Indigenous Australians

If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken … the emptiness of “No”

Paul Hemphill 6 Comments

This is a critical group of voters, whose natural generosity may be undermined by the dog-whistle of division. Their votes will deliver or doom the referendum. Greg Craven.

This referendum is a genuine, good idea to simply get it right. Bill Shorten

The title of this piece is borrowed from the poem by Rudyard Kipling that has served as the source of inspirational manuals, mottos and memes for over a century. It has inspired songs, stories, plays and films – my favourite being Lindsay Anderson’s 1968 anarchist fantasy set in a tyrannical English public school.

Sky after Dark and News Corp opinionista Chris Kenny is almost alone among his colleagues in speaking out in support of the Indigenous and Torres Strait Islander Voice to Parliament. To help readers scale The Australian’s pay-wall, I republish here his advice not to be fooled by the No campaign’s shallow and disingenuous scare tactics. To paraphrase Kipling’s poem, the words of both the referendum and the Uluru Statement from The Heart from which it sprang are “twisted by knaves to make a trap” for the ill-informed and disinterested.

This comes as in the same weekend edition Janet Albrechtsen, one of News’ several No camp tricoteuses * recycles her customary legal arguments (she was a lawyer after all in a past life, though according to a friend of mine who actually worked with her back then, “she thinks she’s much cleverer than she is”). She wrote, disingenuously riffing on the anniversary of Martin Luther King’s seminal “I have a dream” speech – how even the martyred MLK spoke of a land in which there was no distinction between black and white (with the benefi of hindsight, we know how well that dream worked out):

“Australians, without a scintilla of legal training, understand we are inserting into our Constitution brand-new special rights given to a group of people simply because of their race. It is something entirely different to anything in the Constitution right now. By placing this squarely in the Constitution, many Australians understand the High Court will be the ultimate determinant of those rights, not the parliament”.

A dog-whistle if ever I heard one, dressed up in lawyer-speak. Most Australians know sweet FA about our constitution, and their knowledge of our political institutions and the laws which govern them is likewise limited. Moreover, the Voice will not impinge on the lives of most Australians, and yet it’ll mean an enormous amount to First Australians.

Kenny is not alone in The Australian’s pages, however. Conservative expert in constitutional law, Greg Craven, whom I have featured several times in this blog’,  provides a cogent rebuttal of many of the No campaign’s claimsprovides a cogent rebuttal of many of the No campaign’s claims, explaining how the High Court will cleave to constitutional realities and not to conservative fears and fantasies:

“… it is a constitutional principle that powers of the federal parliament should be interpreted broadly. This is a legal fact, rather than the clueless constitutional riffing of senior No campaigners such as Nyunggai Warren Mundine and Senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price …constitutional provisions are to be interpreted as a whole, not cut and diced for media opportunities. The proposed amendment does not just give parliament power to make laws about the voice. It gives specific capacity to make laws about its composition, functions, powers and procedures. Every one of these envelopes enables parliament to make laws firmly locating the voice within proper constitutional and political limits … make a law compelling the voice to give priority to practical improvements rather than international frolics.

Worried the voice will be an exclus­ive clan of excessively remunerated, over-budgeted bur­eau­crats? Make laws requiring strong qualifications for members, forcing membership to be turned over at regular intervals, mandating modest remuneration, setting overall budget limits, confining staff numbers and banning business-class flights.

Worried about endless, expensive inquiries that could go anywhere, without focus and evidence? Make laws imposing reporting times and parameters for inquiries, mandating that they be based on documented evidence, and making the whole operation subject to the normal assurance measures for government action: the auditor-general, Freedom of Information, administrative review and the criticism of the person who makes the tea.

The court will give parliament the full extent of its power, but no more. It will give proper constitutional respect to the voice, but nothing extra. This is real adherence to the Constitution, not peddling constitutional zombies”.

Craven wrote in The Australian on 12 August 2023:

“Indigenous citizens will have no new powers or constitutional rights. They will have no differential status. Unlike in Canada and the US, there will be no unique Indigenous privileges. There simply will be a means for ­Indigenous people to express collective views to Canberra …The No case is misleading in maintaining the law never differentiates between groups of people based on disadvantage. Multiple equal opportunity Acts, let alone special laws for disabled people, stand out. Will we repeal them?

…The irony is that there is indeed a dramatic division between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians, but it is not constitutional, nor does it favour Indigenous citizens. Indigenous people suffer social and economic disadvantage that would see white Australians rise in armed revolt … Preaching against ­division, it divides by pretending to non-Indigenous Australians that Indigenous Australian are getting a cushy, special deal …

Resentment is always a bad base for policy. Logically, one group loses nothing when it is unaffected by modest change assisting some other, profoundly disadvantaged group. Their gain is nobody’s loss. But as a cynical promotion of division, the politics of grudge is highly attractive. Given encouragement, some proportion of people will feel neglected and disadvantaged by the voice. In practice, these will be Australians most exposed to economic hardship through social background or lack and opportunity. .

… Constitutionally, the greatest division and inequality in Australia is that every state gets the same 12 senators, regardless of population. Tasmania gets more places per ­person than Victoria. This is real power, not a constitutionalised chat. It is irrelevant that it was part of the Federation package. The principle is the same”

Recently, Mark Speakman, NSW Leader of the Opposition, former NSW Attorney General and Solicitor General weighed in:

“I don’t see this amendment as racist because, at the end of the day, it is an advisory body that has no constitutional entitlement to be consulted; is not a third chamber; and has no veto rights over legislation or decisions”.

He is is clear-eyed that the Voice is not a “magic wand”, but after decades of failures to close the gap between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians, something has to give.  A Voice enshrined in the Constitution offers a pathway forward, he says. “There’s a real possibility it will make no difference. But you’re not running a criminal trial trying to prove beyond reasonable doubt that the Voice will work. You’re weighing up the pros and cons and probabilities. “And other things being equal, we’ll be better off with a Voice like this than without one.” (Sydney Morning Herald 12 August 2023).

Chris Kenny is convinced that is about the politics.

It is almost a tribal thing. Almost two-thirds of Coalition voters oppose altering the Constitution to establish an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice, according to July’s Resolve poll. Only 17 per cent are in favour. Near one-in-five Coalition voters remain undecided. As recent analyses of election result illustrate, young and even middle-aged voters are deserting the Coalition in droves – and most women overall, parking their votes with Labor, the Grrens abd the Teal independents.

If the coalition introduced a referendum identical to this on it own initiative – an unlikely prospect, I know, given it had a decade to do so, but chose to do nothing- its boosters in the media, including its News Corp enablersand the Sky After Dark cabal, would be standing in its corner. If the Prime Minister decided that he’d replace a constitutional Voice with a legislated one, as indeed as he has “advocated” – though his National Party counterpart begged to differ – the part room would probably oppose it, as it has done with nearly everything the Labor govern has put up.

Kenny writes:

“The historically significant reconciliation project of the Indigenous voice has now been seized as a partisan, political weapon to be used against the federal Labor government – any doubt about that was removed this week. Senior Coalition figures now see defeating the referendum as their primary political priority to inflict political damage on the Prime Minister.

It is that ugly. It is that cynical … Yet think of what the Coalition might willingly trash in its hard-hearted ploy to take some bark off Anthony Albanese. Decades of Indigenous advocacy and consultation, including by Coalition governments, driven by the noblest of intentions, are being dis­respected. Imperilling reconciliation for partisan advantage is hardcore. Yet this week the opposition led question time with scares about the voice and attempted to censure the Prime Minister, accusing him of running a secret agenda to undermine the nation’s future” (The Australian, 5th August 2023)

And so, here we are on the eve of the “actual” Yes campaign, and we are out on the street and at our local markets handing out information and answering questions on The Voice to Parliament. The vibe is good. You’d think we were home and hosed, but we know therein is a lot of wishful thinking. There’s still way t. I’ll leave the last word to Rudyard who is incidentally one of my favourite poets: “If you can fill the unforgiving minute with sixty seconds’ worth of distance run …”  we certainly shall. But, win or lose, neither those who vote Yes or those who vote No will feel too good on the morning after.

* Tricoteuses is French for a knitting women. The term is most often used in its historical sense as a nickname for the women who supported French Revolution and sat beside the guillotine during public executions of the Reign of Terror, supposedly continuing to knit.

© Paul Hemphill 2023 All rights reserved

See other related stories in In That Howling Infinite: 

Martin Sparrow’s Blues; The Frontier Wars – Australia’s heart of darkness ; Dark Deeds in a Sunny Land – a poet’s memorial to a forgotten crime ; We oughtn’t to fear an Indigenous Voice – but we do; Warrior woman – the trials and triumphs of Marcia Langton 

A Voice crying in the wilderness

 


Indigenous voice to parliament: Busting eight myths of the No campaign

Chris Kenny, The Weekend Australian, August 26, 2023

The No campaign is designed to generate anxiety, writes Chris Kenny. Pictured: prominent No campaigner and Coalition Senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price. Picture: Kevin Farmer

No campaigner and Coalition Senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price

It was a simple interest in the truth that first entangled me in Indigenous issues almost 30 years ago. Back then I helped to expose the fabrication of the Hindmarsh Island secret women’s business and was scarified by the Keating Labor government, the ABC, Indigenous groups, environmental organisations, activist churches and every other arm of the broader green left.

It was a tough time, but it triggered a royal commission which exposed the episode, vindicated my reporting and endorsed the evidence and integrity of the Ngarrindjeri women who had called out the prostitution of their heritage. “Reconciliation starts with the truth,” said the late Beryl Kropinyeri, one of those courageous and wonderful women back in 1995.

Three decades later, my longstanding support for an Indigenous voice has seen me cross swords with many from the conservative side of the political debate. And again, in a different way, truth is central.

The referendum debate has been toxic at times, on both sides. The aim of the Yes case is to reassure, and the No case aims to heighten fears. I cannot deal with the myriad minor lies and distortions arising day by day but let me outline what I see as some of the major myths of the No campaign:

1 The voice “inserts race” into the Constitution.

This is a blatant mistruth. Race has been in the Constitution since Federation and still exists in two clauses, including under the so-called “race power”. The voice does not mention race (surely an outdated concept) but would ensure that when the government makes special laws or policies ­relating to Indigenous people (ironically, under that existing race power) then Indigenous people will at least have had the opportunity to offer their views.

2 The voice will deliver a treaty, reparations and more.

These claims form the heart of the scare campaign and deliberately ignore the most central ­element of the voice – it will have no legal power, it is advisory only and cannot implement any law or policy. The No campaign persistently raises extreme demands made by activists and pretends they will be delivered through the voice, even though the voice can deliver nothing.

Because it is only advisory, the effectiveness of the voice will be directly linked to the quality of its ideas. If the voice makes wild recommendations, governments will easily ignore it; whereas if it makes sensible recommendations, the voice will carry some weight. Either way, all the power of implementation rests with government and parliament, so the scares are baseless.

3 The Uluru Statement from the Heart is more than one page long.

The Indigenous consensus for a voice is expressed in the 2017 Uluru Statement, which has become the foundational document for political action. Anthony Albanese committed to “implement it in full” – in other words, he has committed to three elements, of voice, truth and Makaratta (a Yolngu word for agreement-making after disputes). The No campaign has used this to raise fears about treaties but then, earlier this month, they suddenly claimed there was a longer, secret version of the statement, explicitly mentioning treaties and reparations, so Labor had signed up to a more radical agenda.

The claim is false. The documents they refer to are background papers and meeting summaries from consultations leading up to Uluru. They have been public all along (including during five years of Coalition government) and no one has signed up to them. The No campaigners have rejected what is obvious from reading the papers, selectively quoting one of the authors, Megan Davis, and ignoring her clarification – Davis had urged people to read these documents to understand the Uluru statement and her choice of words was poor, but so much for secrecy. The “longer” statement claim is a confection aimed at sustaining a scare campaign but, incredibly, some persist with it.

[The Statement From The Heart is published in full at the end of this post]

4 The voice will divide the nation.

The No campaign argues the 1967 referendum ensured Indigenous Australians were “recognised as part of the population” and that a voice will “enshrine division” in the Constitution. This ignores how the main change in 1967 gave the federal government power to make special policies and laws for Indigenous people. Since, we have seen laws, policies, organisations, and government ministers specifically focused on Indigenous Australians – for good or ill. The voice push recognises this power is still required – to manage native title and cultural heritage issues, for instance, and to close the gap. But it proposes that to help ensure these powers are used effectively and not against the interests of Indigenous people, a representative body should provide non-binding advice to government. To characterise this as divisive is to turn practical reality on its head; alternatively, we would remove division by repealing the race power, abolishing native title and cultural heritage laws, scrapping the Indigenous affairs department (NIAA), axing the Indigenous portfolio, and removing every program and project specific to Indigenous communities. The notion is absurd. Given these special provisions must stay, allowing Indigenous people to provide advice on these matters is not divisive but inclusive – nothing more than a fair go.

Yes campaigner Noel Pearson. Picture: Getty Images
Yes campaigner Noel Pearson. 

