And as i said, I wish people were as concerned about racism as they were about allegations of racism being made. And ‘pitting race against race’ seems like an utterly hysterical overstatement of the case to me. Tell me exactly how this ‘pitting’ is being done?
Here’s the thing about ‘putting race against race’. The entire structure of Australian political and economic society is built on historical racial inequality and atrocity. We are a historical apartheid state, and the side-effects of that linger. Remember that in Aust, the most reliable predictor of your economic situation is the economic situation of your parents. Of the top 5 richest Australians - Rinehart, Forrest, Palmer, Pratt, Triguboff - all 5 of them had parents who were at the very least wealthy, and often tycoons. Now, we’re also all aware that one of the very biggest most reliable bedrock of wealth in this country is ownership of land, right? So, which demographic in Australia has had, historically, vast land ownership violently seized without compensation, and then was functionally banned from owning land for many years after that? The nation that deliberately, for well over a hundred years, locked one specific race out of the pathways to generational economic success with repercussions that continue to be visible today, does not get to clutch their pearls and talk high-mindedly about ‘equality’ now about a damn advisory committee.
The Voice is about acknowledging that reality. The historical experience of post-Cook colonists and immigrants is utterly different to that of indigenous people. One group had their rights of liberty, protection under the law, property, self-determination, pay equality etc etc largely respected, one did not. There have been these two Australias for a very long time. One privileged, one hamstrung. We can’t go back and change that past, but we can’t pretend it doesn’t exist either. Simply arbitrarily declaring that it’s all in the past and we’re equal now just wilfully ignores the reason why the people who owned 100% of Australia in 1788 lost most of that enormous wealth and got no benefit from it, other than a few sacks of strychnine-laced flour. The Voice is, for me, about balancing the scales between those two Australias a bit. We can’t pretend Australia is an equal society, given our history. And I don’t think ANYONE thinks that some sort of pedantic like-for-like major financial reparations process for historical murder or theft of property is even slightly realistic or plausibly possible. Do you? So … the Voice. Is it unequal - well yes, but in a small way to balance staggeringly huge historical inequalities that continue to be felt.
And of course the predictable-as-St-Essington’s-Day counterargument to that is ‘well shouldn’t we be working towards equality rather than a more balanced inequality?’ Well, how are you planning to do that? Because REAL equality means genuinely balancing the past as well as the present, and that means reparations. Are you volunteering for that? And what does your ‘equality’ even look like? Cos if it’s just ‘fit into the world white men built as best as you can and we’ll very generously refrain from massacring you and stealing your land in future, aren’t we nice?’ then you don’t want equality at all and that’s exactly the sort of attitude that’s the problem.
Albanese didn’t come up with the idea of the Voice, remember. It was part of the whole lengthy Uluru Statement consultation process that was entirely driven by indigenous people, from many different places, based on what THEY wanted and needed. I reckon it’s pretty presumptuous of some white guy like me sitting at his surburban laptop and saying ‘no, well that’s NOT what you really need, actually’.
And will it immediately improve life in impoverished remote communities? Well, no of course it won’t. That’s not the point. Can you point me at any Yes campaigner who’s saying it will? There’s lots of areas of indigenous policy in Aust which need addressing, this is just one of them. It won’t fix, for example, joblessness in Tiwi any more than picking up Nick Watson would fix EFCs leaky defence. But just because a step towards solving one problem won’t solve a different problem, doesn’t mean it isn’t worth doing. You might as well complain that replacing the brakepads in your car didn’t fix the alternator.
What the voice WILL is mean that when non-indigenous people impose some unwanted, ineffective, patronising, and contemptuous ‘solution’ to indigenous problems on indigenous people, like has happened many many many times in the past, there’s going to be an indigenous body to say ‘oi, wait!’ Now, parliament will of course be completely free to ignore that body, but the body will be there, it can’t be made to go away or shut up, and non-indigenous people can’t pretend what they do is supported by indigenous people when it isn’t.