With just under one month to go until Australian voters cast their votes on the Voice referendum, the last week has, at least for me, become a tale of two National Press Club addresses.
In the run-up to the referendum, the National Press Club has been running a series of Indigenous speakers of different persuasions on the Voice. Lidia Thorpe, for example, gave an address from the Indigenous sovereignty activist perspective on her 50th birthday a couple of weeks ago. The last two addresses, however, have featured an interesting pair: Marcia Langton speaking for the Voice, and Jacinta Nampijinpa Price speaking against it.
Interesting to me because, as Price stated in the opening paragraphs of her speech, she and Langton previously appeared together on the stage, back in 2016 in a Centre for Independent Studies-badged event to speak about the violence faced by Aboriginal women. It was an important topic, but a controversial speech for many in the community, not least because the media ran with an idea stated in it that Aboriginal men hide behind culture to avoid penalty, while it also ignored any impacts of colonisation that may lead to inflated numbers.
It seems the relationship between the two women soured after this appearance together. A couple of years later, as Price was increasing her profile to run as the CLP candidate for Lingiari in the 2019 federal election, Langton was published in The Saturday Paper calling out Price’s proximity to alt-right and neo-Nazi support. There was truth to these claims — one of Price’s more well-known stunts was a truly bonkers campaign with Mark Latham to “save Australia Day”, for example — but it did leave some of us wondering just what had gone down between these two former collaborators to lead to such a takedown.
Fast-forward five years, and we see Price and Langton not only on opposing sides of the Voice debate, but delivering starkly different speeches on the same stage within a week of each other. Yet in some ways, these speeches weren’t so different. Both speeches, to different degrees, left the concept of “truth” at the door.
Taking her platform, Price proceeded to reel off some of the misleading talking points the No campaign has been utilising throughout this entire process, with a fair evocation of rank nationalism along the way. Her first point was to recycle the myth that the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission (ATSIC) had been a failure while pointing out that if a Voice goes in the constitution, it’s a permanent fixture that cannot be dismantled like ATSIC. This is blatantly incorrect as the third point of the proposed constitutional amendment states that the composition and powers of the Voice shall be determined by laws made by Parliament.
Price also repeated the claim that the Voice would insert race into the constitution. When this claim was challenged from the audience by NITV’s John Paul Janke on the basis that race already exists in multiple sections of the constitution, what followed was an artful dodge by Price, as if she were unaware of this fact.
Perhaps the biggest shock to me from Price’s speech was her claim that voters don’t have the detail of what the Voice will be. Last I checked, Price is a senator, the structure of the Voice will be decided by the Parliament, and as a member of Parliament, Price will indeed be one of the very people debating this proposed legislation and then voting on it. In other words, she is one of the very people who will be deciding what the Voice will look like in the future, despite her stating “we don’t know what it will look like in the future”. Finally, Price claimed that colonisation had had no ongoing impact on Indigenous peoples. This was said with a straight face.
Professor Langton’s speech, however, was not delivered with a straight face. It was, instead, delivered with a passionate, hopeful, and at times tormented face. Langton spoke directly about the impacts of colonisation and the Frontier Wars.
Yet straight off the bat, a claim Langton made stuck in my craw. When discussing what potential impacts the Voice could have, Langton appeared to intimate that legislations such as the Northern Territory Intervention and the BasicsCard rollout would not just simply be allowed to happen as they had in 2007. Firstly, this is incorrect. While the Voice would be able to make representations to Parliament on proposed legislation, there is nothing stating that Parliament must listen and act accordingly. Secondly, Langton notoriously supported both the rollout of the Intervention and the principles of welfare quarantining and put its many failures down to poor policy implementation.
What’s happened to Langton since her address has been nothing short of disgusting, as the media and people like Peter Dutton have sought to twist her delivered words into claims she called No voters “stupid”. Her Saturday Paper opinion piece has also resurfaced in an attempt to discredit points made in her address under the ridiculous guise of Price being a victim of Langton’s “racism”.
In this contorting, however, what falls by the wayside is that Langton was talking with hope on how the Voice “could” operate according to sentiments contained within the Uluru Statement, as well as the recommendations contained within the Voice co-design report she undertook with Tom Calma. None of these ideas are actualities set in stone as illustrated by the proposed constitutional amendments.
All this considered, I find myself again frustrated. Rather than Australians going to the booths considering the merits, or lack thereof, of a simple advisory body with no legislative power, we have instead been fed the politics of fear, or the politics of hope. We have no proof that the Voice will have any impacts on Australia’s systemic racism and build Indigenous community trust in the system (as claimed by Langton), nor is there any truth to claims that a successful referendum will lead to division (as claimed by Price).
As an undecided Indigenous voter, all I find myself wishing for is that the Australian public votes according to knowledge, rather than half-truths and apathy. In this tale of two speeches, I feel this wish may be a mere pipe dream.