5 The voice is an elite forum or a “Canberra voice”.

This, too, is the opposite to reality. It accurately describes the Indigenous advisory councils that Labor and Liberal governments appointed in the past – under Tony Abbott such a forum was headed by Warren Mundine. These hand-picked bodies have been the epitome of a “Canberra voice” and Indigenous people have had no say on membership.

The voice proposal aims to provide an advisory body chosen by Indigenous people in communities around the country, so that the federal government hears ideas from grassroots communities. The whole thrust of the voice proposal, including under the detailed work I was involved in under the Morrison Coalition government, is to provide local representatives from disparate communities.

6 The voice is overreach beyond recognition.

A constant refrain from No advocates is that the voice is overreach and they would support a simple statement of recognition in the Constitution. This ignores the fact voters were given this choice in the 1999 republic referendum when a constitutional preamble was put, including the words, “honouring Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders, the nation’s first people, for their deep kinship with their lands and for their ancient and continuing cultures which enrich the life of our country”. It was rejected. Bipartisan support for recognition was kicked along again by John Howard in 2007, and subsequent political and Indigenous consultations settled on the voice as the preferred means of constitutional recognition. If the current proposal is defeated it will be a rejection of the only form of recognition on offer, and a repudiation of Indigenous aspiration for recognition.

Reconciliation cannot progress meaningfully if non-Indigenous Australia declares it will offer constitutional recognition only on its own minimalist terms – a modern version of trinkets and beads.

7   The voice allows 3 per cent of the population to hold sway over the rest.

This myth flips power balance and victim status on their heads. The idea that redressing disadvantage and a lack of agency for our most downtrodden cohort is a threat to the more successful majority is a perversion. To begin, the constitutional wording ensures the voice can make representations only on matters relating to Indigenous people, and even if opponents argue this could be liberally interpreted to cover virtually any government decision, nothing changes the fact the voice is advisory only.

So the idea the voice is a threat to the nation is to create resentment where there should be none. The proposal aims to redress imbalance, not create it. The voice could lead to some difficult political debates, so be it, but all power remains with parliament and the executive.

8 The voice will not fix Indigenous traumas or close the gap.

This argument is desperate but common. It sidesteps the important issues of justice, recognition, and future safeguards by feigning an overarching concern for contemporary outcomes. Opponents assert that a voice would not fix law and order problems in Alice Springs or end domestic ­violence trauma in Indigenous communities. None of us knows. What we do know is that these problems exist now, and current policies have failed.

A voice could provide the grassroots insights and ideas to make a difference, or it could fail like everything else. But the critics cannot pretend to know the outcomes of a consultative body that has not yet been tried.

One of the most prospective aspects of the voice, which ­conservatives should embrace, is that it would give Indigenous communities not only some input, but a share of responsibility for delivering outcomes. It takes away the excuse, if you like, of a lack of agency.

There have been failures on both sides of the voice debate. Early on, leading Yes campaigners engaged in personal abuse, and emotional blackmail remains a recurring theme.

The No campaign is designed to generate anxiety. Without fear, they have no persuasive arguments, especially given that the Coalition has long argued a voice is worthwhile (the only proviso that it is not mandated in the Constitution).

It is a tall ask to scare people about mandating the legislation of a voice when you propose to legislate a voice under existing powers anyway. But so far it is working.

The debate has hardly been front of mind for mainstream voters, so the next six weeks will be crucial.

No doubt the myths will still be peddled. Opponents are intent on baring their teeth at a toothless body.

The Uluru Statement From The Heart

We, gathered at the 2017 National Constitutional Convention, coming from all points of the southern sky, make this statement from the heart:

Our Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander tribes were the first sovereign Nations of the Australian continent and its adjacent islands, and possessed it under our own laws and customs. This our ancestors did, according to the reckoning of our culture, from the Creation, according to the common law from ‘time immemorial’, and according to science more than 60,000 years ago.

This sovereignty is a spiritual notion: the ancestral tie between the land, or ‘mother nature’, and the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples who were born therefrom, remain attached thereto, and must one day return thither to be united with our ancestors. This link is the basis of the ownership of the soil, or better, of sovereignty. It has never been ceded or extinguished, and co-exists with the sovereignty of the Crown.

How could it be otherwise? That peoples possessed a land for sixty millennia and this sacred link disappears from world history in merely the last two hundred years?

With substantive constitutional change and structural reform, we believe this ancient sovereignty can shine through as a fuller expression of Australia’s nationhood.

Proportionally, we are the most incarcerated people on the planet. We are not an innately criminal people. Our children are aliened from their families at unprecedented rates. This cannot be because we have no love for them. And our youth languish in detention in obscene numbers. They should be our hope for the future.

These dimensions of our crisis tell plainly the structural nature of our problem. This is the torment of our powerlessness.

We seek constitutional reforms to empower our people and take a rightful place in our own country. When we have power over our destiny our children will flourish. They will walk in two worlds and their culture will be a gift to their country.

We call for the establishment of a First Nations Voice enshrined in the Constitution.
Makarrata is the culmination of our agenda: the coming together after a struggle. It captures our aspirations for a fair and truthful relationship with the people of Australia and a better future for our children based on justice and self-determination.

We seek a Makarrata Commission to supervise a process of agreement-making between governments and First Nations and truth-telling about our history.

In 1967 we were counted, in 2017 we seek to be heard. We leave base camp and start our trek across this vast country. We invite you to walk with us in a movement of the Australian people for a better future

A Voice crying in the wilderness

Paul Hemphill 10 Comments

History is a myth that men agree to believe. Napoleon

Origin stories often contain a good deal of mythology – not the old gods and goddesses stuff, nor the tales folktales of faeries and elves, but rather, the stories we tell ourselves about who and what we are as a nation, it’s origins, character, it’s constitution The pioneer spirit is one, based on the now dismissed concept of terra nullius (there was nobody and nothing here of any worth when we arrived ) and the belief that white settlement established in the face of hardship and adversity made us the proud nation wer are today. Military valour and prowess is another, born of a military débâcle, and our repeated involvement in foreign wars, many but not all on others’ interests rather than our own. Other shibboleths evolved from these – like egalitarianism, mate ship, and the “fair go”. Periodically, we are forced to look at ourselves and out history, and to grapple with our many mythologies – and we discover that we are not really who we think we are. And, to quote American cartoonist Walt Kelly, who borrowed from the early 19th century US naval hero Commodore Perry, “we have met the enemy – and he is us!”

A leap of faith or a leap in the dark?

We have waited 122 years to recognize in our Constitution the privilege that we have of sharing this continent with the oldest continuous culture on earth. I say to Australians, do not miss this opportunity. Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese

Anthony Albanese calls the Torres Strait Islander and  Aboriginal Voice to Parliament “the chance to make a positive change that will last for generations”. Peter Dutton says it’s a “reckless roll of the dice” that will “take our country backwards, not forwards”. These are the battle lines drawn around the upcoming referendum on the Voice to parliament, which promises to be a watershed moment in the history of our nation.

If a Yes vote prevails, the Constitution will be amended to formally recognize Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples with the creation of a new body to represent their interests in the running of this country. 

If established , the Voice will be an advisory body to give indigenous people all around the country a say in government policy and programs that affect the lives of their peoples. Critically, the intention has always been to have its existence and validity enshrined in the Constitution. This would have a dual purpose: to formally recognise First Nations peoples as well as to insulate this new body from the threat of an unsympathetic government later attempting to disband it. But if the referendum fails it will bring to a sudden end years of work and, many believe, strike a devastating blow to the process of reconciliation.  

Although opposition leader Peter Dutton’s anti-Voice campaign is yielding its bitter fruit in the steady rise in the No vote, it has yet to translate into a noticeable drop in support for Albanese and his Labor government. And Dutton’s friends and rivals continue to point out that he might suffer more politically than the prime minister if the referendum fails. “If Yes wins, he loses. If No wins, he loses anyway,” is how a senior Liberal put it. And so do we as a nation. 

The Sydney Morning Herald provides a good explainer of what The Voice is, and how the arguments for and against are playing out. Read it HERE– though you might find the of The First Dog On The Moon more lighthearted: 

Controversial indigenous author and anthropologist Bruce Pascoe advises us to read what Megan Davis, a Cobble Cobble woman of the Barunggam Nation and a renowned constitutional lawyer, authoritative public law expert, has written:  Voice of reason, a document for Quarterly Essay that covers the whole ground of colonial assumptions and Indigenous dispossession.

She calmly paints the picture of Aboriginal disadvantage and the origins of that disadvantage. Importantly, however, she emphasizes that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people never ceded the land and the British never followed the terms of occupation as outlined by their sovereign. But Aboriginal people believed in realpolitik and continued to interact with the invader in order to set out their own sovereignty and claims of attachment to the land. She quotes Fred Maynard and William Cooper, both underrated Aboriginal advocates.

Bret Walker SC has said of this situation: “The basis of settlement of Australia is and always has been, ultimately, the exertion of force by and on behalf of the British arrivals. They did not ask permission to settle. No one consented, no one ceded.” The legal authority is completely absent. And in its absence, Australia was able to build, fig leaf by fig leaf, a myth of legitimacy. In this embarrassing nakedness, the few Australian attempts at some adjustment of this situation asked everything of the people and nothing of the state

When, on June 19th, parliament approved both the final wording of the constitutional amendment and the question that will be put to the Australian people later this year to approve it, or not, it was evident that neither a Yes nor a No result was a foregone conclusion. While support for the change had started out high earlier in the year, polling has shown it slipping as a variety of critics across the political spectrum have made their objections known. Still, the Yes campaign has only just officially begun with a series of events across the country this weekend. Nevertheless, as some commentators have pointed out, the Yes campaign appears to be further behind in advocacy and communication  than the the Same Sex Marriage plebiscite campaign at this point on the campaign clock. 

Like it or not, our civic culture and capacity for community discussion is distressingly thin. Our default setting is to leave it to our politicians to direct public debate. Big proposals like the Voice are inevitably funneled through an argument between a prime minister and a leader of the opposition. Right now, the government’s argument for the Yes case at the political level consists of telling us A: what a good feeling we’ll have if we endorse it, and B: what the Voice isn’t. The political risk for Albanese is that at year’s end, after finally fully devoting himself to the referendum in the vain hope that he can get it over the line, he’s condemned by rising numbers of voters who believe he has treated the burning issues of cost of living and the economy as second-order concerns. That wouldn’t be the future he imagined on election night. Sean Carney, SMH 15 June 2023

In what, alas, is shaping up to be a climactic battle in the Australian culture wars, so much of the rhetoric is exaggerated, inapposite and polarizing. It has the ring of being made in America. What conservative barrister and author Greg Craven describes as “the current wilderness of virulence, the toxic atmosphere now surrounding the Voice”.

Craven wrote in the Weekend Australian on 24th June: “As people of good heart, we should not automatically default to the baser character of our days: to weigh, to calculate, to carp and to critique. We need to ask – intelligently and with proper judgment – not just what conceivably could go wrong if everything went against us but what should go right given pervasive goodwill and even average good fortune … What is the actual opportunity, rather than the determinedly imagined Frankenstein’s monster? … The voice will enable those who have 65,000 years of connection to this country, who are now our most dispossessed, to talk to us, yes, with measured authority, but not with a veto. We are indeed the people of the fair go. How is this not fair?”

Hopes and fears

There exists still a darkness at the heart of our democracy that we struggle to come to terms with; and in these divisive days, it doesn’t take much to reignite our “history wars” as we negotiate competing narratives and debate the “black armband” and “white blindfold” versions of our national story.
In That Howling Infinite, The Frontier Wars – Australia’s Heart of Darkness.

In August 2022, mini-micro-party leader Paul Hanson prematurely appointed herself as the leader of the No Vote (others have since grabbed back that dubious role, but she wears the crown well) in an interview with that millionaire champion of strugglers Alan Jones, declaring “If you believe that this is going to create reconciliation then you’re a bloody fool because it’s not.’

Was this contrived or some strange quirk of history and politics that Pauline Hanson resuscitated the the old bogeyman last seen during the lead up to the landmark Mabo decision of thirty years ago – the scare campaign warning that Aborigines would lay claim to our suburban backyards if Eddie Mabo’s High Court challenge succeeded.

Back at the beginning when the Albanese Labor Government was brand new and we basked in the glow of confidence that in a rerun of the 1967 referendum, Australians would embrace  the  long overdue constitutional recognition of our First Nations people, we believed that such visceral opposition was all bluster, as most scare campaigns tend to be.

Sadly, matters have escalated since then as supporters and opponents have got themselves lost on the woods and weeds of claim and counterclaim, hyperbole and just plain hype, and at times, hysteria. There are reasoned arguments on all sides, and in the middle ground between them, but the malevolent genie is out of the bottle. As Chris Kenny, News Corporation opinionista and Sky After Dark “outsider, but one of the very few amongst his colleagues to actively support the Yes campaign for the Voice to Parliament, wrote in the Australian on 3rd June:

“Here is a sample of the many thousands of messages I have received online: “You’re on the wrong side of history and shame on you, you’re keeping racism alive by supporting the voice.” “The voice is a racist joke.” “No to further division. No to giving up property rights. No to reparations based on lies and skin colour.” “Lockouts from state forests, no hunting if you’re not Indigenous, all would get worse. Why cement the woke mind virus, critical race theory, into the Constitution?” “The voice is racist, divisive, apartheid and undemocratic.” “Voice is nothing but a Trojan horse to impose more communist government on us all. They can’t all truly believe this?”

