This year, Australians will go to the polls to have their say on the wrong referendum.
On the one hand, the aboriginal voice to parliament is a racist, meaningless, populist gesture straight from the Chinese Communist Party playbook.
On the other hand, the major parties have, over the past few decades, broken a convention that has been followed since 1948 for allocating 6 and 3 year senate terms after a double dissolution election. By introducing new legislation for counting votes, and repeatedly breaking promises regarding how these terms would be allocated, the major parties have opened the door to whichever group controls the senate effectively stealing additional senate seats for themselves. This has affected the outcome of two federal elections and consequently the type of legislation that has been allowed to pass through parliament.
Although an agreed convention ought to work for allocating long and short term senate seats, the repeated broken promises mean that the only way to fix the problem is via a referendum that dictates the seat allocation. Unfortunately, despite previously showing strong support for, and universal agreement on the method, the major parties are no longer willing to even acknowledge there is a problem to be fixed, because to do so is to acknowledge their own lies to the Australian people.
Back to the voice to parliament. It is, at its core, racist. You may be tempted to dismiss this as some kind of benign racism, just as you might be tempted to dismiss whatever form the voice takes a benign dictatorship, but it is far more insidious. It is an attempt to rebrand racism as a social good and a means to solve genuine and significant problems, particularly in remote aboriginal communities. It does this by providing a facade of progress that will, maybe for a decade or two, let people think we are fixing these problems. Further, it will continue the ultimate cause of these problems. The aboriginal culture that we as a society are suddenly so keen to protect is not the tradition culture of pre-colonisation aboriginal society. Instead, it is a new culture that has been crafted through generations of learned helplessness. By stealing aboriginal wages and giving them whatever we deem necessary, we have taught aborigines in our regional communities that there is no point trying to work hard to better their lives, and that they should look to white authority figures for a handout. This has been watered down in recent decades into various forms of welfare and the soft bigotry of low expectations. Even more recently, we have been teaching aborigines to turn this history of oppression into blind racism, which always comes with some kind of handout.
