… or you might lose it!
Should anyone out there in BUGland really give a flying fuck if The Voice gets up and its representatives want to advise the federal government and executive on the date of Australia Day?
Is there any other group of Australians more entitled to feel aggrieved that our national day over recent decades has celebrated the date Governor Arthur Phillip and his First Fleet entered Port Jackson to end 50,000 years of life as they had known it?
Fast forward to the ABC’s insiders program last Sunday where David “Have I got a gotcha for you?” Speers applied his usual SkyNews schtick and desperately tried to make Aboriginal Affairs Minister Linda Burney fess up and admit she’s no more than just one of those woke Invasion Day apologists.
Burney batted Speers away, reiterating that she expected The Voice to concentrate on four key Closing the Gap issues – health, education, jobs and housing – but therein lies my beef.
I suspect Burney is among the kindest, most decent and hardest working of a pretty reasonable bunch of Albanese government ministers – okay, looking professional and competent was never going to be a stretch after the Abbott, Turnbull and Morrison years – but why on earth does she want to come across as even slightly shifty or evasive? Why leave the door even slightly ajar for the likes of Peta Credlin on SkyNews to claim The Voice will lead to treaties, reparations and, heaven forbid, handouts?
Burney should have just told Speers: “David, The Voice would be perfectly entitled to have their say on Australia Day! But as with any other issue, they can only give advice. They can’t make demands on the government which will still make decisions in the interests of all Australians.”
Besides, what is Speers’ obsession with Australia Day? The Bug household would vote to change the date today and we are far from alone. More and more local councils are changing their Australian citizenship ceremonies to other dates and polls show a growing number of Aussies would be happy to see the date changed in recognition of what January 26 means to the world’s oldest continuing civilisation.
And what if The Voice wanted to have its say on wider issues, for example, whether Australia should send itself broke buying nuclear submarines? It’s not just our First Nations people who could argue those billions and billions of dollars could be much better spent on addressing Australia’s home-grown problems in so many areas.
Perhaps The Voice’s chance of success would be improved if the government over coming months tweaks the accompanying legislisation and somehow restricts the issues The Voice can advise on? Personally, I think it would be an insult to whoever is elected to The Voice to place restrictions on their input. We should have total trust in their ability to concentrate on those issues of central importance to First Nations people. They would be letting their people down terribly if they didn’t.
The Voice is nothing more than a long overdue recognition of those first Australians in our Constitution and a wonderful chance to bring in an advisory body that might just reverse a very sad trend of many decades – of government money not being spent anywhere near as effective as it should have been in closing the gap on a number of key life markers.
Decent, intelligent Australians will have no problem at all with The Voice, its noble aims and how it will work in practice. Spending taxpayers’ money in the best possible way is a no-brainer.
On referendum day, their voice will drown out the small-minded, narrow-focused, ignorant racists in the Liberal and National parties who, along with their mainstream media supporters, see political gain in defeating the referendum through a farrago of fibs and alternate facts and endless bucketloads of pure unadulterated bullshit.
Don Gordon-Brown
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