And by the way, the Voic could also call for changing the date of Australia Day and even, the Australian flag. 

At the heart of the Liberal Party’s opposition to the Indigenous Voice is the notion that it divides Australia rather than uniting it because it gives Aboriginal people rights or privileges that others do not enjoy. Peter Dutton riffed on George Orwell when he declared that with regard to the Voice, some would be are “more equal than others”. But the paradox is that if politicians respond to protracted inequality experienced by different groups by continuing to treat them as equals, they perpetuate that inequality. 

Lawyer Josh Bernstein wrote in the Herald on 4th July: “The reality is that the No campaign encourages Australians to lie to themselves; to deny reality. To pretend that the disturbing inequalities currently suffered by Australia’s Indigenous population – in life expectancy, health, education, income and rates of incarceration – don’t exist. To deny some of the most disturbing parts of our history. To pretend that Aboriginal Australians were not treated as non-citizens for many decades, were not deprived of the vote, were not separated from their families and were not subjected to massacres and violence”.

Then there are those who warn that should Yes prevail, something wicked this way comes. Whilst not indulging in the far-fetched imaginings of the political extremities, some like News Corp’s Madam Défarge Janet Albrechtsen warn of worse to come as the apparent end-game of the Uluru Statement From The Heart comes to pass: “The Uluru statement is the starting point”, she wrote in The Australian, “It calls for a “First Nations Voice enshrined in the Constitution” but acknowledges this is not the culmination of their ambition. As the statement says, “Makarrata is the culmination of our ­agenda … we seek a Makarrata Commission to supervise a process of agreement-making between government and First Nations and truth-telling about our history”. A Yes vote in the referendum, she predicts “is not the end of the process but rather the starting gun to a long and divisive treaty negotiation where the voice has the whip hand. This will likely lead to separatism and bitterness, not ­reconciliation. So if you are worried about the voice, wait until you see the treaty”. 

Paul Hanson argues that Voice would be all-powerful, claims and “would override the supremacy of the elected Parliament and undermine the authority of the elected Australian government”, triggering litigation that would lead to “multiple constitutional crises”. She goes further: it could be a frontrunner for the creation of a new Indigenous state and could also be used as a vehicle for the establishment of racially exclusive seats in parliament held only by Indigenous people, similar to New Zealand’s parliament. Read her Senate speech HERE.

Indigenous independent senator Lidia Thorpe, on the other hand, who opposes the Voice on the basis that it will be powerless and compromise Indigenous sovereignty, has already made clear she wants her “progressive No” arguments included in the No case. Hanson has also demanded a say in the official pamphlet that will outline the Yes and No cases. Senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price is chairing the Coalition committee that will formulate the No camp’s written case. The document will form the opposing half of the Yes/No referendum pamphlet that the Australian Electoral Commission is required to distribute to every Australian household at least 14 days before the vote. There is no legal requirement for the pamphlet to be truthful or accurate.

It is impossible to argue that an Indigenous representative body legislated under a new constitutional mandate is divisive while such a body legislated under existing constitutional provisions is not. This contradiction gives their ploy away. The No campaigners are effectively saying an advisory group drawn from less than 4% of the population advising only on matters affecting this less than 4% will somehow disrupt harmony in Australia. Am I missing something?

In a letter the editor in the Weekend Australian letter 27th May 2023, Janusz Bonkowski of Sunshine Beach, Queensland voiced something similar:

”Chris Merritt (a News Corp columnist in a recent opinion piece)  crystallized the major objection to the voice when he said that “all Australians should be equal not just before the law, but before those who make the law and those who apply the law” (“Name-calling Noel Pearson misses the point about shifting support”, 26/5). Fair enough. So he means that nobody should have a voice because that means undue influence. So all lobbyists should be kicked out, no more meetings with business leaders by our elected representatives, no more preferential consideration of submissions by pressure groups, and no more freebies for our politicians and senior public servants. The voice has got nothing to do with one man, one vote; it is about joining the table that the business roundtable, the National Farmers Federation, the ACTU and every other special interest group has been sitting at since federation”.

So, as Anne Twomey, professor of constitutional law at the University of Sydney, wrote in 2029, we ought’nt to fear the voice but we do. We do this  “not because of race. It is because of indigeneity. Only indigenous Australians have legal rights that preceded British settlement and continue to apply today. Only indigenous Australians have a history and culture unique to Australia. It is not racist, divisive or a breach of principles of equality to enact laws that deal with native title rights or protect indigenous cultural heritage. Nor is it racist, divisive or in breach of principles of equality to allow the only group about whom special laws are made to be heard about the making of these laws. Indeed, it is only fair, and fairness is a fundamental principle that Australians respect”. There is a link to her article at the end of this piece.

Nuff said …

The good heart or the fearful one?

No more turning away
From the weak and the weary
No more turning away
From the coldness inside
Just a world that we all must share
It’s not enough just to stand and stare
Is it only a dream that there’ll be
No more turning away?

If people were being listened to, they would not need a voice. As Prme Minister Anthony Albanese said, back in those early days, “in the past, governments did things for indigenous Australians – ofttimes with good intentions, ofttimes not, and with mixed results. Now it’s time to do things with them”. Whether thevVoic will close the gap is moot, but this is not the point right now.

As Press Gallery journalist of the year David Crow observed in the Sydney Morning Herald on 19th June, “The Voice is more than recognition because Indigenous leaders wanted practical change. The terrible suffering of First Australians over 235 years gave those leaders good cause to demand a right to consult on federal decisions, even at the risk of a tragic setback for reconciliation if the referendum fails. Practical change is ultimately about power, and the polls suggest many Australians do not want to give Indigenous people more power. It is too soon to be sure”.

Peter Dutton declares that “the Prime Minister is saying to Australians ‘just vote for this on the vibe”. And yet, it is the “vibe” that will get The Voice over the line. Perhaps the good heart will prevail Australia-wide on polling day and those “better angels of our nature” will engender trust in our indigenous and also political leaders to deliver an outcome that dispels the prevailing doubt, distrust and divisiveness, and exorcise the dark heart that endures still in our history, our culture and our society. Because if the referendum goes down, none of us will feel too good the morning after … 

© Paul Hemphill 2023 All rights reserved

See other related stories in In That Howling Infinite: 

Martin Sparrow’s Blues; The Frontier Wars – Australia’s heart of darkness ; Dark Deeds in a Sunny Land – a poet’s memorial to a forgotten crime ; We oughtn’t to fear an Indigenous Voice – but we do; Warrior woman – the trials and triumphs of Marcia Langton 

… they were standin’ on the shore one day
Saw the white sails in the sun
Wasn’t long before they felt the sting
White man, white law, white gun
Solid Rock, Goanna 1982

Indigenous voice to parliament – not merely a good idea but the decent thing

Greg Craven, the Weekend Australian, 24th June 2023
Senator Lidia Thorpe as the Constitution Alteration (Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice) 2023 is voted on in the Senate. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Martin Ollman
Senator Lidia Thorpe as the Constitution Alteration (Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice) 2023 is voted on in the Senate. NCA NewsWire / Martin Ollman

No constitutional amendment is easy, and from our current vantage point the Indigenous voicelooks as hard as any. An idea formed in justice and empathy is surrounded by critics, nay-sayers and outright enemies. There are more quibbles and confusions than genuine debates and conversation.

The great challenge with constitutional change is that it becomes – literally – all about words. We forget whatever great good we are aiming for, and rather contend for the perfect adjective or the divinely inspired comma. We are so terrified of the instrumental word-slip that we forget the great imperative the words are meant to serve.

While the constitutional voice was forced in the parliament to duel with dictionaries and thesauruses, the passage of the bill allows us to return to the fundamental truth about successful constitutional amendments. Words are the servants of great constitutional ideas, not the other way around. The heart of those ideas are moral imperatives, not syntax.

Every great constitutional exercise has centred on matters of profound principle. The anti-slavery amendment to the US constitution was not a property law reform or even a realignment of the rights of the states. It was a proposition of humanity.

In Australia, we are famously constitutionally pragmatic, but we need to take a deeper look at the sprawling constitutional project of Federation. Signally imperfect as it was for Indigenous Australians, this was not the administrative reorganisation of the existing colonies. It was the birth of a nation in confidence and hope. The words of the Constitution did not really create Australia. Australia justified them.

As the referendum on the voice goes forward, we need to recapture the notion of constitutional spirit – a concept as familiar to Deakin and Barton as it was to Hamilton and Adams – from the closed fingers of constitutional actuaries. The voice is about the soul of our country, and there is nothing more basic, important and down-right pragmatic as the possession of a soul. Or as our forebears often put it, a good heart.

As people of good heart, we should not automatically default to the baser character of our days: to weigh, to calculate, to carp and to critique. We need to ask – intelligently and with proper judgment – not just what conceivably could go wrong if everything went against us but what should go right given pervasive goodwill and even average good fortune.

We should look at the concept of the voice not through a cracked microscope but a modestly lit window. What is the actual opportunity, rather than the determinedly imagined Frankenstein’s monster? On offer is not a cynical grab for power by a shadowy Aboriginal aristocracy. Frankly, if it were, we would be more than smart and tough enough to frustrate it, before or after referendum.

Nor is this constitutional impetus about “doing something” for Indigenous people. We have tried that for decades, and it has failed, as much for having at its heart a corrosive condescension to helplessness as for any other reason. Indigenous Australians will never rise simply through funding, philanthropy, help, sympathy, compassion or pity.

The only route by which a great people can embrace the indispensable indigeneity of its character, and the people who embody that character, is solidarity.

Solidarity is not some shallow trademark of retro-communists or showy trade unions. It is the sublime concept that people not only live within but within each other. In a Christian context, for example, it means that every person’s humanity is amplified, not qualified, by their commitment to others. The same principle runs through every major religion and most respectable political ideologies.

This is how we must approach our Indigenous brothers and sisters in the referendum. We are not going to give them something, or give up something ourselves, but do something mighty together.

At Federation we created a commonwealth. Now, we advance it.

In fact, Federation is an instructive example in the current wilderness of virulence around the voice. Can anyone doubt that the present No case would have been the No case then? The different states will divide the people. The bureaucracy will run amok. It will all be just too complex and expensive. The risk is just too great.

Listen carefully and you hear the same grudging growls. Those thought leaders who wish to strangle the voice out of contemptuous caution would have throttled the Federation they now flaunt. But the Australian people did not listen. Commonsensical and pragmatic, but still conscious of an irrepressible destiny, they voted Yes. The direct descendant of that vote would be the vote for the voice in October.

One of the great challenges in promoting the voice is that the sort of discussion required is emotionally counterintuitive to Australian public debate, let alone the constitutional politics of our country.

National stereotypes aside, and dismissing the occasional flocks of eccentric fringe protesters, we are not a polity given to the ostentation of public principle. We are not skites of constitutional and public virtue.

Minister for Indigenous Australians Linda Burney during Question Time. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Martin Ollman
Minister Linda Burney during Question Time. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Martin Ollman

Many countries are. The US celebrates its bill of rights and the constitutional bonanza it confers in an unceasing national festival. Its historic failures for numerous racial and other minority groups, and its distortion of representative democracy, are not invited guests. France prosecutes a posterity based on a principle of glory that apparently underlies its numerous failed republics and catastrophic record of lost wars.

Even the British boast and swagger over their timeless constitution. They propound the mother of parliaments, Magna Carta (a parchment for the protection of earls) and the Glorious Revolution, actually a successful bid in aristocratic treason. The stiff upper lip curls in a thin smile of self-congratulation, set to the tune of Rule Britannia and Pomp and Circumstance. It is very hard to imagine constitutionally laconic Australians cavorting for anyone or anything.

But with the voice, a sober enthusiasm has to be achieved if it is to succeed. Australians will never be conned but will need to persuade themselves. The question is how this can happen without an emotionalism and hoopla they will never accept.

One insight is from the sorts of people Australians historically have regarded as being so compelling that they’re heroes: not Ned Kelly-type bunting but genuine figures of public reverence.

From totally different contexts, you might pick our only saint, Mary MacKillop; our most enduring war hero, Jack Simpson (and his donkey Murph); and, particularly in the current context, those two great Indigenous exemplars, senator Neville Bonner and Vincent Lingiari. All of them shared three features.

The first is a predictable lack of “side” or “show”, the true good manners of being Australian.

MacKillop laboured behind a veil. Simpson was shadowed by Murph. Bonner and Lingiari were soft-spoken, humble and self-deprecatory.

The second is that each devoted their lives to a vast project, not national needlework. MacKillop educated and salvaged a desperate Irish-Australian peasantry. Simpson saved multiple lives and gave dignity to hopeless suffering in impossible circumstances. Bonner and Lingiari advanced the justice of their people in the face of the stinging grit of disdain. These were all people who gave a resounding Yes to a truly great work.

