Defeated Voice

 

To Peter in Berlin

OK I'm going to dictate this rather than type so this is voice to text at work.

I think some of what I say here Peter might surprise you. I have a lot of - anger perhaps is a bit strong - but certainly a lot of frustration about what's going on with the Aboriginal issue in Australia. Not just about the Voice but there's a whole lot of stuff going on here which you may have picked up on while you were here earlier in the year but as you haven't been here in the lead up to the Voice you wouldn't have felt this absolute bombardment of the Australian public about Aboriginal issues.

Now for the record I voted yes. I thought it was really important that the yes vote got up just to give Aboriginal people the message that they belong here. But what they got is a message that lots of Australians don't think they do belong here. I think it was a monumental cockup by both the Labour and Liberal parties. I think both parties should have stayed out of it and basically said to the Australian people ‘this is not a political issue; this is a personal conscience vote issue’ and they should have stayed out of it. What in fact happened is that it became like an election with Liberal versus Labour and it was a disaster for all concerned.

I think a lot of what happened is that there are a lot of Australians like me who are sick to death of hearing about it. Someone on the ABC wrote today that at a time when we have major problems in this country with education, not enough beds in the hospital system, not enough doctors, not enough houses for people to live in, people are struggling to get enough money to buy food and a whole host of other issues the last thing that many Australians want to think about is the welfare of the Aboriginal people. The timing was disastrous, and it feels to me like we are being force fed a diet of Aboriginal issues 24/7 in all forms of media. Now whether or not other people believe that to be true doesn't matter because the perception is from a lot of people that it's just been rammed down our throats and it's another example like with the whole gender issue. We are being told what to think and you get the message that you can't object to what people are saying or you'll be considered sexist or you know gender-ist, or racist. You’re reluctant to express any dissatisfaction with the prevailing orthodoxy for fear of recrimination and accusations.

 

A simple example of this is that it's a recurring theme now that I see on Facebook and I hear people say it to me and I hadn't said it out loud 'cause I guess I didn't want to appear racist. But - I am sick to death of being welcomed to my own country – at every game, every bit of theatre, every movie,  every talk, every lecture, every everything you are subjected to this tokenistic welcome to country. I know that country in the Aboriginal sense of the word is different to what we mean by country but I think that's irrelevant here in the bigger picture.  The fact is I and a lot of people just don't want to be welcomed to country because it's already my country. And I find myself at these things when they're talking about elders past and present and I want to ask what about my elders? what about the Italians? what about the Vietnamese? What gives the Aboriginal people the right to have this little gig behind every public ceremony just because they were first here? Well it is important, they are important, but I don't think they're that important that they have to occupy you know several minutes of our consciousness every day of our lives. 

A local Councillor the City of Playford, said he thought acknowledgements had gone "overboard".

"I listen to the younger generation who attend university and colleges, it's being read out for every lecture," he said. "I think it's gone a little too far, and for me, I don't think is balanced."

The acknowledgement needed to be "inclusive", adding the words "our people, our forebears that have contributed in building and defending our great nation and way of life".

"This is Australia, we are a great nation, we've got to be thankful and grateful to our custodians," he said.

"But we also have to respect our forebears that have built this great nation, there are many people who've put blood, sweat and tears, sacrificing their lives for this nation."

"In this climate, it takes courage to do this ... some people will see this as some sort of racist attack, and that's far from what it is," he said.

"[The acknowledgement] loses a bit of its meaning when every single meeting, every single lecture, we have this verbatim read out."

And I think there are a lot of Australians - in fact I know a lot of Australians like my brother Shaun are fed up with the Aboriginal issue. And it is still the case that a lot of Australians think - as the guy who looks after our pool said when he was here the other day - they already get everything for free. They get free healthcare, they get free education, free housing - what else do they want? so I'm voting no he said. So there is still a perception in the Australian community that Aboriginal people do get a lot more breaks than the rest of us. Ironic given that all the poverty and well-being markers still show that Aboriginal people are way behind the rest of the country but the rest of the country still feels like they're getting an easy ride and are not inclined to give them what they see as an even easier ride by giving them something called the Voice which people didn't understand anyway.

 

It's really interesting too that when you analyse the data from the referendum and look at where the majority of yes votes were recorded. It was in the inner cities of Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane,  Adelaide where educated well-off possibly more liberal (as in left thinking) people live. They voted yes. The further you move out from the inner city to the outer suburbs and then out into the countryside and then out into the remote regions the thinner the yes vote gets so it's an enclave of inner city elite thing.  I don't know how you want to describe them and I guess I'm in that category too and I think we’re actually a little bit out of touch with what the rest of the country is thinking. The rest of the country was absolutely conclusive - no. Not interested. Don't care.

 

And I think that care factor is significant here. With the same sex marriage plebiscite - strictly not a referendum - that was put through because everybody knew someone who was affected by the laws as they were then which said same sex relationships can't be legitimate, they couldn't marry, they had no rights so everybody knew there was a practical outcome within their families or within their circle of friends. So people cared. In this context with the Voice it made absolutely no difference to the average Australian whether this thing got up or not. Obviously it did to Aboriginal people but to the average white Australian they didn't give a toss. They didn't understand and didn't care. I don't know what it says about Australia. It feels like a sad empty feeling but what angers me are these two things 1) that politicians got involved and it scuttled the whole thing and 2) read the room. There's a number of people in this country who are sick of - I think it's called identity politics. They want governments to spend time and money on issues that affect all of us – education, health, transport, the economy, food, places to live - they don't want governments to spend their time looking at you know whether or not you're gay or whether or not you're transgender or whether or not you're Aboriginal or whether or not you're autistic. They want the government to focus on problems which affect everybody. Now this is a little bit my interpretation of what's going on but I feel like that's a bit how it's running at the moment.

Some weeks later I found this – seems I’m not alone in my thinking. Don Watson put it this way:

“if the Left wants to regain the ground it lost it needs to give up its fashionable pieties, broaden its reading, examine its own motivation for signs of vanity and self-interest, and stop equating occupation of the moral high ground with doing something useful. It should recognise that identity politics is an option for people whose identities are threatened, but it won’t get you a democracy where all identities are secure. It will get you Trump.” (The Monthly, November 2023)

But I'm sad the Voice didn't get up. It was a good idea. It was a necessary step towards reconciliation, to treaty, to healing - it's now gonna take another decade or two so we’ll be long dead methinks before the Aboriginal question is satisfactorily resolved, if ever. It feels strangely sad and negative and empty today. It says something about Australia that I don't like but I kind of understand why it happened and I just think these inner urban elites and politicians need to read the room and focus on the things that actually mean something to everybody.