It’s good to know that your basic beliefs are worth dying for, Fay Weldon said during that notorious Hypothetical in 1989 about Salman Rushdie and the fatwa against him for The Satanic Verses, the one where the despicable Yusuf Islam, along with a British Muslim leader, called for Rushdie to be murdered.
Weldon would later go on to be accused of “Islamophobia” for writing a pamphlet about Rushdie’s book and what it and the fatwa said about the modern West. She passed away in her 90s back in January. Those words have always stuck with me in the decades since I watched them on the ABC. Values of freedom of expression and thought, of tolerance, of rationality. Enlightenment values, really — values portrayed by the right as flabby, weak-kneed liberalism or, worse, an elite conspiracy, not merely inadequate to the demands of the modern world, but a form of out-of-touch secularism aimed at destroying the good-hearted, God-fearing patriotism of your average person.
Values portrayed by the left as a philosophy of privilege, comfortable middle-class white thinking, a crumb-maiden to white patriarchal capitalism. And, yes, Enlightenment values that the British cherrypicked and told themselves, and First Peoples, they were bringing to “civilise” them here, when it was the Enlightenment that gave birth to European anti-colonialism and a forensic gaze at the hypocrisy of colonisers purporting to be superior to other races.
That we know of, the only person whose life has come under threat during the Voice campaign is Lidia Thorpe, from Nazis — a strange target given Thorpe’s scathing opposition to the Voice. But lives are at stake. Let’s be crystal clear: this is not some theoretical application of Enlightenment values. It’s not just about the historical justice of recognising that First Peoples were here when the British invaded, and were dispossessed and slaughtered, or that we are being asked to recognise that fact in a way that Indigenous peoples have sought, rather than simply imposing a white “recognition” on them.
It’s about an institution that will be at the apex of a different approach to Indigenous policy that the evidence says will make a difference. All the evidence shows that health programs developed and implemented in partnership with Indigenous communities deliver far better results. In a country where Indigenous peoples die on average nearly nine years younger than the rest of us, that’s evidence that cannot be ignored.
Lives are at stake.
The Voice is thus an expression of those much-despised, Enlightenment-based liberal values. It is about fairness and historical fact, recognising prior occupation and dispossession. It is about fairness and tolerance in seeking not to impose recognition, but to engage with the “recognised” not as an object but as a subject, as a partner with their own agency, to determine a mutually agreeable form of recognition. About rationality and fairness in accepting an idea that originated not with white policymakers but with First Peoples, and engaging with it and embracing it for its intrinsic worth. And it is about rationality and evidence in identifying the Voice as part of a policy partnership that we know delivers better results.
The No campaign has been about none of these things. It springs from a place well before the Enlightenment. The least-incoherent No argument has been of the “if it ain’t broke don’t fix it” variety — recognition might be OK but the request for a constitutional Voice is too much innovation. Except, the only thing everyone agrees on across the spectrum is that it is, indeed, broke, and that something needs to change. Peter Dutton even claims to want a Voice, just one a white-dominated Parliament can control, thanks very much.
The No campaign cannot identify what harms the “innovation” of a Voice — that is, an advisory body to Parliament, without legislative or executive power of its own — can actually do. There are no credible jurists who argue it poses any legal problem — quite the opposite, given the long list of eminent judges and lawyers who support a Voice.
In truth, the “dangerous innovation” argument is merely a legal fiction for a scare campaign: a Voice, according to the No campaign, is a threat to white Australians — a threat mostly unarticulated, but some particularly racist No campaigners have gone there, saying it will impose reparations, or dispossess Australians of their property.
The message of the No campaign, from Peter Dutton and former Liberal leaders like Howard and Abbott, is: be scared. There is always someone out to get you, to take something of yours, to get something you don’t have. You’re the victim. Indigenous peoples are just the latest in a long line of people trying to do you over, with the help of an “elite” that hates you. Live in fear, and huddle in resentment.
The past few months, and most of this year, have been about a pretty straightforward clash, one about as simple as the referendum question under consideration. A clash between Enlightenment values and pre-Enlightenment values. Enlightenment values that, however imperfect, are less imperfect than any other, that have delivered a healthier, better educated, more just society, a set of values based on the idea people can be rational, fair, thoughtful creatures. And pre-Enlightenment values that are about living in terror at what lies beyond the flickering light of the campfire, that warn of the danger of anyone from outside your tribe, that imagine a world full of sinister threats to your group.
Win or lose, it’s good to know your values are worthwhile, and that the alternative is a bleak, empty fearmongering. But it’s not comfortable, middle-class people like me who’ll pay the price for the victory of fearmongering. It’s First Nations peoples, including generations yet to come, who will die sooner, live poorer, sicker and less rich lives because of it.