The third glaring reality of these lives is that they personified a willingness to embrace risk in the service of good. MacKillop had no business plan, and the chance that she would establish an entire school system was infinitesimal. Simpson threw his life into the dirt of Gallipoli every time he went up some shattered gully. Bonner and Lingiari could never fully know a new Australia each time they fielded insult and injury.

The moral lesson for the voice is that great causes are not won by insurance policies and niggardly doubt. They are achieved by courage and intelligence yoked in the service of profound, national, common principle.

The impetus that prompted a religious sister, a mule driver and two Indigenous men without formal education is the principle that binds Australians as individuals, a nation and a people. That principle also animates the voice.

It is the principle of extravagant fairness.

Many individuals, nations or groups can be fair in the sense that they are not consciously unjust and try not to be too nasty. But extravagant fairness is completely different. This is the fairness that is not only just but generous, joyful, enduring and productive. It is the sort of profound fairness that activated both the Good Samaritan and Weary Dunlop, blessing both receiver and giver.

Senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Martin Ollman
Senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Martin Ollman

This is the fairness of MacKillop and Bonner, and it is on this sublime national trait – ourselves at our very best – that the case for an Indigenous voice must be based. The strength in fairness, fairness in strength, that is so powerfully expressed in the notion of a fair go.

Appeals to history may be inspiring and even apt. But Australians usually blush at the suggestion of intergenerational praise and are apt to look at its guarantors as the property developers of posterity. But fairness they instinctively understand, as an imperative and a life choice. Postmodern cynics love to deride the concept of a “fair go”, but in a world of self-actualisation and life coaches it probably is the one purely moral proposition that has explicit everyday currency in contemporary Australian existence. When Australians become convinced that a constitutionally enshrined voice represents a fair go for their Indigenous brothers and sisters, they commit to voting Yes.

Undecided voters will vote for it not because they want to feel good about it, let alone because they like the wording, but because it is the right thing to do.

It is our grandmothers’ injunction about doing the “decent thing”. Decency is not merely rightness. It is a consciousness that our actions not only benefit others but in so doing make ourselves better, more human people. As when, in the creation of the voice, the privileged citizens of a nation reach out to some of the nation’s most powerless, the relationship becomes one of equals. Not merely because the voice is a good idea but because it is in the fullest sense just.

The prevalent tone of Australian history is cynical and sarcastic, but potent instances of national decency are not hard to find, often arising out of previous acts or policies of national shame. The justice meted out to the Myall Creek murderers of Aboriginal people was decent. The refusal of the Australian people to vote at referendum in favour of outlawing of the Communist Party, even at the height of the Cold War, was decent. Our historic welcome to the poor, displaced and fugitive from overseas has been decent.

The great challenge of the voice referendum is to engage the potent Australian sense of fairness with the enabling of our Indigenous people. There is so much story and history here that there is almost too much. In the swirling accounts of suffering and dispossession, we all need at least one story that drags at our soul.

Mine is from a dear Indigenous friend, dating back to his grandfather’s time before the war. His people came from NSW, across the Great Divide. They worked hard in hard jobs, splitting timber, working cattle, the odd factory job. In the town, they were not so much hated as tolerated.

One day the trucks turned up at the school. The kids were loaded up. Then the trucks drove around the streets and the mothers were told they would never see their kids again if they did not climb aboard. They were loaded up. Then the trucks drove to the workplaces and told the fathers they would never see their families again if they did not come too. They were loaded up. They were all driven hundreds of kilometres west, away from their lives and their country.

It is the banal administrative indifference that strikes you. It was not about doing evil but about spiritless efficiency. There is a bizarrely hurtful footnote. By an incredible effort that can barely be imagined, my friend’s grandfather had £200 saved in the bank. He had taken our country at its word, and worked for the betterment of his. He never saw his money again. He was robbed.

This awful story, and all like it, are blasphemies against the fair go. They are libels on the betterness of ourselves and our nation, which must be repudiated, and the notion of giving a voice to the descendants of this great and good man could not be more apt.

One of the truly miserly tunes against the voice is that there are other groups who have suffered, others who have felt the sting of discrimination, so why should we single out Indigenous people? As an Irish-Australian, I have ancestors who suffered starvation, dispossession, bigotry and even massacre. Many Vietnamese citizens remember expulsion and imprisonment, and many of our Indian diaspora have lived the refusal of opportunity and disdain.

A portrait of Aboriginal rights activist and Gurindji elder Vincent Lingiari on Railway Terrace in Katherine. Picture: Katherine Regional Arts
Aboriginal rights activist and Gurindji elder Vincent Lingiari on Railway Terrace in Katherine. Katherine Regional Arts

Yet to expect jealous rejection of Indigenous people by Australia’s great multitude of the previously disadvantaged is a calumny on every Australian Indian, Chinese, Jew, Sudanese or Irishman. On the contrary, the natural feeling that subsists between those who have suffered and those who suffer is a deep empathy. The voice is the occasion for companionship, not contempt.

There also needs to be remembrance. Our richly varied immigrants need to ask themselves which Australians tried their hardest to keep them out, to claim they were dangerous, to say the cost would be too high. It was not Indigenous people.

But when one looks to the bastions of those who are opposed to the voice, there are those same icy sceptics. The lofty who now say the voice will create overpaid Indigenous bureaucrats are the same who said the Chinese would take work, and the Indians never fit in.

It is the same with division, the theme music for the No case. Its proponents claim terror at the fictitious notion of a people divided through the voice by race, but their direct ideological ancestors – some embarrassingly close – inveighed against an Australia divided by the inclusion of coloured ethnic misfits. The Vietnamese would never play cricket and the Chinese would never embrace democracy. Those Catholics breed.

The appalling irony here is that extreme opponents of the voice actually revel in division. Their entire strategy is to ensure that the referendum does indeed divide the Australian electorate so that a majority – however thin – is alienated not only from the voice but from the Indigenous people for whom it would speak.

For these opponents, it will be a good campaign’s work if any burgeoning, institutional alliance between black and white Australians – a work of the left and culture war guerrillas if ever there was one – were to be permanently sidelined. Hence the grotesque language of apartheid to describe the voice. They hijack a monstrous form of racism to impugn a design of national harmony. Whatever is beyond disinformation, this is it.

There are some views that are very hard to rationalise in the voice referendum. Of course, every one of us striving for the voice have friends on the No side, some very active. Other acquaintances are undecided or just plain confused. They may frustrate and even infuriate us. But these are honourable people striving to make sense of their constitutional obligations. No one is entitled to revile them.

Yet there are others, though mercifully few. These are not dissentients of goodwill but hard hearts. For whatever reason, Indigenous people appear an ideological enemy. They dislike any Indigenous cause that doesn’t align with their punitive thinking and deficit ideology. They revel in the language of division and discrimination. Unlike every decent Yes or No voter, they do not contemplate a failed referendum with concern. They savour the thought.

To force these souls of negativity towards alternative reality, what sort of Australia do you actually want? Yes, we understand the rhetoric of radical equality, but what are we going to do with that? Where is the place for co-operation, tolerance and shared commitment in your bleak wasteland of purist liberal theory? What sort of nation are we going to create, rather than prevent?

These ideologues do not represent the bulk of the Australian people. They should not be allowed to con the Australian people. They have no idea of the fairness of the Australian soul. And I hope the Australian public repudiates their ideas by voting Yes.

Over history, many truly awful people have talked about national destiny. Usually this means some great turning point, or new direction. But on the issue of the voice, the great issue of destiny for Australia actually is static in the very best sense: do we remain loyal to ourselves, and our creed of fairness?

The voice will enable those who have 65,000 years of connection to this country, who are now our most dispossessed, to talk to us, yes, with measured authority, but not with a veto. We are indeed the people of the fair go. How is this not fair?

 

Warrior woman – the trials and triumphs of Marcia Langton

Paul Hemphill Leave a comment

We have waited 122 years to recognize in our Constitution the privilege that we have of sharing this continent with the oldest continuous culture on earth. I say to Australians, do not miss this opportunity.

Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese

People will forget what you said. people will forget what you did. but people will never forget how you made them feel. people want to be treated justly. perceived injustices can create enmity, and enmity is the beginning of the slide towards intractable conflict.  

 Colin Tatz Reflections on the Politics of Remembering and Forgetting

What is going on in the mind of opposition Peter Dutton that in the belief that he’s taking the fight to the Prime Minister, he picks a fight with this most formidable woman?

This excellent profile of longtime indigenous academic and activist Marcia Langton should be required reading for all supporters of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice to Parliament and the recognition of indigenous Australians in our constitution – and for all people of goodwill who may be wavering under the weight of conservative misinformation and disingenuousness. We’ve republished it here in In That Howling Infinite for folk who cannot scale the News Corp pay-wall.

When Dutton committed the Liberal Party to a ‘resounding no”, Langton was not backward in coming forward. she pulled no punches when she declared:

“This is the Australia we live in; it is racist. So this could be the political making of a whole lot of people who want to help us get this over the line and create a permanent system of empowerment for Indigenous people. If we want to mute racism, we have to raise our own voices. We have to make sure that we win this campaign, because if we don’t, then the racists will feel emboldened. We have to have a constitutionally enshrined voice that empowers our people, regionally and nationally, to make bureaucrats accountable, and respond to representations on all policy matters and legislative matters that affect us. If we can have a constitutionally enshrined voice that’s permanent, that makes us a formal part of the democratic architecture of Australia, that’s how we fight racism. That’s how we fight our disempowerment”. The Guardian, 7th April 2023.

See also in In That Howling Infinite, We oughtn’t to fear an Indigenous Voice – but we do ;The Frontier Wars – Australia’s heart of darkness; and Dark Deeds in a Sunny Land – a poet’s memorial to a forgotten crime  

[Author’s note: At Bellingen’s 2019 Readers and Writers Festival, it was our pleasure and privilege to attend a powerful “conversation” between acclaimed historian Henry Reynolds,  Marcia Langton – and, by fortunate serendipity, to share a meal with them at the Federal Hotel afterwards].

‘Vote ‘No’ and you won’t get a welcome to country again’

Marcia Langton doesn’t mince words and now she’s really had enough. When Australians vote on the voice, she wants them to think hard about what’s at stake.

By Helen Trinca, The Weekend Australian, 8th April 2023
‘I imagine that most Australians who are non-Indigenous, if we lose the ­referendum, will not be able to look me in the eye,’ Marcia Langton says. Picture: Nic Walker
Marcia Langton.  Picture: Nic Walker

Over more than 50 years as an academic and activist, Marcia Langton has never been known to mince her words. But now the Melbourne University professor, Boyer lecturer, public intellectual and co-author of a landmark report on the Indigenous Voice to parliament and government has really had enough. When Australians go to the polls to vote on the Voice later this year, Langton wants them to think hard about what’s at stake. “I imagine that most Australians who are non-Indigenous, if we lose the ­referendum, will not be able to look me in the eye,” she says. “How are they going to ever ask an Indigenous person, a Traditional Owner, for a welcome to country? How are they ever going to be able to ask me to come and speak at their conference? If they have the temerity to do it, of course the answer is going to be no.”

This is classic Langton – unanswerable in its logic; intimidating in its ferocity. She has always been known for her intellectual clarity and lack of compromise and at 71, has lost none of that edge. But Langton is conscious that in some ways the referendum is the last throw of the dice for her ­generation of leaders. She is in demand to talk about the Voice but will pace herself in the campaign, in part because her job as Associate Provost and Redmond Barry Distinguished Professor at the University of ­Melbourne is time-consuming, in part because there’s a new group of Indigenous leaders snapping at her heels. “I want to be a less dominant voice because the younger generation must be given an opportunity to be heard on these matters,” she says. “I’m not an Indigenous leader and lots of young ­people hate the concept of ­Indigenous leader because they feel cut out, they feel like they’re not ­valued.” She says she can understand their point of view, and then pauses before adding: “They just need to learn a ­little bit about earning ­respect for one’s work.”

‘The younger generation must be given an opportunity to be heard.’ Picture: Nic Walker

Marcia Langston. Picture: Nic Walker

Respect for her work is what Langton has earnt in spades since those decades when Indigenous people who spoke up were so easily dismissed by white Australia. One observer notes she had to “bulldoze” her way to influence. Film director and producer Rachel Perkins quips that Langton is like the Beyoncé of Indigenous ­Australia: “You say Marcia, and everyone in black Australia knows who you are talking about.” To TV anchor and author Stan Grant, Langton is the “broken-hearted warrior” who, like Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela and Rosa Parks, are “people who know the world can break you and still stand up”.

