Thoughts on The Voice: by a humble Spaniard living in Australia

Today, 14 October 2023, Australians will go to the polls to vote, in the first federal referendum since 1999, to decide whether to amend the Australian Constitution to recognise the First Peoples of Australia by establishing a body called the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice (the Voice).

As a Spaniard who's been living in Australia for less than a year, one of the things that shocked me the most when I started to immerse myself in the Australian culture, was how present – and recent – the colonialist past of the country is.

The consequences of the brutal British invasion and posterior abuse of aboriginal people are now a complex and tricky structural issue, and probably one of the hardest challenges for Australian society.

But why should you also care about this if you are not Australian?

Ironically, 2 days ago on the 12th of October, we celebrated “El día de la Hispanidad” in Spain. This is our National Day, and we celebrate “El descubrimiento de America”.

Yes, we celebrate that we “discovered” America. We celebrate its colonisation.

You may be thinking that we take this chance to acknowledge First Nations people in America.

Well, I’m afraid you will be disappointed, my friend…

Because we celebrate it by organising a military parade where the monarchs are at the center of the ceremony. (Some Latin American countries DO commemorate indigenous people by celebrating "El día de la Raza")

Fun fact that kind of connects both things: the Torres Strait in Australia was named after Luís Vaz de Torres, a maritime Spanish explorer who led the first recorded European navigation of this strait.

Okay, but let’s forget about the Nationalist nonsense of colonialist countries for a second...

WHY is this REALLY IMPORTANT for humanity in general?

Today’s society is the offspring of colonialism. In fact, we just rebranded it and came up with a ‘cooler’ name: Globalisation.

I don’t think colonialism is something exclusive to our ‘barbaric and greedy’ ancestors.

Colonialism is just a word to give some context to a period when some nations abused their power and executed their desire to dominate, own, and exploit other territories, that happened to be inhabited by other people.

But this mindset of dominating, owning, and exploiting is still really present in our capitalist system. And it is the main reason why so many ecosystems are collapsing.

We need a new paradigm. We have to learn from our mistakes and deconstruct the very core elements of our system.

We need to stop destroying ecosystems that took thousands of years to create, jeopardising life on Earth itself.

By destroying diversity – both biological and cultural – and homogenizing society, we are destroying the opportunity to increase our resilience and chances of thriving as a species. And we are also limiting the richness of opening to other ways of co-existing, enjoying, playing, and creating on this planet.

Paradoxically, ancient wisdom brings a fresh approach to a decadent system led by a hectic and destructive modus operandi that we can hardly escape.

It reminds us how disconnected from the land and nature we are, giving hope to humans like me, who refuse to accept that this is the best the human race can do.

For instance, the Regenerative approach, which luckily is gaining quite a lot of popularity lately, is rooted in the idea of identifying Bio-regions. It is all about understanding how a system functions naturally before taking any action, and to do so we need to observe and listen.

First Nations people in Australia have 65,000 years of continuous Indigenous connection to the land and nature. Same with First Nations people in America. So maybe, we have a couple of things to learn from them, don’t we?

They shouldn’t just have a voice on the issues concerning their own people. We NEED them to have a voice on every single issue humanity is facing right now.

Maybe the people we abused and destroyed are the ones who can help us fix this mess.