespect of Yes advocates towards just about everyone. Even those who agreed with the voice were not told candidly and precisely what this body would entail.

The Yes side had little idea how to win friends and influence people. They treated morality as a zero-sum game – we on the Yes side are moral; you No people are not – when disagreement should have been respected as a difference of opinion.

Craven was one of the biggest disappointments during the debate. The constitutional academic had a long history of being astute about our Constitution and our High Court. In 1999, he wrote about our highest court under the title A Study in the Abuse of Power. The professor wrote: “The Court now has a long record of consciously ‘interpreting’ the Constitution in a manner contrary to the Founders, with a view to achieving this or that supposedly desirable social result … the court simply has begun a process of inventing appropriate rights, and purporting to ‘imply’ them into the Constitution.”

In 2012, writing in The Australian Financial Review, Craven wrote that “putting a whole new section into the Constitution to deal with Indigenous people, then packing it with abstract, legally binding value statements, displays the sort of political naivety usually encountered in the Mosman branch of the Young Greens. Once again, the slogan will be ‘Don’t Know – Vote No’.”

Back then, Craven predicted correctly that “legions of depressed Australians, entirely committed to reconciliation, yet not prepared to maul the Constitution to escape the lash of Professor Langton’s tongue” would vote no.


Prime Minister Anthony Albanese is escorted through the Garma camp site by the Red Flag Dancers during Garma Festival.

I miss that version of Craven – the genuine constitutional conservative. In recent years, Craven succumbed to unintellectual emotion and moralising every bit as unhelpful as the more radical activists. He treated thoughtful concerns about the voice with shrill contempt, never properly addressing them as a constitutional conservative should. Quips and comedy may help Craven get through his day but it was never going to carry the day for the voice.

If Craven was having heated disagreements with the Yes side, and I don’t doubt him, he didn’t bother telling us soon enough or fully enough. Only much later, when it became clearer that the Yes vote was probably going to fail, and he would be on the losing side, was Craven candid enough that there were problems with the proposal as drafted. The killer punch to Craven’s constitutional conservatism came when he threw caution to the wind and said he’d vote for the voice anyway because it was the moral thing to do.

Unlike Craven, Freeman has offered the one piece of post-referendum insight that helps us truly understand why such a bad proposal was put and why it was prosecuted with such fervour.

Freeman, a fellow Yes advocate, has the courage to identify the proposal as driven by a particularly radical form of identity politics. This consists not only of the belief that some groups in society have been oppressed and that political action is needed to correct that oppression but that “only the oppressed group can determine what political action is necessary to overcome the oppression they have experienced”. Now we understand why at least some of those who might have been sceptical about the voice proposal felt themselves unable to object to it.

One thing Craven said 30 years ago is worth repeating. He described constitutional academics as “pretty pointless people”.

“If no one wants to rewrite the Constitution, it is a depressing business being a constitutional academic,” he said. “I speak from experience here. It is bitterly unfair that Sir Samuel Griffith and the boys got so successfully into the act in the 1890s, and that consequently no one is ever going to come to you and say, ‘Re-do the Constitution’, so that you get your turn.”

How exhilarating it must have been to imagine yourself recorded in history as one of the drivers of the voice amendment to the Constitution – finally a time to shine.

Perhaps Craven assumed the country would only ever remember those who changed the Constitution. I reckon the country will remember those who saved the Constitution – Jacinta Nampijinpa Price being the most important in that role. And she wasn’t even an eminent conservative constitutional professor. Though she had one, you didn’t need a law degree to understand why the proposal sank.

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JohnDe said:

10 months on and the YES brigade are still blaming everyone else.

There was a time when the Yes side infuriated me with the shallow quality of their “debate”. Now the Yes side bores me.​

​

At its core it was a bad idea for the simple reason that Australians would never accept a two-tier Constitution, where one group of people had special rights permanently entrenched in the Constitution. Dividing groups by race made a bad proposal worse. Acceptance of this simple yet powerful truth will be the final stage of activists dealing with their loss.​

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IFocus said:

Yet another nasty piece by Janet Albrechtsen, red meat for the faithful.

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JohnDe said:

Please explain what is so nasty about her article, and why.

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IFocus said:

TBH cannot remember ever reading anything from Albrechtsen that wasn't nasty and I have read most of her stuff it's just her style IMHO.

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farmerge said:

Wow will these proponents of the Yes lobby ever get it. NO means exactly that NO

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Baseless claims of racism and virtue signalling won’t help Indigenous cause

Victorian barrister Lana Collaris was recently branded a racist because she chose not to do a welcome to country at a meeting of the Victorian Bar Council. Instead Collaris acknowledged all Australians.