Revered and feared, this mother of two and grandmother of three is criticised at times from within her own community. An example: her commitment to constitutional recognition goes back decades and has never wavered. But when she decided in 2017 to work with human rights and social justice campaigner Tom Calma to produce a report to the federal Coalition on a Voice that could be a legislated advisory body to parliament and government, it was seen by some as letting government off the hook on constitutional reform. Langton, pragmatic, persisted and produced a 272-page document that proposed local and regional voices feeding into a National Voice of 24 members. They would have the “responsibility and the right” to give advice to the parliament and government. The final ­report of the Indigenous Voice Co-design Process, commonly known as the Calma-Langton ­report, was submitted to the Coalition Federal Government in July 2021. It is now seen as the blueprint for the Voice, which under the Labor Government’s policy will be ­enshrined in the constitution if the ­nation votes “yes” in the ­referendum expected later this year. Says Langton: “We want the ­principle voted on first. So that then there’s time for everybody, including all the parliamentarians in the House and in the Senate, and the public to debate the model.”

Human rights and social justice campaigner Tom Calma AO. Photo: NCA
Human rights and social justice campaigner Tom Calma AO. Photo: NCA

On March 23, when Prime Minister Anthony Albanese announced the referendum wording, Langton was present in the Blue Room of Parliament House. When she stepped up to answer a ­reporter’s question it was with the gravitas that comes from a lifetime of reflection, research and ­advocacy. And defiance. And anger. And frustration. And sadness. “Each one of us here has been ­involved in a major initiative. The royal commission into Aboriginal deaths in custody. The inquiry into the forced removal of Aboriginal children from their families. The Don Dale royal commission,” she told journalists. “I could go on and on. And in each case we have doggedly recommended changes to stop the deaths, the incarceration, the early deaths, and the miserable lives and it is so ­infrequently that our recommendations are adopted.” She added: “And each year, people like you come along to listen to that misery-fest. And each year, people go away wringing their hands. We’re here to draw a line in the sand and say this has to change.”

There were tears that day, as Langton, the sophisticated political player, revealed a glimpse of the pressure she has been under since the PM used his election night victory speech in May last year to commit to the Voice.

Growing up in Queensland amid 1950s racism, the young Marcia learnt to step back and let the whites be served first in the local shop; she learnt to step aside and walk on the other side of the street from white Aussies. In her new book Law: The Way of the Ancestors, co-authored with Aaron Corn, Langton recalls attending a conference in Townsville in 1981 where she met the Torres Strait Islander intellectual, teacher and ­litigant Eddie Koiki Mabo. “He was the first person I had met who clearly articulated the fact that ­Indigenous laws exist”. She writes that “by day in school I was forced to ­listen to a fantasy about Australian history and ­Indigenous ­people in ­particular”. The young girl with Yiman and Bidjara heritage on her ­mother’s side figured these were ­“elaborate lies”. None of the people she grew up with resembled the ­“supposed ‘savages’ who rampaged through the pages of my school books”. Queensland was a state, she writes, “where no civil or ­humans rights were accorded my people.”

Langton at the press conference on March 23 after Prime Minister Anthony Albanese announced the referendum wording.
Press conference March 23 after Anthony Albanese announced the referendum wording.

It was an experience of racism that fired a lifetime of work on land claims, native title, field work, right campaigns, lobbying parliament, ­sitting on inquiries and commissions, working in government and in universities. “I don’t know of anyone else with her breadth of knowledge of Indigenous issues,” Perkins says. “She can write about deep culture, she can write about contemporary art and film, she can write about mining and economics, about women’s issues, about history, native title, treaty and of course constitutional law. She has an incredible mind.”

Prominent Indigenous academic Marcia Langton says there was “no evidence” to show previous bodies aimed at improving Indigenous outcomes did not work, arguing past consultative groups and councils made “dogged”…

Over more than three hours of interview and a photoshoot in Sydney, Langton’s mind is on full display. She is in turn sharp-witted and ­sharp-tongued, resigned and optimistic, warm and angry. At one point her ­energy ebbs and she takes a break, walking outside for a smoke and a chat with photographer Nic Walker. She submits courteously to a makeup artist but her distinctive grey hair is largely untouched and her handsome face needs little attention. Langton has the classy dress sense of a Melburnian and is far from the stereotypical image of either activist or academic.

Indeed, the media has never been able to decide between the two ­labels, and she has long mixed academic smarts with activism, stepping between both worlds with ease. “My view as an academic has always been that my work must have a beneficial impact, so if I can find a ­solution to a problem, then I will advocate for that solution,” she says. “Unfortunately, there’s no word for an academic like me and so the ­Australian media call me an activist. Most people don’t even know that I am an academic.” She adds, without embarrassment: “I much preferred in my public work to be referred to as a public intellectual, and I think that’s the correct term.”

Langton in 1982.
Marcia Langton in 1982.

Last November, at the annual Outlook conference organised by The Australian and the Melbourne Institute, Langton’s sophisticated ­presence underlined the “incredible journey” she has made from a childhood of multiple schools and homes in ­regional Queensland and outer Brisbane to this crucial moment in her life and the life of the ­nation. Off stage, talk was of the brutal death of West Australian teenager ­Cassius Turvey just three weeks earlier and the alleged details of an ­attack that would later result in four people charged with the 15-year-old’s murder. For a moment Langton seemed overwhelmed. She was ­unwell and had been given only a few hours’ notice as a replacement speaker, but she gathered herself, put on her public face and had the audience in her thrall as she spoke of the ­desperate need for the Voice in ­regional areas; of how the green economy – specifically massive solar panels on Aboriginal land – was potentially damaging to communities; and of the challenges for many Indigenous people ever “closing the gap”. With a mixture of stoicism and sadness she told the room that only one third ­of Indigenous people had truly been able to close that gap. She had done so, as part of a cohort of Indigenous women who had done postgraduate study. Langton has a PhD.

Langton was very young when she realised there was a world she could access beyond her own. “Many of my ­childhood circumstances were ­unsafe and scary, so I would often go to the ­library. I learnt that I could ­borrow books from a very young age, and I would take my books to my ­secret places.” She was fascinated by Douglas Mawson and the journals of other adventurers and explorers that provided escape in those early years. By the time she arrived at Aspley High School in outer Brisbane her talent for leadership was apparent. In one of the few photographs from her ­childhood, the young Marcia is lined up with the other house captains, calm and serious as she faces the camera. It was a time of expanding ­university access but at the University of Queensland in 1969 she was one of only two Aboriginal students and among the first to attend the institution. “It was apartheid Queensland, where you were either Aboriginal or not, there was no in between,” she says.

Langton, front row, right, at Aspley State High School, Brisbane. Picture: Supplied
Langton, front row, right, at Aspley State High School, Brisbane

She began to study anthropology, the discipline, along with human ­geography, she would eventually pursue for doctorate. But it was not easy: “There were some wonderful ­people and then there was a very nasty ­racist. I handed in a major essay and she failed me and her written comment on it was that I couldn’t have ­written it because I was Aboriginal. I should have stopped studying ­anthropology.” It still rankles. “To this day there are many anthropologists who say that I don’t write my own work because I couldn’t possibly as an Aboriginal,” she says. “They don’t regard me as Aboriginal. The only real Aborigines – quote, unquote – are the full bloods they worked with in the 1970s. So people like me aren’t real Aborigines. That’s still pervasive in the discipline of anthropology in Australia.”

After a year at UQ and already a mother, she postponed her studies ­because, she says, of racism, and went overseas with her then ­partner and their son, escaping from a state police force she calls ­“extremely brutal and terrifying, far worse than they are today”. It was the early 1970s and in the US and Asia she was exposed to new black narratives. “Despite all the ­terrible things I saw, it became very clear to me what ­Martin Luther King Jr, James Baldwin, Malcolm X were talking about in a very visceral way, and that is that we people of colour, we’re not regarded as human animals,” she says. Five years later, back in Australia and now a single mother, she went back to UQ, “stupidly” enrolling in Australian literature. “I was the lone Aborigine again in the class … and it was just so ­racist. I couldn’t cope. So then I came down to Sydney, I worked for the ­Aboriginal Medical Service, I worked for the Federal Council for the Advancement of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders …”

Langton was elected general secretary, becoming increasingly involved in Aboriginal ­politics, working with several people including Roberta “Bobbi” Sykes in the Black Women’s Action group. Later, in Canberra she resumed her study of anthropology at the ­Australian National Univer­sity, becoming the first Indigenous person to take honours in the subject. It would be another couple of decades before she completed her doctorate in human geography and anthropology at Macquarie University, carrying out field work in the east Cape York Peninsula. In 2000 she was appointed foundation chair of ­Australian ­Indigenous Studies at the University of Melbourne.

Langton, right, speaking during The Australian Outlook Conference. Picture: Arsineh Houspian
Langton speaking during The Australian Outlook Conference. Picture: Arsineh Houspian

It was in the 1980s, while working part-time as a history­ researcher at the Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies in Canberra, that she sat the 18-year-old Stan Grant down one day and quizzed him about his ambition. Says Grant: “I was a young kid out of school, pushing a trolley around, ­delivering mail, and doing photocopying … She basically said, ‘What do you want to do with your life?’ She said, ‘My parents and my people have not struggled and ­sacrificed for me to be pushing a trolley around delivering mail’.” It changed Grant’s life. “I’m not here without her, it’s as simple as that. I knew what I had to do. Marcia is not someone you say no to easily.”

Indeed. Langton has a national reputation as intellectually intimidating to media and politicians alike and at the same time is always prepared to step up, to speak or write or debate the big issues. Her scope and influence is so broad that it has led inevitably to criticism within Indigenous communities, but Perkins says: ­“People are very deferential to her great knowledge”. Grant adds: “One of the great strengths in ­Marcia is that she’s been able to challenge herself, she’s found new ways to fight and she’s constantly questioning herself.”

That flexibility has made it hard to predict which side she will come down on in the issues that regularly inflame debate about her people. Fifteen years ago, in an essay in this newspaper, Nicolas Rothwell identified Langton and Noel Pearson as the former “radical activists” who had developed a deep understanding of the root causes of the crisis in remote ­Indigenous communities. Rothwell wrote that both believed alcohol and passive welfare were at the heart of destructive behaviour in these communities, and that both had to be addressed by contentious policy change.

Langton has not backed off, arguing that Indigenous people must receive funding on the basis of need, not identity; and supporting restrictions on the sale of alcohol in some cases. She has done years of research into the issue, published widely and advised the federal government, but she steps cautiously into a debate she says is “almost impossible” to enter. “If I say one thing, Aboriginal leaders are going to go ballistic, and at the very same time [conservative columnist] ­Andrew Bolt’s going to go ballistic, right?” she says. There is no silver bullet in this area, she says, but alcohol management plans are the best way forward.

Langton is fearless on funding, prepared to upset other Aboriginal ­advocates by saying identity should not be the criterion for assistance ­because “many middle-class ­Indigenous people … are not more disadvantaged than other Australians”. There is one exception: the children of Indigenous people who leap from social security to well-paid jobs, for example in mining, and who suddenly appear to be “closing the gap” but find it hard to break free of intergenerational disadvantage, ­will continue to need support. Her uncompromising ­approach can upset both left and right in white and black Australia: “I have been humiliated and insulted by all sides.”

Another example: When Langton delivered the Boyer Lectures on Radio National in 2012 she focused on mining and its potential to enrich Indigenous economies but quickly found herself the target of environmentalists, blasted for not declaring that a research project with which she had been associated had been partly funded by the mining sector. “Most of the left-wingers who attacked my lectures did not read them and they ­viciously attacked me on the basis of what they thought I was saying, not what I actually said,” she says. “They let the industry off the hook because they tried to humiliate me and diminish my arguments. I blame the left for so much of the damage caused to us because of their ­arrogant racism, and particularly many of the environmentalists who do not take us seriously as the First Peoples of this land.”

There’s that word again – racism. Langton uses it often. “Racists don’t understand the horrible impact they have,” she says. “They don’t realise the wear and tear of constant racism is a huge factor in the ­suicide of young Indigenous Australians. So don’t say to an Aboriginal ­person ‘you’re too fair to be Aboriginal’, or ‘you’re too pretty to be Aboriginal’, or, ‘did you write that?’” Langton is astonished at the “mischievous” demands for a definition of ­Aboriginality that have emerged in the Voice debate. Being Aboriginal, she says, has nothing to do with race, but is “a cultural link, a claim of descent, an assertion or claim of identity, and ­acceptance by the community; it’s about being a member of a community by descent and culture”. She references the High Court decision in the 1983 Tas­manian dam case, which defined an ­Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander person as one of “Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander descent who identifies as an Aboriginal or Torres Strait ­Islander and is accepted as such by the community in which he or she lives”.

She says the “terrible history” of the stolen generations continues for their descendants, some of whom are “as white as the driven snow”. “What they cop is, ‘you’re not dark enough to be Aboriginal’,” says Langton. “It’s a different kind of racism that they have to wear but it’s far removed from the racism you experience when you walk down the street in this country if you have dark skin. They might suffer occasional racism, they might not get the job, the promotion to professor that they wanted, they might not get an Australian Research Council grant. [But] there are a lot of Aboriginal ­people who will never be able to get a taxi. These young, fair-skinned ­people, they’ll get a taxi OK. They suffer a very ­different kind of racism, and it’s more in the zone of the typical … identity attacks of, ‘you’re doing it so you can get money’.”

