The former Coalition minister for Indigenous Australians Ken Wyatt says his former party is using the same “fearmongering” tactics it deployed during the native title debate to sink the voice, and has accused Peter Dutton of spreading fear and division.
Wyatt quit the Liberal party in April this year after Dutton announced the party would be supporting the no case in the voice referendum. He told ABC radio on Friday that he has since seen the party lurch to the right and its tactics have become “Trumpian”.
“Some of the tactics are copybook out of America. The fake news, the statements of ‘you’ll end up paying Aboriginal people, you’ll lose land, you won’t be allowed to do this’,” he said.
“That was never the intent. We had the same fearmongering from my party over Mabo and the issues around the Wik decision and I’m seeing [that] being played out again. And that concerns me that we haven’t moved on.”
Wyatt took two proposals on how the Indigenous voice would work to the Morrison cabinet, which Dutton was a part of. He said Dutton had access to the information but “he never had a serious discussion with me at all on the voice”.
Wyatt said some of the arguments the Liberal party has been putting forward during the referendum campaign “are not factual”.
“They’re contentious in order to create fear and division,” he said.
“And they are intended to fundamentally sink the voice. And that I find disappointing because leadership really requires people to think about what are the constructive outcomes from this that would change the status quo.”
Wyatt said he remains optimistic the yes camp will prevail in Saturday’s referendum, with his faith resting in the “quiet Australians” who have not taken part in what became a partisan debate.
But he said if the vote fails he did not believe the government would have a mandate to legislate a voice.
“The PM doesn’t have legitimacy to the legislative voice, because that’s a very strong message,” he said.
“The fear I have now is with a strong no [is] whether governments will become reticent to become adventurous on doing significant reforms in the future in the Aboriginal affairs portfolio, and on programs and policies that could reshape the landscape of Aboriginal affairs, and the way in which Aboriginal people access the plethora of services that we all take for granted across this nation as our inherent right.”
‘No one else called’
He said he remains a “Liberal in spirit” but when he resigned the only person from his former party to contact him was Julian Leeser, who had quit the front bench over the party’s decision to oppose the voice.
“No one else called, no one else rang me and said ‘change your mind. Don’t do this’,” Wyatt said.
He said his resignation was leaked to journalists before the party had even contacted him to accept it.
“I probably expected it. Because when you take a strong position on something you believe in and go the opposite way to what your leader is indicated, then you don’t expect any sort of intervention,” he said.
Wyatt said he hoped the nation would undergo a truth-telling process, no matter the result, as “it’s always been an issue the true history of our country has never really been told”.
“Truth-telling has to be about the true history of a country. But not about guilt … so that we can make sure that things like this never happen again.”
Wyatt said a no vote would lead to “significant trust issues” between any future Liberal governments and Indigenous people.
He recounted a story he was told by an Aboriginal woman who attended one a forum he was at, who said that if the nation voted no, she would “feel unwanted”.
“She said after 72 years of contributing to Australia, she said, I personally will take it as rejection.”
