Voice Results Are In – REJECTED

Indigenous Voice to Parliament – REJECTED. Despite all the celebrity endorsements. Despite all those people writing Yes on their hands. Despite all the big companies with their Yes23 campaigns. Despite the politicians telling you how to vote. What did you do? You didn’t listen! This was all about listening and you f***ed it up!

These are only preliminary results, but the result is clear. Australia voted against the Voice.

I’m not here to celebrate. I’m not holding anything against anybody. I said from the beginning, I would accept the outcome no matter what happens. I know a couple of Yes voters, and their reasons for voting Yes were pretty straightforward. They just wanted to help Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. They wanted to help their fellow Australians. You can’t blame somebody for wanting to help. Obviously, they had good intentions, and I presume the vast majority of Yes voters had the same thinking. But Australia is a multi-cultural country. People won’t accept if one of those cultures is given some constitutional advantage over the rest of us, no matter how slight that advantage might be. One thing that we pride ourselves on in Australia is our egalitarian society. The principle that all Australians are equal and deserve equal rights and opportunities. Under the law, we are already equal, and when people try to toy with that, well, you saw what happened. Australians overwhelmingly voted no.

So what could have the government done? Obviously, just telling us to vote Yes didn’t work. Importing famous NBA all-stars from overseas didn’t work. To be fair, we’re not nine years old. I’d hope that no adult Australian would be swayed by such a stunt. Not to mention that there was so much confusion over how the Voice would operate. The constitution represents all Australians. The moment this amendment started to cause division, was the moment we realised it just didn’t belong.

But what I really didn’t like about the whole campaign was that they told us that a No vote will change the way we see ourselves. It will change the way the world sees us. That we will be seen as some sort of racist backwater, and send the most unloving of messages to Indigenous Australians. Well, I think that’s unfair and almost coercive. At the very least, it’s very threatening language, isn’t it? I didn’t ask for this referendum, and I’m sure many of you were in the same boat. We didn’t want this. The very act of holding this referendum was what caused all the division and hurt feelings.

The Albanese Government pushed this at the expense of everything else. He was a man obsessed. The Government could easily have trialled the Voice. They could have legislated it at any time, even though that wasn’t what the Uluru statement was calling for. But who’s in charge here? The Uluru statement, or the Australian Government? They could have trialled the Voice for a couple of years during Albanese’s term, and then see how Australians reacted to it. If it truly helped out Aboriginal people, then they could have said, “See, it works!”, and then pushed for constitutional change. But just blindly putting it in the constitution with very little framework, expecting us just to accept a body for one group of Australians based purely on their ancestry, common sense would tell us that this was always doomed to fail.

If the Government’s goal is to truly stop racism and its effects, wouldn’t it make more sense to remove all mentions of race from the constitution? I think Australians could have really gotten behind that. And if they didn’t get behind it, you’d have to question why?

Section 25. Provisions as to races disqualified from voting. And in Section 51. Legislative powers of the Parliament: The Parliament shall, subject to this Constitution, have power to make laws for the peace, order, and good government of the Commonwealth with respect to: Part 26, the people of any race for whom it is deemed necessary to make special laws.

If the Government are truly against racism, why not remove this? Because I think they like having this power to divide. Not only did they not offer to remove this, they wanted to actively insert more racial language. It’s absurd that they thought that this was okay.

It’s a false narrative that Indigenous people don't have a say. They have just as much rights as the rest of us. They can elect representatives to the parliament, and have done so. We already have so many bodies in Australia dedicated to helping Indigenous Australians, but yet, they have delivered such poor outcomes. Perhaps we need to bring a measure of accountability to these existing bodies. With all their billions of taxpayer money, how is that they’ve failed so drastically?

Anyway, the people of Australia spoke, and they spoke loudly. The constitution is not a document to be toyed with. It is not a place to divide us by our ancestry.

MUSIC
Allégro by Emmit Fenn