To Langton, there’s a certain irony in columnists questioning the ­authenticity of those who don’t “look” Aboriginal: after all, she says, if there are fraudsters, they are ipso facto white, not Aboriginal. She has never felt confusion about her own identity, although she is still asked by some why she doesn’t “pass” as a white person. Overseas she’s often ­mistaken for Palestinan, Moroccan, ­Algerian, Puerto Rican, Indian or Anglo-Indian or even ­Brazilian Portuguese. Langton almost snorts her ­answer: “As if I wanted to do that [pass as white]. I used to say to them when I was younger, ‘Are you saying to me that I should disown my mother and my grandmother and all my family? They think I would ­prefer their life but actually, I don’t. I love being ­Aboriginal, I have never been anything else.”

Langton has stood out in the past as one of the few Indigenous women with a ­national profile in a world of ­Indigenous male leaders including Noel Pearson, Pat Dodson and others. ­Perkins ­recalls a ­corporate women ­leaders’ event at Sydney’s Barangaroo a few years ago at which Pearson was asked to name the woman who had the biggest ­influence on him. Says Perkins: “Noel thought for a while, then he said it had been Marcia.”

Welcome to Country by Marcia Langton.
Welcome to Country by Marcia Langton

Perkins worries about her friend’s vulnerability and the physical and emotional pressure she has absorbed: “I don’t know what I would do, I don’t know what we would do without Marcia, because she is so fearless, she has such depth. I don’t know of any other person who has had her ­staying power, she continues to give to the movement endlessly. It has ­absorbed her entire existence.”

As the referendum on the Voice nears, Langton appears almost fatalistic. If it’s a no, she will largely blame Opposition Leader Peter Dutton, who has “waged a very successful campaign to undermine the Voice”. As for those Indigenous leaders opposed to the Voice: “They have no better ideas. They say that the Voice won’t solve particular problems. So where are their ­solutions? We’ve put 30 years of work into our proposition, 30 years of work. There are countless reports, we’ve done the homework, we’ve done the hard yards, we’ve done the research, we’ve tested everything.”

If the referendum fails, it will be a staggering setback for Langton and others of her generation, but she readily acknowledges how far we have come. “Fifty years ago, I wouldn’t have been invited to give the Boyer ­Lectures; I wouldn’t have been invited by [publishers] Hardie Grant to write [her travel book] Welcome to Country; I wouldn’t be a professor at the ­University of Melbourne. Of course things changed.”

First Knowledges: Law, The Way of the Ancestors by Marcia Langton and Aaron Corn (Thames & Hudson Australia, $24.99), is out on April 25

Helen Trinca is a highly experienced reporter, commentator and editor with a special interest in workplace and broad cultural issues. She has held senior positions at The Australian

Australia’s choice – survive by respect or die by stupid

Paul Hemphill 1 Comment

Normally, the weeks preceding our national day see social and mainstream media, posturing politicians and personalities and cultural warriors of all our tribes caught up in argument and invective about its meaning and significance. And then, it’s all over. Calm is restored as summer winds down, the kids return to school, and the working year starts in earnest – until the next national shibboleth lumbers into view – Anzac Day in late April. 

This year, however, things are unseasonably quiet. As a nation and a community, we are too preoccupied with Australia’s unprecedented bush-fire crisis to wage our customary wars of words.

The fires have dominated the media space, with harrowing photographs and video footage of their impact on people, property, and wildlife, stories of heroism and resilience, and circular debates and divisions, political posturing and finger-pointing. They have crowded out others news and reportage from around Australia and overseas where much is happening, be it the US’ assassination of Iran’s foremost general, ongoing protests in Beirut and Baghdad, the continued pounding on tons and villages in Syria’s beleaguered Idlib province, devastating floods in Indonesia, and volcano eruptions in the Philippines and and Zealand – and, less catastrophic but infinitely entertaining, Britain’s imminent retreat from Europe, and Harry and Meghan’s divorce from the royal family.

The fires have also crowded out the predictable argy-bargy over our national identity. It’s as if the partisans and opinionistas right across our political spectrum have holstered their weapons in deference to our collective pyro-purgatory.

There is one piece, however, that I deem worthy of republishing in In That Howling Infinite insofar as it encapsulates perfectly a cognitive and cultural dissonance at the heart of our national identity that I touched upon recently in How the ‘Lucky Country’ lost its mojo.

Sydney journalist Elizabeth Farrelly is always worth reading for her perspective on our identity, our culture and our natural and built environment. On this Australia Day 2020, she asks the perennial rhetorical question: what does it mean to be Australian? Her observations are illuminating. Here is my summary – you can read it in full below.

“As the fires rage on, bringing little but anti-green and pro-coal propaganda from our governments, we have a choice. We can go on pretending that exploitation is a sustainable way of life. We can pursue this culture of denial, where truths about nature, climate, women and Indigenous peoples are held in contempt. Or we can smarten up …

Australian culture has always relied on easy exploitation. From the moment white people arrived, we’ve been kidding ourselves that arrogance and theft add up to a lifestyle with a future. We dig stuff up and flog it, no value added, no questions asked. We grow food in the most destructive possible manner – clear-felling, mono-culturing, irrigating and overgrazing; destroying soil, desertifying land and belching carbon. We crowd to the edge of the continent, gazing out to sea, chucking our trash over our shoulders, pretending it won’t come back to bite.

Even now, our Indigenous peoples are being displaced three and four times over. Last year we extinguished native title for Adani’s foreign coal-mining interests, making the Wangan and Jagalingou people trespassers on their own land. We relentlessly export such coal, helping drive temperatures in central Australia beyond the habitable, exiling people for a second time from their ancestral homelands. Then, should anyone dare critique this mindlessness, as Bruce Pascoe obliquely has, we label them non-Indigenous and  set the federal police onto determining their ancestry.

And we apply this domineering denialism, this refusal to listen, across the board. In agriculture it says, we don’t care what naturally grows here. We’re going to poison the insects, suck the water from ancient caverns and nuke the living daylights out of the soil with petroleum-based fertilizers. We’re going to burn oil and coal, and if we get fires that destroy our townships, we’ll clear the forests too. 

In politics and at home it says, if our women are troublesome, we’ll ridicule, intimidate and beat them into submission (with one woman murdered every week by her current or former partner and our political sphere internationally recognized for its misogyny).

In sport, it says it’s fine if our cricketers – so long as they don’t get caught. And in social relations, if people insist on different hierarchies – if they demand gender fluidity, or optional pronouns, or same-sex marriage or voluntary race-identity or anything else that questions our superiority we’ll come down on them like a ton of bricks.

It’s the arrogance we came with, two centuries back, but it’s getting worse, not better … God gave us white guys dominion and we’ve weaponized it. We’ll show this country who’s boss. 

Forget the Aussie flag, the flag of dominion. 

This we should carve on our hearts: there is no economy without ecology”.

See also: We got them Australia Day Blues;  and Down Under – Australian History and Politics

Survival-by-respect or death-by-stupid: your choice Straya

Elizabeth Farrrelly, Sydney Morning Herald 26th January 2020

It’s invasion day again only, this time, the eyes of the world are upon us. Under headlines like “Australia shows us the road to hell“, the world is wondering if our economy isn’t every bit as fragile as the landscape it routinely exploits. It’s wondering about our tourism, with massive cancellations already from China and a US travel warning putting Australia on par with Gaza and PNG. It’s asking how long Australia will be habitable. But beneath those questions lies another. What, at this crossroads, does it mean to be Australian?

The first three are questions of both fact and perception. As such they may be partly addressed by Scott Morrison’s $76m commitment to beef-up Australia as a brand. But the last is a question for us. Who are we, as a nation, and who do we wish to be going forward? 

Australia Bushfires: Tourism fire effects

The tourism industry has lost some $4.5 billion as overseas visitors cancel trips over bushfires.

As the fires rage on, bringing little but anti-green and pro-coal propaganda from our governments, we have a choice. We can go on pretending that exploitation is a sustainable way of life. We can pursue this culture of denial, where truths about nature, climate, women and Indigenous peoples are held in contempt. Or we can dust off our angel wings and smarten up.

Australian culture has always relied on easy exploitation. From the moment white people arrived, we’ve been kidding ourselves that arrogance and theft add up to a lifestyle with a future. We dig stuff up and flog it, no value added, no questions asked. We grow food in the most destructive possible manner – clear-felling, mono-culturing, irrigating and overgrazing; destroying soil, desertifying land and belching carbon. We crowd to the edge of the continent, gazing out to sea, chucking our trash over our shoulders, pretending it won’t come back to bite. 

 

Illustration: Simon Letch

Illustration: Simon Letch

And sure, to some extent, that’s just colonialism. Colonialism is inherently macho, and inherently denialist. But it should be transitional. Now, as the NY Times argues, our political denialism is “scarier than the fires”. Smarten up? It’s time we grew up.

This is Australia’s moment of reckoning. It’s time we lost the attitude. Time we made a clear, rational and collective choice between survival-by-respect and death-by-stupid.

On top of Auckland’s Maungakiekie, the volcanic Māori pa also known as One Tree Hill, stands an obelisk. The land was bequeathed to the city in the mid-19th century by the beloved Scot Sir John Logan Campbell, who designed the obelisk as a permanent record “of his admiration for the achievements and character of the great Maori people”. That was then – now, New Zealand has Jacinda. And yes, these dots are connected.

Australia has shown no such reverence. Indeed, unable even to express genuine remorse for our repeated attempts at genocide and erasure-by-other-means, we’re still doing arrogant displacement. And we, as a result, have Scott Morrison, who must live with the disparaging epithet concocted by the lads at the Betoota Advocate – Scotty from marketing – because many Australians believe there is a ring of truth to it.

Morrison who responds to bushfires by wanting to clear more land. Who thinks hazard reduction is climate action and more advertising can persuade them back to a charred continent. Death by stupid.

It’s the arrogance we came with, two centuries back, but it’s getting worse, not better. Even now, our Indigenous peoples are being displaced three and four times over.

Last year we extinguished native title for Adani’s filthy foreign coal-mining interests, making the Wangan and Jagalingou people trespassers on their own land. We relentlessly export such coal, helping drive temperatures in central Australia beyond the habitable (Alice had 55 days above 40 degrees last year, and recorded street-surface temperatures between 61 and 68 degrees celsius), exiling people for a second time from their ancestral homelands. Then, should anyone dare critique this mindlessness, as Bruce Pascoe obliquely has, we label them non-Indigenous and set the federal police onto determining their ancestry.  

As if that very ancestry, those very records, hadn’t been, for two centuries, the subject of our energetic erasure. As if being Indigenous had always yielded some special right to speak, instead of the precise opposite. As if the speaker’s genetic makeup validated or invalidated his speech. What?

And we apply this domineering denialism, this refusal to listen, across the board. In agriculture it says, we don’t care what naturally grows here. We’re going to poison the insects, suck the water from ancient caverns and nuke the living daylights out of the soil with petroleum-based fertilisers. We’re going to burn oil and coal, and if we get fires that destroy our townships, we’ll clear the forests too. That’ll show them. 

In politics and at home it says, if our women are troublesome, we’ll ridicule, intimidate and beat them into submission (with one woman murdered every week by her current or former partner and our political sphere internationally recognised for its misogyny).

In sport, it says it’s fine if our cricketers cheat – so long as they don’t get caught. And in social relations, if people insist on different hierarchies – if they demand gender fluidity, or optional pronouns, or same-sex marriage or voluntary race-identity or anything else that questions our superiority we’ll come down on them like a ton of bricks. 

God gave us white guys dominion and we’ve weaponised it. By golly we’ll show this country who’s boss. Then if things get really rough, we’ll pop to heaven. Let’s hear it. A recent street poster picturing Morrison declaring Pentecostals for a Warmer Planet! may seem extreme, but Meritus Professor of Religious Thought, Philip C. Almond, explains why Morrison’s faith means “reducing carbon emissions … may have little intellectual purchase with the PM” – because world’s end means the second coming and, for the chosen, salvation. It’s also why Morrison’s beloved Hillsong church can happily advertise its coming conference, called Breathe Again, with Bishop T D Jakes saying “it’s amazing how God can strike a match in Australia and the whole world catches on fire”. As if the fires were God given.

That’s choice A, Scott Morrison’s choice. Business as usual but with extra cheesy advertising. Choice B, survival-by-respect, recognizes that even cheese can’t sell a pile of ash.

Survival-by-respect means just that: respect for Indigenous peoples, for nature and for women. It means knowing that listening is no weakness, but a path to greater strength.

On the ground, the shift would be dramatic but not impossible. Zero carbon cities would become an immediate priority: solar vehicles, green roads, every surface productive of food or energy. It would mean ending coal production. Investing in renewables. Creating whole new industries. 

This would mean listening to people who’ve spent 60,000 years here. Not copying, necessarily, listening. And listening, above all, to nature, heeding the fires’ overwhelming lesson. Forget the Aussie flag, the flag of dominion. This we should carve on our hearts: there is no economy without ecology. 

Sure, we can stick with lazy old Plan A. We can bow to Brand Australia and trust our grandchildren’s futures to the Rapture Hypothesis. Good luck with that, and happy Straya Day!

