The first Aboriginal person in federal parliament, the Liberal senator Neville Bonner, would have “hated the idea” of a constitutionally enshrined Indigenous voice to parliament.
We know that because voice opponent George Brandis – former Liberal attorney general, once high commissioner to London, now professor at the Australian National University – has told us so in a recent didactic, partisan article where he also takes opportunity to gratuitously compare the Liberal record on Indigenous advancement with Labor’s.
But how could anyone possibly know what Bonner might today think of the voice? After all, Bonner – a Jagera man born on Ukerebagh Island on the Tweed in 1922 – died at 76 on 5 February 1999. Nearly 25 years ago. Long before the voice to parliament was conceived at the Uluru dialogue and articulated in its statement from the heart in 2017.
Bonner entered the Senate through a casual Queensland Liberal vacancy in 1971. He was elected in 1972, ‘74, ‘75 and ‘80. He was a moderate. In terms of his Indigenous activism this meant he was conservative or middle-of-the-road – not “radical”. As a Liberal, this meant he was largely progressive.
He was sometimes mercurial, as evidenced by his crossing the floor, as Brandis writes, more than 30 times.
In the countdown to the Whitlam government’s dismissal in 1975, Bonner was at odds with the Liberal leader Malcolm Fraser’s tactic of indefinitely delaying government supply bills to force an election. Bonner planned to vote with Labor to break the impasse.
Such determination to follow principle ahead of party strictures indicates independent thought. He was no party hack easily intimidated by the whips. Indeed, around parliament, Bonner was often a lone – and lonely – figure, certainly not wholly socially embraced by his own party.
He was enigmatic. By accounts, sometimes difficult to read when it came to how he thought – or might vote – on given issues. His position, it’s a fair assumption, would be near impossible to predict almost 25 years after his death, now he can neither be asked for nor furnish an opinion on the voice.
But here is Brandis – who undoubtedly knew Bonner well, indeed proudly claims him as both inspiration and “something of a mentor” – doing just that under a declaratory headline: “Neville Bonner was our first Indigenous MP. He would have hated the Voice.”
Brandis writes: “His memory is preserved in the name of a federal electorate and a new pedestrian bridge across the Brisbane River. Yet it has been entirely absent from the current debate about the Voice. Perhaps that is because he would have hated the idea: it would have offended both his constitutional conservatism and his profound belief in equal citizenship for Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians alike.”
Yes, Bonner was a constitutional conservative, as evidenced by his representation of Australians for a constitutional monarchy at the 1998 constitutional convention. But must it logically – or historically – follow that he would have “hated the voice”, which of itself, according to many leading proponents and constitutional experts, is quite a modest, conservative constitutional change to a document that already includes race?
The point is we don’t – and will never – know. Using the past political positions of a dead Indigenous senator, relegated to the unwinnable third position on the Queensland Liberal ticket in 1983 (Bonner narrowly lost when he ran against his old party as an independent) to soothsay about what he might suppose today, seems an indolent misuse of history.
What’s more, as Indigenous people (be they progressive no, conservative no, yes or ambivalent) might tell you had you ears to listen, a white anglophile invoking the imagined views of a dead Jagera man in support of his partisanship seems like a profound act of continuing colonisation.
There is, of course, no more corrosive, destructive emotion than hatred.
Bonner’s life before, during and after politics – throughout which he believed the best way to advance Black Australians was through negotiation rather than confrontation, by working within rather than attacking the system – suggests he was the exact opposite of a partisan hater.
Might he have seen the virtue of bipartisan political support for the voice? Who knows? We never will.
Instructively, Brandis goes on in his article about Bonner’s “hatred” of the voice to promote the Indigenous bona fides of Liberal governments. Correspondingly, he reckons Labor was more talk (Keating’s Redfern speech and Rudd’s apology) than action – “… as the old saying goes, fine words butter no parsnips”. How quaint.
He also promotes the Liberal achievement of Ken Wyatt as the first Indigenous House of Representatives member, first minister and cabinet member. He omits, however, that, like Bonner before him, Wyatt also quit the Liberals (Wyatt over the federal party’s opposition to the voice).
Yes, Bonner was the first. But his words – actual, not supposed – indicate he may never have been truly welcomed.
“It was worse than being out droving … I was treated like an equal on the floor of the chamber, neither giving nor asking quarter, but there were hours just sitting in my office and I went home alone to my unit at night. There was never one night when anyone said, ‘Hey, let’s go out tonight’.”
• Paul Daley is a Guardian Australia columnist
