THE FEDERAL NATIONALS OPPOSE THE VOICE

This series was posted on Facebook in December 2022

1  “... IT WON’T CLOSE THE GAP”
The Uluru Statement from the Heart
calls for an Indigenous Voice to Parliament
as a means of improving policy development and service delivery
to overcome historic disadvantage -  in other words,
to close the gap.

The Nationals oppose The Voice because
“… it won’t close the gap”.

This is business as usual - the latest instance of Whitefellas
asserting that they know what’s best
for Blackfellas.

But what about Jacinta Yangapi Nampijinpa Price
who opposes The Voice because
“… it won’t close the gap”?
Shouldn’t she and those she speaks for  be heard?
Isn’t that what The Nationals are doing?

BREAKING NEWS
Non-indigenous Australians have to choose between
contrary views within Indigenous Australia on The Voice.

So, yes, what about JYNP?
Is she “a majority of one” or “the exception that proves the rule”?

See the next page for a consideration of those two terms.

2  UNDULY INFLUENTIAL, MORE RIGHT THAN HER PEERS
Two phrases may be useful in considering the role of
Jacinta Yangapi Nampijinpa Price
in the debate on the Indigenous Voice to Parliament.

“the exception that proves the rule” and “a majority of one”.

When a person is drastically out of step with everyone else
yet insists that theirs is the correct position or point of view,
they can be regarded as the exception that proves the rule.
It’s sarcasm which uses illogical construction to mirror
the perceived quality of the dissenter’s reasoning.
Such a person may be regarded as ludicrous but harmless.

The phrase a majority of one has a similar but more sinister meaning,
i.e. someone feeling entitled to assert, and, if possible, impose himself
in ways that, though welcomed at first, become intrusive, irritating to others
and illegitimate. Such a person comes to be regarded not just as
presumptuous but as unduly influential; requiring courage and endurance
on the part of others to put one man of abundant gall in his place.  
Yet this phrase once had, and can still have, the exact opposite meaning.

Andrew Jackson said, “One man with courage makes a majority of one.”
David Thoreau coined the phrase when he said,
“… any man more right than his neighbours constitutes a majority of one.”
So, there are two ways of being a majority of one:
the way of egotism and the way of integrity.

The question is, how can we know what we are seeing
when someone defies what we think we know to be true?

3 COURAGE?
OR THE DESIRE TO BE NOTICED?
Those who might, without giving it a second thought,
prefer The Nationals’ position on The Voice
are likely to regard Price as
“a majority of one”
in the sense in which Jackson and Thoreau used the term.

Likewise, those who might, with unquestioned certainty,
support the Uluru Statement from the Heart,
are likely to agree with Noel Pearson who,
though he didn’t use the phrase
“the exception that proves the rule”,
explained Price’s opposition to The Voice as
the result of being caught in a
“tragic redneck celebrity vortex”.

Is Price fearless and courageous,
more right than her peers;

or is she indulging the desire to be noticed
and punching down on other blacks to get her fix?

4 THE STAKES
Framing these starkly contrasting versions of Price together
sharpens awareness of what’s at stake.

Price ceases to be just anyone with a dissenting voice
and becomes a crusader at the head of an insurgency
bent on “taking the country back”… from woke culture

and supporters of The Voice,
sensing the prospect of decades of progress,
towards an agreement on whose country it is,
voided by a failed referendum,
feel the imperative of righteous cause burning
not in their heads but in their guts.

So, what is at stake?

What’s at stake for The Nationals, and anyone they speak for,
is the perpetuation of the Colonial Project;
and for supporters of The Voice,
a consolidation of the project of a morally sustainable Australian nationhood.

Both in their own way about
“taking the country back”.