Overuse of the welcome to country practice is a problem and deserves discussion. For those who disagree with Collaris, they are entitled to challenge her and state their case why they believe it is an appropriate ritual. But to call her racist for declining to do one is unfounded and absurd.

The kind of criticism Collaris has experienced is neither new nor rare. For as long as I can remember, too many people have been far too quick to scream racism against Aboriginal Australians where there is none. Many of this newspaper’s readers will recall the unprecedented backlash the late, great Bill Leak received for drawing a cartoon that drew attention to the neglect too many Aboriginal children face.

For as long as I can remember, people have been routinely claiming Aboriginal Australians are the victims of endless racism. This has resulted in branding Australia as a racist nation against Aboriginal Australians.

Claims of Australia being racist towards Indigenous Australians peaked during and after the voice referendum. Consider the words of ABC Indigenous affairs reporter Bridget Brennan, as recently quoted in The Australian: “When there is so much racism embedded in this country … (during the voice) it was really horrible as an Aboriginal person … We know what exists in Australian society, we see it every day.”

I challenge the claim that we are a racist country against Indigenous people, mostly on the basis that any evidence provided to support the claim is weak or absent. Claims by themselves, however frequent, are simply assertions, not evidence. If Brennan wants to describe exactly what it is she sees each day, I’m perfectly willing to listen. So why are so many Australians so keen to claim we are a racist nation against Indigenous Australians?

I propose a couple of reasons. First, as I wrote in this paper recently when addressing Laura Tingle’s claim that we are racist country, if we hear a message often enough, we start to believe it. Psychologists have a term for this – illusory truth. For as long as I can remember, the media, leaders, academics and lay people have proudly shouted the message that Indigenous Australians are endlessly victims of racism.

Once the belief that we are a racist country is planted in the minds of ordinary people, confirmation bias takes over and they will interpret events and claims in ways that affirm their existing beliefs. A classic illustration is the number of Australians who saw the failure of the voice referendum as proof positive Australia is racist towards Indigenous Australians.

However, 60 per cent of voting Australians did not say no to Indigenous Australians; they said no to a significant proposal that lacked clarity in how it would help Indigenous Australians.

Certainly, there are a small minority of Australians who are racist against Indigenous Australians, but their prevalence is not sufficient to condemn Australia as a racist country.

Using an analogy to elaborate on this, consider that there are many Indigenous Australians who are financially comfortable. It would be foolish to conclude on this basis that Indigenous Australians are financially well off – a few are, but far too many are not.

A second and often overlooked reason claims of racism against Indigenous Australians prevail is that it provides some certainty, when trying to understand the complex reasons for why Indigenous Australians disproportionately suffer poorer health and wellbeing. Rather than addressing factors such as education, employment and remoteness, stating “systemic racism is the problem” provides a sense of certainty and is the quick and easy solution.

This has obvious appeal. Schools can teach their students to apologise for colonisation, the corporates can roll out their cultural awareness programs, and governments can continue with their anti-racism campaigns. Such “well-intentioned” gestures are virtue-signalling at best. In the end, they harm race relations and impact most adversely on Indigenous Australians.

The aforementioned virtue-signallers represent a minority of Australians. Most Australians know that we as a nation are hardworking allies with much good will towards our Indigenous brothers and sisters. However, the constant claims that Indigenous Australians are the victims of a racist country must test the patience and good will of the average Aussie.

But I do not see the torrent of claims of racism against Indigenous Australians abating anytime soon, particularly given the renewed focus on a Makarrata commission that will oversee “truth-telling”. I’m happy to be proven wrong, but I strongly suspect this truth-telling will conclude that racism is the big culprit holding Indigenous Australians back. Let’s start with this truth: racism is not the big culprit holding Indigenous people back today.

We all agree that when racism against Indigenous Australians rears its head, we all have a responsibility to stamp it. But we should be just as diligent in stamping out false claims of racism, otherwise we all suffer.

Anthony Dillon is an Indigenous commentator, and an honorary fellow at the Institute for Positive Psychology and Education at the Australian Catholic University in Sydney.

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sptrawler said:

In a nutshell, that referendum put the whole indigenous issue back 20 years, just a case of grandstanding for the elites showing how out of touch they are.
Fortunately everyone has moved on and put it in the brain fart closet.

