Vote Yes, you’ll get more of the same

Prime Minister Albanese went to the Garma festival this year and urged Australians to vote Yes. Why? “Because if you vote No, you’ll get more of the same.”

Actually, if you vote Yes, you’ll get more of the same. And it will be in the Constitution.

Listening to Albanese and Voice architect, Noel Pearson, at Garma, the message was clear. The government’s policies are a failure. Governments don’t listen to Aboriginal people. But a constitutional Voice will be a magical wand that will solve everything from rheumatic heart disease to low life expectancy to suicide rates.

How exactly? By letting Aboriginal people advise the government. But (as Albanese is now at pains to point out) the government can still ignore them.

That’s exactly how it works now.

If an Indigenous Voice advising government will reduce suicide rates and increase life expectancy, these problems should already be solved. The Coalition of the Peaks, a representative body of over 80 Indigenous community controlled “peak organisations”, has been advising the Commonwealth government since 2018 via a formal partnership and has substantially designed and written the programs and policies currently administered by the National Indigenous Australians Agency. Its member organisations have themselves been lobbying governments and influencing policy for decades.

If listening to Aboriginal people will eliminate rheumatic heart disease in Cape York, why haven’t Noel Pearson’s own signature programs in the region cured this already? Governments (Labor and Coalition alike) have been listening to Noel Pearson’s advice for decades. Not just listen. The programs designed by Pearson and his Cape York Institute have been implemented and funded by governments to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars.

According to Albanese, Aboriginal people advising government in this way isn’t working. So, we need it to be constitutionally enshrined.

The campaign for the Voice is based on the lie that Aboriginal people don’t already have a Voice. They do. They have many. There are hundreds of Aboriginal organisations across Australia, including organisations that represent traditional owner groups and service areas in law, health and social services.

The campaign for the Voice is based on the lie that Aboriginal people and organisations will always give good advice. Sometimes they don’t. The Albanese government made the very bad decision to abolish cashless debit cards taking advice from the Coalition of the Peaks, whose chair, Pat Turner, is a longstanding opponent of cashless welfare. That saw a spike in crime, alcohol abuse and violence in communities where the cards were withdrawn.

The campaign for the Voice is based on the lie that a national Indigenous representative body is the solution. If that’s true, why did the four other national Indigenous representative bodies since 1973 fail to solve any problems at all?

I know why. The problems facing many Aboriginal Australians and communities today can only be solved by economic participation – kids in school, adults in jobs, people starting their own businesses and owning their own homes.

Governments have only one role to play here – they lay down the conditions under which economic participation can either thrive or be stifled. Governments don’t create jobs, build businesses or deliver economic participation. These are generated by commerce, private capital and innovation. But governments are responsible for the legal and policy settings that either foster the conditions for jobs, commerce and economic participation to thrive – or impede it.

And for far too long governments have allowed legal and policy settings that impede economic participation in Aboriginal communities and by Aboriginal people.

In many Aboriginal communities across Australia, economic participation is strangled by land title systems that don’t allow private property ownership; by compulsory school attendance not being enforced; by violence, sexual abuse and other criminal activity going on without any consequence for the offenders; by deep social breakdown, that wouldn’t be tolerated in any non-Aboriginal community, being ignored; and by chronic, inter-generational welfare dependence being tolerated, even encouraged.

Albanese’s message at Garma is about as compelling as Dennis Denuto's “It’s the Vibe. I rest my case.” ?Aboriginal people deserve better than this.

I’ve no confidence a constitutional Voice will succeed where all other national representative bodies have failed. I don’t believe that some Aboriginal body giving advice to government - which may be good or bad and may or may not be listened to – is the solution. Nor, apparently, does Albanese, given his criticism of the current way things are done.

I believe that a constitutionally enshrined Voice will undermine Australia’s first nations and threaten the autonomy of traditional owners over their own lands and waters . And I believe that the model for the Voice proposed by the Calma/Langton Co-Design Report of a vast and complex new bureaucracy, interfacing at all levels of government and community , will be an unmitigated disaster.

But the Voice’s constitutional status will ensure we’re stuck with it.

Voting Yes doesn’t mean change. It means more of the same embedded in the Constitution.

The only way to drive change and send a message to governments that we want a different way is to vote No.

Nyunggai Warren Mundine AO DUniv (Hon. Causa) is Director, Indigenous Forum, Centre for Independent Studies . This article was first published in The Daily Telegraph on 8 August 2023.