“The Voice is the clean canvas Australia needs to paint a better future,” says a key Yes campaigner. “All the No campaign is doing is throwing shit at it.” Some of that shit is sticking, and by far the stickiest is the claim that the Voice is divisive, dividing Australians by race.
What is the answer? The core truth is that the Voice is not about race. It’s about indigeneity. What’s the difference? Race is about skin colour. Indigeneity is about first peoples. Australia is home to various races but has only one first people.
As Noel Pearson has said in years past: “If we were in Lapland, we would be blond and blue-eyed and we’d still be Indigenous.”
And the indigenous people of Lapland, the Sami people living in the northernmost realms of Finland, Norway, Sweden and Russia, suffered a similar experience of dispossession at the hands of Scandinavian settlers, as my colleague Rob Harris wrote this week.
“Who would say to the Sami of the Arctic Circle or the Maori of New Zealand that their status is based on race and not that they are native to their homelands?” Pearson said at the 2019 Garma Festival.
It’s easy to conflate race and indigeneity. So while it may be “shit”, it’s clever shit. Because the difference is profound yet can appear subtle. It’s also a “rancid dishonesty”, according to Pearson. But why is it important to distinguish between the two? Simple. Indigenous Australians suffered uniquely. So they deserve unique redress. Hence the Voice.
Their unique suffering? They were dispossessed of their ancestral land. And with it, they were dispossessed of the very right to exist – under the legal doctrine of terra nullius.
Indigeneity is “the ancestral bones in the land, that is the source”, Pearson has said. “At the core of all Aboriginal customary law, you find these elements – the ancestral tie to the land. The person born from that land, who remains attached to the land, and whose spirits will one day return to it. I would venture to say that these ideas are universal to all indigenous conceptions of relationship to their country, the world over.”
It’s a concept that conservatives might recognise in the words of the great conservative philosopher Edmund Burke’s famous definition of society as “a partnership of the dead, the living and the unborn”.
While Indigenous Australians were dispossessed of their land and their rights, convicts who’d served their sentences often were granted land by the colonial administration and recovered their rights in full. One group was systematically excluded from the economic and social systems of colonial Australia while the other was included.
In fact, the late historian John Hirst established that convicts in Australia, even as they served their sentences of forced labour, enjoyed greater rights than English domestic servants in London. For instance, an English employer in London was within the law to beat his domestic servant at will. A landowner in Australia could only beat his assigned convict labourer if a magistrate gave permission. Whereas an Australian native was mistreated with impunity and at times forced into slavery.
www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/how-could-the-voice-be-racially-divisive-when-it-s-not-about-race-at-all-20230913-p5e4bn.html