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sptrawler said:

In a nutshell, that referendum put the whole indigenous issue back 20 years, just a case of grandstanding for the elites showing how out of touch they are.
Fortunately everyone has moved on and put it in the brain fart closet.

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The voice was defeated … So, why do we carry on accepting Indigenous separatism across our institutions?


Protesters march from Parliament House to Flinders's Street Station during the Treaty Before Voice Invasion Day Protest.

As George Orwell recognised, one of the left’s tricks is to use loaded words as a form of moral intimidation. As he wrote in Politics and the English Language, “political chaos is connected with the decay of language” that’s “designed to make lies sound truthful … and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind”. It’s this “slovenliness of our language”, he said, that “makes it easier to have foolish thoughts”.

Notice how, in our public discourse, almost no one refers any more to “Aboriginal people”. Instead, there has been a steady shift in nomenclature – at least by most of the media and officialdom – from the term Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, a simple description, to the term First Nations people, which implies a particular status.

This intellectual sleight of hand has continued apace, entirely uninterrupted by the smashing defeat of the voice.

First, “Aboriginal people” became “Australia’s first peoples”, as in the First People’s Assembly of Victoria. More recently they’ve become “First Nations people”, as in the ambassador for First Nations people, which was one of the first moves by the then new Albanese government. That’s hardly surprising, as implementing the Uluru Statement from the Heart “in full” – voice, treaty and truth – was the very first commitment that Anthony Albanese made on winning the federal election in 2022.

It’s just that the Uluru statement, far from being the gracious invitation to walk the road to reconciliation together, as the Prime Minister repeatedly claimed, is actually deeply subversive of national unity. It reads: “Our Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander tribes were the first sovereign nations of the Australian continent … and possessed it under our own laws and customs … This sovereignty … has never been ceded or extinguished and co-exists with the sovereignty of the Crown.”

But the term nations implies sovereignty and the term sovereignty implies power. In other words, notwithstanding they’re part of Australia, each Aboriginal “nation” is “sovereign” in the sense of having its own authority to govern itself.

When the voice referendum was resoundingly defeated last year, 61 per cent to 39 per cent, most Australians would have expected some official recognition that the electorate had spoken and decisively rejected the Indigenous separatism inherent in the Uluru agenda. But the Albanese government has never definitively ruled out a legislated voice; is still committed to treaties (even if these are to be negotiated between “First Nations” and the states); and still has $6m in the budget for Makarrata or a so-called truth-telling commission.

Moreover, whenever he’s talking about Aboriginal people, the Prime Minister (and all his ministers) habitually use the term First Nations despite its implications for who is really entitled to call the shots in modern Australia.

The Australian Public Service Commission website advises that the government’s “preference” is to use the term First Nations people. The Walking Together Reconciliation Committee says the terms Aboriginal and Indigenous “fail to represent unique cultures”.

As for the term First Australians, it notes that “some take issue with the reference to ‘Australia’ as it compromises sovereignty for the first people that existed before ‘Australia’ came to be”. By contrast, the term First Nations, says the committee, “recognises Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples as the sovereign people of this land” and is thus a “better choice” than other “outdated and offensive terms”.


The Aboriginal Tent Embassy in the Canberra Parliamentary zone.

Despite spending millions on a voice proposal that their customers and their staff, by and large, didn’t support, woke public companies such as Qantas and Virgin still acknowledge the “traditional owners” whenever a plane lands; and still welcome Australians to the country of the relevant Aboriginal clan rather than to the city or town that belongs to everyone.

Likewise, despite the voice referendum’s defeat, just about every building and landmark in the country, with more than one flag pole, continues to fly the Aboriginal flag co-equally with the national flag, as if the flag of some of us should have equal honour to the flag of all of us.

When voice architect Marcia Langton said there would be no more “welcomes to country” if the voice failed, many Australians quietly cheered. In the event, though, other than a handful of local councils that said they would end the practice, welcomes to country remain commonplace.

Last week, a Victorian barrister, Lana Collaris, publicly rebuked the Victorian Bar Council in these pages for its habitual acknowledgment of the “traditional owners” at the start of every meeting. There’s a particular problem with the term First Nations, she added, which “is wrongly used to strengthen the claims of the ‘sovereignty was never ceded’ and ‘always was, always will be’ movement”. She warned that this was leading to a “two-tiered legal system based on race”.

In response, Victorian Bar president and Bar Council chairwoman Georgina Schoff KC insisted that she would continue to acknowledge “the peoples of the Kulin Nation, the traditional owners of the land where we meet at Owen Dixon Chambers in William St, Melbourne” and cited judicial acknowledgments of Aboriginal people’s connection with country.

