What the Voice's 'Yes' Campaign is missing...

A lot of logical and justifying statements have been utilised by the ‘Yes’ camp for the upcoming ‘Voice to Parliament’ referendum but none of them have, for me, truly hit the mark as what it really offers, a template for the future of humanity. Much of the Yes camps justification focusses on the notions of fairness and adequate representation for indigenous Australian people. Its campaign states

“…recognise that our country’s history begins with 65,000 years of continuous Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultural connection to this great land and support the creation of a committee ensuring Indigenous voices have a say when the Government is making decisions about policies that affect their communities”.

But is this truly selling the 'Voice' model properly and, suspecting it hasn’t, has this allowed the No campaign to forge its effective ‘separation’ argument into it, which suits their narrative of sustaining the status quo, maintaining the unfair system that persists today?

A lot of good can be justifiably expressed to the power of diversity in culture – diversity of thought, diversity of belief systems, diversity of lived experience, especially when compared to the alternative – a monochromatic population that becomes a self-reinforcing echo chamber where the lack of openness to new ideas quickly makes it necrotic and rotten. History shows us that this how civilisations die – the lack of new ideas to confront a world demanding adaptation. However, with diversity, issues arise when diverse voices are filtered into a narrative that suits the incumbent power structure. Suddenly, in that filter, diversity of voice and representation becomes homogenised, colonised, catholicised and even ostracised. It’s fair to say that this has what’s occurred to the Australian indigenous voice from the moment Captain James Cook declared the Great Southern Land, terra nullius, two words that would lay a path of brutal genocide, trauma and shame for the next 200 years, never reaching anywhere near a ‘milieu’ between Australia’s indigenous and its colonisers in that time. That issue is now compounded and becomes a problem when Australia and the global population, as our world becomes more evidently turbulent and uncertain, primarily due to centuries of western philosophy, can generate better ideas and confront our frequently occurring 'disasters' such as floods, bushfires and pandemics. Perhaps it’s time for a different ‘voice’ to be heard, as Albert Einstein once quipped “we can't tackle our problems with the same level of consciousness (systems) that created them”.

In this notion of an indigenous direct voice to a western power structure that can fertilise better ideas is where the Yes vote should be postured and sold – anything less is kowtowing and demeaning and doesn’t counter the No vote’s ‘separation and division' concerns as historically and anthropologically baseless, at least as a first step towards a better milieu for Australia’s future. In that vein, if I was to rewrite the Yes campaigns primary catchcry:

“….recognise that our country’s history and future depends on 65,000 years of wisdom being directly heard through Indigenous voices, via the creation of a committee, that allows the Government of the day to generate better ideas towards policies that affect their communities and this nation as a whole”.

Some will say that’s more polarising and perhaps even fantastical, but as dramatist and philosopher Albert Camus once wrote “all great deeds and all great thoughts have ridiculous beginnings”.

The bigger picture is that the Voice model could and should be used as a template for nations around the world in incorporating un-filtered indigenous voices into policy decisions, especially within aspects concerning climate change, biodiversity management, nature-based solutions and connection to place to name just a few, who have perfected their philosophies with place over many thousands of years. This is the time, not next decade and certainly not next century, where western philosophy needs to park itself and just… listen.