The Nationals have come out against the Indigenous Voice to Parliament on the grounds that it won't close the gap, and that practical solutions are needed. To be consistent, I hope David Littleproud has gone through his cutlery drawer and thrown out his vegetable knife because it won't whip cream, his whisk because it won't grate cheese, and his cheese grater because it won't cut onions. One tool doesn't have to do everything.
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Closing the gap between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians in education, income, life expectancy and so much more is important, and a high priority; but it's a tough problem, and telling Indigenous Australians that they'll have to wait for political recognition until they're equal in everything else doesn't offer them much hope of getting anything done this century.
Closing the gap is a tough problem partly because each one of the sub-problems complicates all the others, and partly because all the sub-problems are worsened by an overriding haze of prejudice that Australian society insinuates into us all, including Indigenous people themselves.
Lifting that haze, installing some enforceable rights, would make all the other problems easier to fix. Being powerless is a major health risk, for example. Pride is an educational plus. People who are unable to make an impact in any other aspect of their lives are more prone to domestic violence. The Voice will touch all that.
Constitutional recognition may even take Indigenous people's minds off what they've had taken away. Saying "This is Aboriginal land" makes a good t-shirt, but it's rotten landlord- and-tenant law. The total value of Australian land, adjusted for inflation since 1788, is about $10 trillion. If the original owners hadn't had their fingers pried off it, they could now ask for $0.5 trillion a year in rent, or a handy $52,000 each, not counting mineral rights.
Paying rent isn't on the political agenda, but a Voice to Parliament is, because it's what Indigenous people are asking for. There was a process that led to this, and the Voice is what came up. They would have asked for more, I'm sure, and sooner and better, if they hadn't had several hundred years of systematic disillusionment, but as it is they've gone for the absolute minimum that would demonstrate that the rest of us are halfway serious about reconciliation.
It's a tribute to the moderation of the request, I suppose, that its opponents (such as the Nationals) don't seem to have many positive objections to it, which is why they fall back on the claim that even if it's harmless it stands in the way of doing other better things - things that the Nationals didn't do when they were in government, and things they're not proposing now, and things that they don't actually feel able to put into words, but wonderful painless effective solutions that will instantly vanish into smoke if the Voice is passed.
If the Nationals do think the Voice is a meaningless gesture, mind you, you'd think they'd be all in favour of it. Meaningless gestures were just about the entire content of the last Coalition government. There wasn't a Trumpist bogey, from electoral fraud to trans pronouns, that didn't get taken up by Scott Morrison and Sky News and the Australian right and trumpeted as wokeness gone mad.
In the USA, a firm position on wokeness seems to be enough to raise a person to presidential timber. Florida governor Ron DeSantis recently came over all Churchillian, pronouncing: "We fight the woke in the legislature. We fight the woke in the schools. We fight the woke in the corporations. We will never, ever surrender to the woke mob."
It was perhaps a mistake for him to put this principle into Florida law, because courts can ask what exactly the government means by woke, and one court did so. DeSantis's lawyers were forced to clarify it for the judge: "DeSantis's general counsel said the term referred to 'the belief there are systemic injustices in American society and a need to address them.'"
If the Voice to Parliament did nothing else other than repeat, over and over, that there are systematic injustices in Australian society and that we need to address them, then it would justify its existence.
The Anti-Woke Party won Morrison his first term, but has gone down hard in several elections since. There's nothing so practical as a change in culture. Us old white privileged fellas are doomed for dust and that is good. Bring on the next generation - smarter, not all white, and so much more into justice.
- Denis Moriarty is group managing director of OurCommunity.com.au, a social enterprise that helps Australia's 600,000 not-for-profits.
