Rest assured, if Anthony Albanese had unveiled a detailed model for an Indigenous Voice to Parliament on the weekend — say, the local and regional/national Voice model outlined in last year’s Indigenous Voice Co-design Process report — we’d already be down in the weeds debating the minutiae, with obstructionists searching for issues to exploit.
Instead, Albanese unveiled a referendum question and suggested words to be added to the constitution, with the model’s details to be left to Parliament. Albanese remembers how John Howard derailed a push for a republic by making the referendum and the debate that preceded it all about a model, not about the majority of Australians’ support for a republic.
The Indigenous Voice Co-design Process panel, led by Marcia Langton and Tom Calma, produced nearly 300 pages of detail on how its model of 35 local and regional Voices, and an overarching national Voice, would operate, based on extensive consultation with nearly 10,000 people and organisations. It’s difficult to think of a more credible and well-founded model, or of a substantially different one that could somehow emerge from another consultation process. But the referendum would be about the principle of enshrining a Voice in the constitution, not machinery issues. A constitution that doesn’t even mention a prime minister or cabinet is no place for the details of, say, how gender balance will be achieved in the Voice.
Deprived of the detail to criticise, obstructionists instead are criticising the lack of detail, either unaware of or ignoring the Langton/Calma report. This led the Financial Review today into a bizarre position in an editorial that insisted “detail is crucial” and “would make debate less divisive”, but then complains of too much detail: “Indigenous academic Marcia Langton says such questions are answered by her 2021 co-design report co-authored with former Indigenous social justice commissioner Tom Calma. But with that document running to almost 300 complex pages, it falls short of an easily digestible blueprint.”
Maybe Langton and Calma should have included lots more pictures so the geniuses at the AFR would find it “digestible”.
In truth, complaints about detail are usually cover for a fundamental rejection of both a Voice to Parliament and the broader project of constitutional recognition of Australia’s First Peoples, just as the claim that a Voice is a “third chamber” (for which at least one high-profile opponent has since apologised) was often cover for an outright hostility to Indigenous recognition.
That rejection is mainly sourced from some sections of the right, though by no means all. It is predicated on a straight denial of Australian history and the invasion and dispossession of First Peoples. The rejectionist line is that Indigenous peoples are nothing special; they’re just another minority group and singling them out is somehow “racist” — their Indigenous status is irrelevant to their status as workers, consumers and voters, just like everyone else.
Faced with the consequences of invasion and dispossession, which are detailed in the large gap in health, educational, economic and social outcomes between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples, rejectionists split off into different responses — some more overtly racist in arguing that too much money is directed to Indigenous peoples, others arguing that Indigenous capitalism and entrepreneurialism must be fostered as the only way forward.
Both ignore the core meaning of the Voice: that it would formalise the clear, well-evidenced truth about Indigenous policymaking — only policies and programs that have been designed by and with Indigenous communities and which are implemented by and with Indigenous communities deliver effective outcomes on the ground. It’s not merely “symbolic” or “decent” to have an Indigenous Voice, it’s crucial to Closing the Gap and beginning to address the continuing impacts of invasion and occupation.
Obstructionists and rejectionists refuse to acknowledge this practical reality. Obsessing about detail is another step in the long history of dispossession.
