“The prime minister’s got himself into a very tricky position where he won’t provide the detail and I think millions of Australians expect the detail,” Peter Dutton told Sky News this week.
Dutton was being disingenuous and deliberately so. The Coalition spent nine years in government receiving regular expert reports on how a voice might operate.
Albanese has said all along this is not Labor’s voice. Aboriginal people asked for this form of constitutional recognition in the Uluru statement from the heart. It is not up to the government to be too prescriptive about it, he said.
The referendum draft bill is expected to appear in the next month or so and then we will all have more than enough detail to argue about. But in the interim, the opponents of the voice have stepped into the perceived void of information and had plenty to say, not all of it correct.
So, let’s clear up some very basic points.
The voice to parliament is a formal way for Indigenous Australians to be heard by governments on matters that affect their daily lives.
It would require governments to listen to and consult our preferred representatives, not just speak on our behalf.
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Inserting the provision for a voice into the constitution means no government can get rid of it. It may change form over time, but the provision will remain. To put that provision into the constitution, they need your permission. What you are being asked to decide is: do you support a voice to parliament enshrined in the constitution? Yes or no. Beyond your answer to that question, all the detail will be decided by the parliament, including Peter Dutton and his Coalition colleagues.
As constitutional expert Anne Twomey patiently explained this month, and not for the first time, “constitutions are not places where you want to freeze details. It is appropriate to leave it to parliament as this gives greater flexibility to adjust for future needs.”
This is precisely how other constitutional amendments operate. It is not unique to the voice vote. It is not a blank cheque. Or if it is, Dutton and his team will be the ones to cosign it.
It is disingenuous at best for politicians who know this, or who should have more than a passing understanding of how the nation’s birth certificate works, to continue to ask for detail.
It’s becoming clear that if the Coalition supported a voice to parliament enshrined in the constitution, it would have said so a long time ago. Seen in this light, calls for detail are not to help shore up a considered position in the near future. They are designed to sow doubt and confusion, to delay and distract, to run a “spoiling game”, as Noel Pearson described it this week.
If Albanese is in a tricky position, it is because he hasn’t filled in the next steps in this process since he went to the Garma festival in July and announced a suggested form of words for the referendum. For six months, presumably to avoid being too prescriptive, Labor has repeated these talking points and said “watch this space”. Those who would delay or spoil have had plenty of time to test their arguments and fill that space.
Indigenous affairs has been a spoiling game for as long as any of us can remember. We’re a handy political football and this reality is playing out once again.
Without a voice – that is, an inextinguishable means of making governments listen to what Aboriginal people are asking for – that spoiling game will just kick on.
In Alice Springs at the moment, a human disaster is unfolding and nobody is more distressed about it than the Aboriginal families and elders who live there, who cannot turn away from the grim reality that unfettered access to alcohol has led to a terrible rise in crime, violence and harm.
But the long intervention years of federal cutbacks to communities, the mainstreaming of programming, punitive cashless welfare and years of opaque funding processes forcing them to go cap-in-hand to the minister for a bite of the Coalition’s $4.9bn Indigenous advancement strategy while millions were handed to big business, have also been to blame.
Aboriginal organisations say they warned the Morrison government that if the intervention-era bans on alcohol in remote communities were to lapse, harms would rise dramatically. They weren’t heard, but they were right. In mid-July, liquor became legal in some communities for the first time in 15 years. NT police statistics show property offences have jumped by almost 60% over the past 12 months, assaults have increased by 38% and domestic violence assaults by 48%.
“This was something that was predicted,” Dr John Boffa told Guardian Australia. Boffa is chief medical officer at Central Australian Aboriginal Congress, the main health organisation in the region.
“A range of Aboriginal organisations wrote to governments warning them that if this legislation was simply allowed to lapse, that we would see the sort of crisis we’re seeing now and, unfortunately, it’s happened,” Boffa said.
If only there was a formal way of requiring governments to listen to these expert voices and to the communities they serve, whose experience, knowledge and hard work are essential to making any real progress.