See next page for a consideration of the Colonial Project

5 THE COLONIAL PROJECT AND
MORALLY SUSTAINABLE AUSTRALIAN NATIONHOOD
Historically, the Colonial Project was the dispossession of Indigenous people
from their land; the murder of 90% of their number; confining the survivors
in ghettos; erasing their languages and cultures; denying them agency in
every aspect of their lives; stealing their wages; fomenting and maintaining
an attitude of contempt towards them as people, and much, much more.

The Colonial Project is also all the material prosperity achieved
at the expense of the people whose land was taken away (stolen) from them.
All non-indigenous Australians participate in and benefit from
the persisting Colonial Project.

The Constitution is the formal framework by which the Colonial Project
operates as a Nation State.

The Constitution continued explicitly to exclude Indigenous Australians.

Constitutional recognition of  Indigenous Australians
is not about privileging them with something that no one else has access to.
 
It rectifies the exclusion of Indigenous Australians from the project of
Australian nationhood.

The ongoing Colonial Project manifests as policy making, at all levels of
government and non-government enterprise, that maintains and perpetuates
the material conditions that originated in dispossession. Even when policy
has purported to remedy those conditions it has always been on the basis of
a non-Indigenous understanding of those conditions.

Effective policy cannot emerge from colonial assumptions about the situation.
Redressing the effects of the Colonial Project in Australia requires a response
from the lived experience of colonised Indigenous Australians. There is no
other transit from the Colonial Project to a morally sustainable
Australian nationhood.

6  DECOLONISATION!? WHO... US!?
(1) Perpetuating established relationships, and
(2) responding critically to a changing world,
are the diverging priorities shaping our post-Second-World-War political trajectory.
The triggers for critiquing and reforming pre-war norms were twofold:
our knowledge of and response to the Holocaust; and Decolonisation.

A quest for respectful and inclusive relationships emerged as a response
to the Holocaust. Ideas and actions denigrated as Politically Correct or Woke
are some of the fruits of post-Holocaust recalibration of the moral compass.

Decolonisation – self determination – enabled the overwhelming majority of people
in the world to seize back their own voice, and that in turn became the opportunity
for us in the West to redefine who we are:
no longer masters but partners.

But not in Australia.

All former colonies achieved independence after the Second World War,
either by returning fire against the violence of colonial powers
attempting to reinstate the status quo ante,
or by the power of moral persuasion and diplomacy.

Self-determination became the self-evident moral right of people
living in their own land.

In countries where the colonisers became, and will, therefore, always remain, the
majority population, treaties were made between colonisers and indigenous people;
and though repeatedly broken, treaties legally recognised
the prior occupation of the land by, and ongoing presence of, indigenous people.

Only in Australia is there still no treaty or other form of recognition.

7  DEMANDING AND DELIVERING RECOGNITION
Indigenous Australians have been asserting their right to recognition since 1934.
In 1972 the Aboriginal Embassy was hoisted as an umbrella and later
erected as a tent in front of Parliament House, to demand...

Land Rights
and to assert Sovereignty and
the right to Self Determination...

and remains the oldest continuing protest occupation site in the world.

The right to Constitutional Recognition
was acknowledged by John Howard in 2007.

A decade of negotiation and consultation with Indigenous and non-indigenous
Australians, culminated in the Uluru Statement from the Heart and its call for
Voice, Treaty and Truth. A further two years of co-design involving senior
Indigenous leaders and representatives of the Australian Government, and
ever ongoing public consultation, produced a comprehensive plan for the
implementation of an Indigenous Voice to Parliament.

In 2022 Anthony Albanese committed to holding a referendum to enshrine
The Voice in the Constitution.

The Referendum is this generation’s opportunity to end the
colonial relationship between Indigenous and non-indigenous Australians;
and to begin decolonising all of our minds as we undertake a shared journey
towards a morally sustainable Australian nationhood.

8  IGNOMINIOUS EXCUSES
235 years after the a British penal colony was dumped at Warrane, later
known as Sydney Cove, Australians are on the cusp of moving on from the
Colonial Project, but there is some resistance, ostensibly to the means of
doing so, but in fact to doing so at all.