Bare Dinkum

Elizabeth Farrelly is a Sydney-based columnist and author who holds a PhD in architecture and several international writing awards. She is a former editor and Sydney City Councilor. Her books include ‘Glenn Murcutt: Three Houses’, ‘Blubberland; the dangers of happiness’ and ‘Caro Was Here’, crime fiction for children (2014).

The Frontier Wars – Australia’s heart of darkness

Paul Hemphill 7 Comments

Pemulwuy

It was recently announced that Phillip Noyce, Director of the award winning Rabbit-Proof Fence, is to bring to our screens the story of Bidjigal warrior and resistance leader Pemulwuy who lived near present day Botany Bay and who united local tribes in a twelve year guerrilla war against the British invaders of what we now call New South Wales.

As is always often the case with such fearless but forlorn intifadat, Pemuluy came to a sad, bad end. Shot down in a a totally one-sided firefight, his pickled head was sent by Governor Philip King to renowned botanist Joseph Banks in England, a grisly souvenir of Britain’s self-ordained, and, to many in power, god-given, mission civilatrice. 

And thus began Australia’s frontier wars. 

White historical memory is like a sieve. Give it a good shake and only the big chunks are left. For a long time in Australia, the story of our frontier wars was not one of those. But in recent decades, an ever-widening crack has let the light in.  

The first hairline fissures appeared in the early years of settlement as a small number of humanitarians voiced their concerns, although not with enough impetus to cool our pioneer fervour. Henry Reynolds, acclaimed historian of the frontier wars, quotes one such: ‘How is it our minds are not satisfied? What means this whispering in the bottom of our hearts?’ 

I touched upon this paradox in a review I wrote of historian Peter Cochrane’s novel The Making of Martin Sparrow:

“The country into which most characters venture is not, as we now acknowledge, an empty land. It was a peopled landscape, a much revered, well-loved, and worked terrain, its inhabitants possessed of deep knowledge, wisdom and respect for “country” … 

… Whilst many colonists, particularly the soldiery, regard the native peoples as savages and inflict savage reprisals upon them for their resistance to white encroachment, others, in the spirit of the contemporary ‘Enlightenment’ push back against the enveloping, genocidal tide with empathy and understanding …

… “It’s the first settlers do the brutal work. Them that come later, they get to sport about in polished boots and frock-coats … revel in polite conversation, deplore the folly of ill-manners, forget the past, invent some bullshit fable. Same as what happened in America. You want to see men at their worst, you follow the frontier”. “I don’t reckon we’re the Christians … We’re the Romans. We march in, seize the land, crucify them, stringing ‘em up in trees, mutilate their parts”.

… They knew in their hearts that this ancient people and its ancient ways are helpless against the relentless tide of the white man’s mission civilatrice. “It might be that the bolters have the ripest imagination, but sooner or later, an official party will get across the mountains and find useful country, and the folk and the flag will follow, that’s the way of the world. It’s a creeping flood tide and there’s no ebb, and there’s no stopping it. No amount of … goodwill”. 

No ceasefires, no parlays and no treaties

At Bellingen’s recent Readers and Writers Festival, it was our pleasure and privilege to attend a powerful “conversation” between Reynolds and indigenous activist and academic Marcia Langton (and, by fortunate serendipity, to share a meal with them at the Federal Hotel afterwards). One of many discussion points was that old conundrum: are those who rebel against authority and resist oppression and dispossession terrorists or freedom fighters? The festival event’s tight schedule precluded what was shaping up to be a very lively question time. 

Australia’s frontier wars, Reynolds reminded us, raged for decades from Tasmania in our far south  to Queensland’s far north. It was a story of vicious raids and reprisals. 

Australia at the time of first settlement, and particularly on the frontier, was a brutal, violent place. It was colonized by soldiers and convicts, most of them young men chock-full of testosterone and aggression, bitterness and prejudice, greed and ambition. The conflict, which in Queensland, endured  into the last decades of the 19th Century, was a war of conquest and extrajudicial killings – or more bluntly, murders. The subdued territories were patrolled  by the native police – effectively paramilitary forces. 

The wars were waged by an outgunned people on the one hand, and, on the other, what were effectively robber bands raised and provisioned by the local magnates and squatters intent on seizing, holding and expanding their often enormous landholdings. 

There were to be no ceasefires, no parlays and no treaties. And no recognition of indigenous rights. None were ever on offer – not that that would’ve made a difference. 

Reynolds observed how we as a nation celebrate war and warriors, but do not recognize, and indeed, forget our foundational wars of martial conquest. We commenced our national journey with a declaration that our land  was terra nullius, an empty land that was “ceded and  conquered”. There is still no proper explanation at law of how sovereignty passed from the indigenous people to Britain and thence the Australian State. 

Waterloo Creek Massacre, January 1838

Until the momentous Mabo decision of 1992 when the High Court held that the doctrine of terra nullius, which imported all laws of England to a new land, did not apply in circumstances where there were already inhabitants present – even if those inhabitants had been regarded at the time as “uncivilized”, and that as such, any indigenous land rights which had not been extinguished by subsequent grants by the Crown continued to exist in Australia. The concept of indigenous land title was thus born.

And today, at public gatherings and meetings, at carnivals and ceremonials, at conferences and conventions, many of us now recognize and acknowledge our first peoples as the traditional owners of this land and acknowledge elders past, present and future. 

We have come a long way in a short time; but we’re not there yet.

There exists still a darkness at the heart of our democracy that we struggle to come to terms with; and in these divisive days, it doesn’t  take much to reignite our “history wars” as we negotiate competing narratives and debate the “black armband” and “white blindfold” versions of our national story. 

© Paul Hemphill 2019.  All rights reserved

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                            Solid Rock
They were standin’ on the shore one day
Saw the white sails in the sun
Wasn’t long before they felt the sting
White man, white law, white gun
Don’t tell me that it’s justified
’cause somewhere, someone lied
And now you’re standing on olid rock
Standing on a sacred ground
Living on borrowed time
And the winds of change are blowin’ down the line

We oughtn’t fear an Indigenous Voice – but we do

Paul Hemphill 10 Comments
They were standing on the shore one day
Saw the white sails in the sun
Wasn’t long before they felt the sting
White man, white law, white gun
Don’t tell me that it’s justified
‘cause somewhere, someone had lied
And now you’re standing on solid rock
Standing on sacred ground
Living on borrowed time
And the winds of change are blowin’ down the line
Goanna

Journalist Jacqueline Maley wrote in The Sydney Morning Herald , 17th November 2019:

“The Uluru Statement From the Heart, with its reasoned call for constitutional recognition, has become such a politicised issue that it is easy to forget what a beautiful piece of writing it is. It is not even 500 words, but within it is a world: the struggle, tragedy and dignity of one of the world’s oldest living cultures. It discusses the ancestral ties of First Nations peoples to the land, unextinguished by colonisation. It talks about children stolen and incarcerated. “This is the torment of our powerlessness,” it reads “.

You’d have thought that the recognition of Indigenous Australians in our constitution would be a no-brainer, and that their participation as stakeholders and advisers in matters of government policy affecting them, much as many other bodies and institutions do, would be a reasonable and worthwhile proposition. It would, one might’ve thought, be simply the right thing to do.

But you’d be disappointed. Not in today’s Australia, it would seem. The things that divide us are greater than those which unite us.

Anne Twomey, Professor of Constitutional Law at the University of Sydney has written a clear and concise response to the naysayers, fear-mongers and purveyors of misinformation. It ought to be required reading, but as it is behind News Ltd’s paywall, I republish it here.

It is followed by an opinion piece by one time journalist and now academic, Stan Grant, on why the plan for a referendum proposed by our new Minister for Indigenous Australians, Ken Wyatt, may be a forlorn hope (both Grant and Wyatt are indigenous Australians); and after this, an informative article by conservative columnist Chris Kenny.

Kenny is normally a caustic and predictable member of News Corp’s right wing  commentariat, but here, he provides a good analysis of the obstacles facing Wyatt and the ambivalent PM Scott Morrison.

“There appears to be no sphere of our national political debate – indigenous groups, conservatives, progressives, media, business, sport­ing organisations – mature enough to deal with this issue in a meaningful, pragmatic or generous fashion. Perhaps unsurprisingly given the toxicity, shallowness and incompetence of our past decade of national politics, we seemed to have learned nothing about how to conduct this discussion. Instead of reasoned negotiations we have positions shouted and rejected across the airwaves, exaggerations and scare campaigns run against various options … (for) constitutional change that is neither detailed, settled or easily understood. Everyone wants to parade their view … but are less prepared to do the hard work of grinding out a workable compromise. The nation’s first indigenous Minister for Indigenous Australians must despair at the kneejerk responses since he reopened this debate”.

Malcolm Harrison, an old friend of mine, makes the following observations”:

”The liberal, progressive left, identity politics movement seems to have met some severe headwinds of late, and the growing apprehension about some of its more extreme aspects may halt it for the forseeable future. Various forms of conservatism are definitely gaining ground at least in the short term. The voices of oppressed indigenous peoples, and those colonised like India, are growing louder, and demands for financial compensation are becoming more common. It’s only a matter of time before this becomes a very real issue. If I were the government of Australia, I would be making secure deals with what’s left of the indigenous peoples, while I still could. Excluding them from the constitution only strengthens their future case. From the perspective of identity politics, if I were an aboriginal I would be righteously aware that from a human rights perspective, I had a lot to complain about. And sooner or later, the conscience of my society might be forced to acknowledge this in practical ways that at present it is not prepared to countenance or even consider. But, as I imply in the first paragraph, we may not get there in the short term, and indeed we may never get there at all. Indeed, if some of the extreme ideas being privately discussed among our present neoliberal aristocratic elites come to fruition, many more of us might be joining our indigenous brothers on the fringes, beyond the pale”.

There is a darkness at the heart of democracy in the new world “settler colonial” countries like Australia and New Zealand, America and Canada, where for almost all of our history, we’ve confronted the gulf between the ideal of political equality and the reality of indigenous dispossession and exclusion. To a greater or lesser extent, with greater or lessers success, we’ve laboured to close the gap. It’s a slow train coming.

Also, in In That Howling Infinite: Down Under – Australian History and Politics

Postscript

two month’s on, and it would appear that positions have hardened. More like ossified, I would say.

Delivering the 19th Vincent Lingiari Memorial Lecture in early August, Ken Wyatt made explicit, in the strongest terms since becoming Minister for Indigenous Australians, that the Morrison government has decided to dismiss the call for a First Nations Voice enshrined in the constitution.

“I want to be very clear,” he said. “The question we put to the Australian people will not result in what some desire, and that is an enshrined voice to the Parliament –  these two matters [constitutional recognition and a Voice to parliament], whilst related, need to be treated separately.”

Whilst carefully choosing how it tackles the Uluru Statement from the Heart, the government’s tactic may be to appear to be doing something, while doing nothing at all.

If the government legislates the Voice without constitutionally enshrining it, it will not only ignore the Uluru Statement and the unprecedented consensus that made it, ii will be setting it up to fail. A First Nations Voice established by an act of parliament alone and not protected by the constitution will one day be diminished or repealed at the whim of a future parliament as has been the fate of all national Indigenous representative bodies. Moreover, Indigenous people do not support mere symbolic constitutional recognition and have dismissed it in regional constitutional dialogues. Those who are to be recognised need to be able determine how they are recognised.

22nd August 2019

See also in In That Howling Infinite:

Fright-monsters keen to deny voice a fair go

Anne Twomey, The Australian, 13th July 2019

The most remarkable thing about a proposal for an indigenous voice to parliament is how moderate and reasonable it is. It is not a demand to dictate laws. There is no insistence upon a power of veto. There is simply a cry to be recognized — to be listened to with respect.

It means no more than that indigenous views can be channeled into the parliament by a formal mechanism so that they can be taken into account and parliament can be better informed when making laws that affect indigenous Australians.

How many people would prefer that the parliament be poorly informed? Who thinks it is a good idea for parliament to waste money on ineffective programs that achieve nothing?

The proposal is so very reasonable that it has shocked people into imagining hidden conspiracies and conjuring up fright-monsters, because they cannot bring themselves to believe that a proposed change could actually be good.

The best way to dispel fright-monsters is to expose them. The first is the claim that any indigenous voice that could channel its views and advice into the parliament would be a “third house of parliament”.

To state the obvious, it would be a third house only if it was given the power to initiate bills, pass and veto them, and be defined as a constituent part of the parliament in section 1 of the Constitution.

The only people suggesting this are those who are opposing it, so we can strike this off the list of problems.

If the suggestion is that any person or body that formally advises parliament in relation to bills or policies is a third house, then we would have a parliament of very many houses indeed.

Take, for example, the Independent National Security Legislation Monitor, whose role is to provide independent oversight of national security legislation and make recommendations about it, which are tabled in parliament. The monitor is currently conducting an inquiry into laws that terminate the citizenship of people involved with terrorism. Does this make the monitor a “third house of parliament”?

If so, the monitor would join the Auditor-General, the Productivity Commission, the Australian Law Reform Commission, the Australian Human Rights Commission and the many other bodies and people whose job it is to ensure that the parliament is better informed about particular subject matters.