No doubt this practice was originally intended as a simple courtesy, a mark of respect, and perhaps an acknowledgment that Aboriginal people haven’t always been treated as well as they should have been in their own land. The problem, though, is the clear inference that ownership has never legitimately transferred.

Chris Merritt, from the Rule of Law Institute, has said that First Nations talk is “a modern fairytale that does more harm than good”. He points out that former High Court chief justice Harry Gibbs said: “There is no Aboriginal nation, if by that expression is meant a people organised as a separate state or exercising any degree of sovereignty”. Another former chief justice, Anthony Mason, said the Mabo case “is entirely at odds with the notion that sovereignty, adverse to the Crown, resides in the Aboriginal people of Australia”.

There are two good reasons why Australian jurisprudence, contrary to current fashion, has never acknowledged Aboriginal nationhood or sovereignty. The first is that the 500-plus clans or tribes that occupied the Australian landmass in 1788 were quite different from the emerging nation-states of Europe, with no formal systems of government and no clearly defined territory.

It may not have been terra nullius but it certainly wasn’t organised, even in the way of the islands of New Zealand at that time, or the Native Americans in the US.

The second is that a retrospective acknowledgment of sovereignty or nationhood would imply the need for some form of atonement or reparation for its loss.

And that’s the whole point, isn’t it? Compensation is exactly what the activists want by demanding the use of First Nations terminology. And that’s exactly what Labor governments will ultimately surrender to if they keep pandering to this linguistic shift. It is why I was so determined to expose the full agenda of the Uluru statement, which at page 19 referred to “reparations” and “a financial settlement (such as seeking a percentage of GDP)”.

What’s becoming clear is that it wasn’t nearly enough simply to defeat the voice. As long as our mental landscape is dominated by the various manifestations of Aboriginal separatism – the First Nations talk, the welcomes to country and the different flags – the voice referendum will simply be a battle won in the lost war for one Australia.

Click to expand...

JohnDe said:

This is what I have been alluding to -

Notice how, in our public discourse, almost no one refers any more to “Aboriginal people”. Instead, there has been a steady shift in nomenclature – at least by most of the media and officialdom – from the term Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, a simple description, to the term First Nations people, which implies a particular status.​

​

But the term nations implies sovereignty and the term sovereignty implies power. In other words, notwithstanding they’re part of Australia, each Aboriginal “nation” is “sovereign” in the sense of having its own authority to govern itself.​

​

What’s becoming clear is that it wasn’t nearly enough simply to defeat the voice. As long as our mental landscape is dominated by the various manifestations of Aboriginal separatism – the First Nations talk, the welcomes to country and the different flags – the voice referendum will simply be a battle won in the lost war for one Australia.​

Click to expand...

orr said:

For those looking forward ;

A way forward after the Voice

Earlier this month, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese announced his government’s new focus for Indigenous policy, pivoting away from the rights-based self-determination approach of the Uluru Statement from the Heart to a First Nations Economic Partnership with the Coalition of Peaks. Representing...

www.thesaturdaypaper.com.au

better than having your head in a place to comfortably sniff your own 'ding' .....or to paraphrase, for those looking for 'Advancement'' from 'the Australian' astro turf movement.

Click to expand...

orr said:

For those looking forward ;

A way forward after the Voice

Earlier this month, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese announced his government’s new focus for Indigenous policy, pivoting away from the rights-based self-determination approach of the Uluru Statement from the Heart to a First Nations Economic Partnership with the Coalition of Peaks. Representing...

www.thesaturdaypaper.com.au

better than having your head in a place to comfortably sniff your own 'ding' .....or to paraphrase, for those looking for 'Advancement'' from 'the Australian' astro turf movement.

Click to expand...

qldfrog said:

Indigenous leader Geoff Clark facing jail time for years-long community theft, fraud

Clark could be jailed after being found guilty of stealing more than $1 million from Indigenous community organisations to pay off ballooning personal debt.

www.theage.com.au

Had the voice gone thru, we could change the laws and make this legal freeing an innocent man racially vilified

Click to expand...

qldfrog said:

Indigenous leader Geoff Clark facing jail time for years-long community theft, fraud

Clark could be jailed after being found guilty of stealing more than $1 million from Indigenous community organisations to pay off ballooning personal debt.

www.theage.com.au

Had the voice gone thru, we could change the laws and make this legal freeing an innocent man racially vilified

Click to expand...