THERE CAN BE NO VALID REASON TO MAINTAIN THE COLONIAL PROJECT!

The shameful hope of doing so is, therefore, disguised as red herrings and
lies about the means:

there is no detail;

it would represent the interests of Redfern and not the diversity of Indigenous Australians;

it would be a third chamber;  

it won’t close the gap.

There are 272 pages of detail in the Indigenous Voice Co-Design Final Report
which was twice presented to the Federal Cabinet.
“There is no detail” is barefaced lie.

To withhold support for The Voice because “there is no detail” when there is
a fully articulated design and rationale is disingenuous.

To oppose the Voice despite the “fact” that there is “no detail”,
is absurdly inept at best or blatantly obstructive and even intentionally adversarial.

The report provides for thirty five Local and Regional Voices to inform the
National Voice. The imputed dominance of urban interests is a
malicious wedge.

The function of The Voice is “… to make representations to the Parliament”.
The wording makes it clear that it is not conceived as part of the Parliament.

“It would be a third chamber” is a deliberately shameless misrepresentation
of the words and their intent.

The failure of “Whitefellas know best”
is the whole point of the Indigenous Voice to Parliament.
The assertion that “it won’t close the gap”
is a breathtaking assertion that
“Whitefellas still know best”;
and a blatant disregard for the principle that
policy should reflect the interests and awareness of those about whom it is made.

9 IDEOLOGICAL INTRANSIGENCE OR A REALISTIC RELATIONSHIP
Some high profile Indigenous Australians oppose The Voice, the most
prominent being CLP Senator Jacinta Yangapi Nampijinpa Price, former
Liberal candidate Nyunggai Warren Mundine and Greens Senator Lidia Thorpe.

Such exercise of free choice is expected of non-indigenous Australians, but
considered problematic if replicated by Indigenous Australians. For example,
non-indigenous Australians who don’t support The Voice cite its lack of
unanimous support among Indigenous Australians as a reason to continue
with business as usual and oppose it.

Yet when the Federal National Party announced its opposition to The Voice,
it exposed the lack of unanimity within its own ranks. It unveiled a fault line
between ideological intransigence and recognition of the need for a
realistic relationship with Indigenous Australians.

The push back from within its own party room and State Divisions of the party
affirms Noel Pearson’s account of gaining the widespread support of
National Party members for The Voice throughout Australia.

What, then, accounts for the federal party’s surprising move?

To return to my question about Price on the first page of this series of posts:
Is she “a majority of one” or “the exception that proves the rule”?

10 HOW CAN WE KNOW
On the second page I said: There are two ways of being a majority of one:
the way of integrity and the way of egotism.

The way of integrity as coined by David Thoreau:
“… any man more right than his neighbours constitutes a majority of one”;
and for Andrew Jackson: “One man with courage makes a majority of one.”

The way of egotism manifests in someone feeling entitled to assert, and,
if possible, impose himself in ways that, though welcomed at first, become
intrusive, irritating to others and illegitimate. Such a person comes to be
regarded not just as presumptuous but as unduly influential; requiring
courage and endurance on the part of others to put one man of abundant
gall in his place.

Or woman.

As I asked earlier: How can we know what we are seeing
when someone flies in the face of what we think we know to be true?

Is Price more right than the likes of Marcia Langton, Tom Calma, Megan Davis,
Noel Pearson, Pat Anderson, Mick Gooda, Jackie Huggins, Lowitja O’Donoghue,
June Oscar, Marion Scrymgour and Pat Turner, to name those who spring
immediately to mind?

Is Price being courageous by channelling the Colonial Project in opposition
to the orthodoxy of Indigenous Self Determination?

Or is she the cherry picked black with views that ‘legitimise’ the ideologues’
preferred position on matters indigenous, who has outmanoeuvred any
expectation on their part of being able to control her?