All of these bodies and officers have influence, and should be listened to with respect because of their experience and expertise, but that does not mean they dictate legislation and government policies.

Governments have to take into account broader issues as well, such as the budgetary position and the general wellbeing of the entire country.

There is no greater threat in having an indigenous body advise and influence the parliament than there is in relation to any of these other bodies. Instead, there is a benefit in having a better informed parliament and hopefully better targeted laws and policies.

The next argument is that if this indigenous voice is enshrined in the Constitution, the High Court will get involved and every time indigenous advice is not followed there will be litigation and the High Court will force the parliament to give effect to that advice. This view is misguided. It is part of the principle of the separation of powers that the courts do not intervene in the internal deliberations of the parliament.

The High Court has held that it will not enforce constitutional provisions, such as sections 53 and 54 regarding money bills, because they concern the internal proceedings of the houses. As long as the constitutional provisions concerning an indigenous voice were drafted to make it clear that consideration of its advice was part of the internal proceedings of the houses, the matter would not be one that could be brought before, or enforced by, the courts.

The third argument concerns equality. Some have argued that there is a fundamental principle of equality in the Constitution and that division on the basis of race should not be brought into the Constitution.

First, there is no general provision of equality in the Constitution. For example, Tasmanians have, per head of population, far greater representation in the federal parliament than voters from NSW.

Members of parliament might also be aware by now that section 44 disqualifies them if they are dual nationals.

Second, the Constitution has always provided for distinctions based upon race. From 1901 to 1967 section 127 provided that for certain purposes “aboriginal natives” were not counted in the population.

This did not mean that they weren’t counted in the census. Every census, from the very first, has included detailed information about indigenous Australians. But it did mean that when determining the population for the purpose of calculating how many seats a state had in parliament, indigenous Australians were excluded from the statistics until this provision was repealed in the 1967 referendum.

Section 25 continues to provide that if a state excludes people from voting on the basis of race, it is punished by having its population reduced for the purposes of its representation in the federal parliament. Section 51 (xxvi) continues to allow the federal parliament to make laws with respect to the “people of any race for whom it is deemed necessary to make special laws”.

There are good reasons today to remove sections 25 and 51 (xxvi) from the Constitution, but there will still be a need to include some kind of power to make laws with respect to indigenous Australians.

This is not because of race. It is because of indigeneity.

Only indigenous Australians have legal rights that preceded British settlement and continue to apply today.

Only indigenous Australians have a history and culture unique to Australia.

It is not racist, divisive or a breach of principles of equality to enact laws that deal with native title rights or protect indigenous cultural heritage.

Nor is it racist, divisive or in breach of principles of equality to allow the only group about whom special laws are made to be heard about the making of these laws. Indeed, it is only fair, and fairness is a fundamental principle that Australians respect.

Anne Twomey is a professor of constitutional law at the University of Sydney.

Ken Wyatt, a man in the cross-hairs of history

Stan Grant, Sydney Morning Herald, 13th July 2019

Ken Wyatt is a man of history. He has defied a history of Indigenous children stolen from their families. He has defied a history that locked Indigenous people out of Australian political life, that for too many years denied Aboriginal people full citizenship. This week he made history, speaking at the National Press Club as the first Aboriginal person to be a cabinet minister in a federal government – an Aboriginal person leading the portfolio for Indigenous Australians.

His moment in history ... Ken Wyatt, the Miniser for Indigenous Australians.                        Ken Wyatt, the Minister for Indigenous Australians (Alex Ellinghaussen)

But when it comes to constitutional recognition of Indigenous people, history is against him. There have been 44 referendums put to the Australian people and only eight carried. It has been more than 40 years since the last yes vote. We set a high bar: change requires a majority of voters in a majority of states. Fifty per cent of the national population plus one is not enough.

The numbers are against him: Indigenous people are fewer than 3 per cent of the Australian population seeking to win over 97 per cent. Politics is against him: he is in the wrong party; more than half of all referendums have been put by the ALP. Right now, Ken Wyatt cannot even count on the full support of his own side of politics.

If a referendum won’t succeed, there will be no vote, he says. He’s hoping for consensus, bringing together political opposition including influential politicians such as Pauline Hanson. He wants a conversation with the Australian people around barbecues and dinner tables. His hardest conversation will be with Indigenous people.

Black Australia has already spoken. The Uluru Statement from the Heart remains the clearest expression of the aspirations of Indigenous people, emerging out of an exhaustive and emotional process of negotiation and consultation. It is itself a compromise, a conservative position, achieved in spite of understandable hostility from some Indigenous people who have no faith in Australian politics. Now they are being asked to compromise again.

Constitutional lawyer George Williams knows how difficult referendums are. He has previously laid out a roadmap to a yes vote. It requires political bipartisanship and popular ownership.  It cannot be perceived as political self-interest. The public must know what they are voting for, so it requires popular education. Referendums, Williams warns, are a minefield of misinformation.

And there must be a sound and sensible proposal.

Professor Williams has cautioned that the referendum process itself may be out of date – not suited to contemporary Australia. He says referendums should be expected to fail if there is political opposition or if the people feel confused or left out of the process.

On that basis, as it stands right now, an Indigenous constitutional voice looks a forlorn prospect.

But there is a glimmer of hope and it comes from our history. In 1967, Australians voted in overwhelming numbers – more than 90 per cent, the most resounding yes vote ever – to count Aboriginal people in the census and allow the Parliament to make laws for First Peoples.

Ken Wyatt is invoking the spirit of ’67, but he also knows its lesson: it was a victory of fairness over difference. Australians are wary of difference, suspicious of questions of rights. Australia has no bill of rights; our constitution is a rule book, not a rights manifesto. Australia is a triumph of liberalism where people are not defined by their race, religion, ethnicity or culture. Australia is a place where migrants are encouraged to leave their histories and old enmities behind. Nationally we are more comfortable mythologizing our own history than probing its darkest corners.

Indigenous people live with their history; they carry its scars; it defines them. In a country founded on terra nullius – empty land – where the rights of the First Peoples were extinguished, where no treaties have been signed, this – as the Uluru Statement says – is the torment of their powerlessness.

When it comes to Indigenous recognition – symbolism or substance – black and white Australia speak with a very different voice.

Ken Wyatt, a man of history, is now in the cross-hairs of history.

Stan Grant is professor of Global Affairs at Griffith University. He is a Wiradjuri and Kamilaroi man.

The key to an indigenous voice’s success – it must be practical

Chris Kenny, The Australian, 13th July 2019

For all their best intentions, it might have been a mistake for Ken Wyatt and Scott Morrison to put indigenous constitutional recognition back on the agenda and commit to getting it done in this term of government. There appears to be no sphere of our national political debate — indigenous groups, conservatives, progressives, media, business, sport­ing organisations — mature enough to deal with this issue in a meaningful, pragmatic or generous fashion.

Perhaps unsurprisingly given the toxicity, shallowness and incompetence of our past decade of national politics, we seemed to have learned nothing about how to conduct this discussion. Instead of reasoned negotiations we have positions shouted and rejected across the airwaves, exaggerations and scare campaigns run against various options, and groups as diverse and seemingly irrelevant as national sporting organisations and major businesses running jingoistic campaigns supporting constitutional change that is neither detailed, settled or easily understood.

Everyone wants to parade their view and, yes, signal their virtue, but they are less prepared to do the hard work of grinding out a workable compromise. The nation’s first indigenous Minister for Indigenous Australians must despair at the kneejerk responses since he reopened this debate.

Completely lost in the debate is the genesis of the “voice” proposal as a compromise proffered by conservative thinkers looking to deliver a meaningful outcome for indigenous Australians while preserving the integrity of the Constitution. This concept, first devised by indigenous leader Noel Pearson building on work by now Liberal MP Julian Leeser, conser­vative philosopher Damien Free­man and others, was assiduously workshopped and then explained and promoted to politicians, commentators and activists.

At the heart of this proposal, and a key to understanding this debate, is the desire to ensure constitutional recognition provides more than a cursory or symbolic mention of Aboriginal people in our nation’s founding document but delivers a practical outcome for indigenous advancement. This would be done by guaranteeing indigenous input into decision-making over their affairs — something that happens informally now but under the plan would be genuinely representative and underpinned in the Constitution.

In return, the Constitution would be protected from more radical change and a statement of national values would make more poetic exclamations about the shared indigenous, British and immigrant strands of our national bounty, outside of the Constitution. Incredibly, all the work devising this approach occurred outside the official channels such as the expert panel and select committee inquiries.

Initially its prospects seemed likely to match those of a snowflake at Uluru. It was attacked as a sop by the activists on the left who argued for a racial non-discrimination clause to be inserted into the Constitution as well as an indigenous affairs power and recognition clause that looked like a broad-ranging, de facto bill of rights. The right branded this voice approach as a divisive attempt to give additional rights and representation to indigenous Australians — an attempt to inject race into the Constitution.

Never mind that race is already embedded in our Constitution and that whatever happens on recognition the detailed constitutional changes are likely to remove those redundant race-based clauses. Never mind that by dint of legislation such as the Native Title Act there already are very specific measures that fall under the constitutional responsibility of the federal government that demand special consideration for indigenous people. And never mind that successive governments, Labor and Liberal, have had informal bodies to provide advice from Aboriginal people on these issues.

Somehow, mainly because of the power of the ideas but also thanks to the persuasiveness of Pearson and his team, the thrust of these ideas was embraced by a summit of indigenous community leaders at Uluru in May 2017. It was a monumental achievement but the grandiloquence of the “Statement from the Heart” would always frighten many horses.

Talk of “first sovereign nations” and spiritual links to the land was anathema to calculated, clinical constitutional change. Having invested some time in comprehending this process, I recall being immediately dismayed by the emotive words of the Uluru statement because I foresaw the political resistance they would trigger. It is a beautiful statement in many ways, and certainly encapsulates a wise position, but constitutional change is no place for emotionalism. Still, at its core are two proposals: “the establishment of a First Nations Voice enshrined in the Constitution” and “a Maka­rrata Commission to supervise a process of agreement-making between governments and First Nations and truth-telling about our history”.

This is now characterized as indigenous people asking too much of their non-indigenous compatriots. It is actually the opposite; these proposals can be seen as a generous offer of compromise from Aboriginal Australia to try to advance reconciliation in a practical but meaningful way.

Instead of demanding a racial non-discrimination clause and direct recognition of their rights in the Constitution, indigenous Australia is merely looking to have a guaranteed, advisory and non-binding input into legislation that affects them. And instead of demanding a treaty, they have come up with a regionally based process of agreements and truth-telling under the Yolngu (Arnhem Land) word of Makarrata, which encompasses conflict resolution but helps to avoid divisive arguments over treaties.

Conservative politicians as different as Malcolm Turnbull and Tony Abbott have dismissed the entire voice proposal as a “third chamber” that is too radical to contemplate. This has made the voice a third rail in the debate.

This is disappointing and ultimately dishonest because there are so many options available to arrange the representation and functions of a voice that if anyone has concerns it might be directly elected and wield some kind of informal veto power over parliament then a way to deal with the issue is to propose an acceptable format rather than just create fears over a third chamber. Otherwise, are they really suggesting the Aboriginal advisory councils reporting to Labor and Liberal governments over past decades have operated as third chambers of parliament?

Not all the blame for the emptiness of this debate rests with the conservatives — let me remind you, conservative thinkers were at the genesis of this proposal. The sloganeering on the progressive side has probably created more concern in the community than the scare campaigns from the Right.

People like Marcia Langton have been so aggressive towards their perceived ideological enemies that they burn goodwill faster than others can create it. And when big business and big sport start pushing loosely formed ideas about Recognition or a Voice onto customers and supporters — out of context and without formal proposals even being in existence — they raise the suspicions of voters, if not their hackles.

The most likely avenue for compromise now is for Morrison to prevail, as hinted at in Wyatt’s speech, and have a voice formalised through legislation but not mandated in the Constitution. This will disappoint many indigenous people but might fly.

Another idea worth consideration to assuage the doubters might be some sort of sunset provision. There is a legitimate argument to be made that one race-based grouping should not have separate consideration in our political processes. For reasons I have outlined previously (mainly recognizing historical disadvantage and accepting special status under native title rights), I think an exception should be made for indigenous Australians. But perhaps in the spirit of the Closing the Gap initiative, any changes could recognize that once those crucial gaps in social outcomes between indigenous and non-indigenous are closed, then special representation might no longer be required.

That will be a long way off. But it might provide extra emphasis on the need to focus on practical outcomes rather than mere symbolism. Let us see where the debate takes us in coming months. Success for Wyatt would be success for the nation. But he and Morrison need to be wise enough to walk away from their self-imposed time frame if necessary.

This will be worthwhile only if it delivers something practical that can help indigenous advancement and provide closure to decades of debate. A trite phrase dropped into a preamble to make the majority feel good about themselves won’t be worth the effort and could create more trouble than it is worth.

Read also: Walk with me, Australia: Ken Wyatt’s historic pledge for Indigenous recognition