This year, colonial Australia faces one of the more significant choices in its history, through a national referendum on whether to create an Indigenous “Voice” to parliament, cemented within the constitution. Before I go any further, if you are unfamiliar with my work, then allow me to say I am the son of Lebanese and Turkish Muslim migrants. My mother and her siblings were born in Tripoli, Lebanon at the onset of the civil war; my father and his siblings were born in Adana, Turkey, to a poor sheet metal worker. I was born in Liverpool, which is the land of the Cabrogal clan of the Dharug nation. My family, my communities, and homelands have all been subject to incredible violence at the hands of Western imperialism, and our presence here is complicated by this fact—still, I would assert that my opinion on the subject of the Indigenous “Voice”, as an uninvited guest here, ought to be superfluous. Unnecessary, unneeded, unwanted. However, the indignity of the referendum is that everyone’s opinion matters, and having gone through a similar process with the same-sex postal vote in 2017, as a queer man, I understand how and why this would disgust and infuriate many First Nations people. It’s awful to have your existence and agency so blatantly designated as debatable, and most importantly, refusable. No is a choice emblazoned every day and it’s sickening.
This will not come as a surprise to any First Nations people, as it did not come as a surprise to queer people in 2017, having experienced it all our lives in small and major ways—despite that, the scale of the national vote is overwhelming, demeaning, and distressing. That it allows for an organised No campaign, that it makes permissible every bigoted thought to once again be given the biggest mic, has an incredibly negative impact on your mind, body, and spirit, which isn’t combated by the Yes movement, by the affirmation offered there, because that should be the default— there’s not much such weak affirmation can offer to those exhausted and burned-out from all the attempts at good-faith engagement which have failed or been betrayed in a corrupt system that rewards disingenuous assholes seemingly at every opportunity. Ultimately, I decided to write this for the same reason I decide to write anything: I have something to say I’m not seeing elsewhere, and I hope it’s of use to others.
So, let’s talk about Voice, Treaty, Truth and the Uluru Statement from the Heart. I’m choosing to include the full title—Voice, Treaty, Truth—because in public discourse so far, it has mostly been rendered as “Voice”, and this has given some weight to detractors who try to dismiss the entirety of the process by focusing on that alone, on Voice as a symbolic and meaningless gesture as opposed to Treaty (which I would argue is equally symbolic, and using their arguments, equally meaningless, particularly if you look at other First Nations treaties in the world, like the US, which routinely tramples on them whenever it is convenient for the State). But more on that later.
NB: The referendum will be held on October 14th, and the most recent major polls all point to the No vote winning.
What is the Uluru Statement from the Heart?
The Uluru Statement from the Heart is a document that came out of a National Convention at Uluru, in 2017, which calls for two things: a Voice, and Makarrata (a treaty-making process). The convention itself was the culmination of 12 Dialogues held around the country, over the previous five years, which were large meetings of First Nations people made up of traditional owners (TOs), Indigenous community members, and local Indigenous people (differentiated as those who live in the area but come from different Country). At the end of this extensive, considered process, 250 delegates representing those Dialogues and communities came together to write and sign the Uluru Statement.
Why the Voice? Why a referendum?
The following information I take directly from the Uluru Statement From the Heart website which I suspect a great many people still haven’t bothered reading.
“The Voice needs to be enshrined in the Constitution of Australia to ensure it remains a permanent part of our democracy. Constitutional enshrinement can only be achieved through a referendum. A referendum is the mechanism by which Australians can change the Constitution. All Australians of voting age will have the opportunity to vote at the ballot box in support of enshrining a First Nations Voice into the Australian Constitution. A legislated Voice - made by a law, or passing a bill through Parliament - would have the authority of the Australian people if the vote was successful. This would make it more difficult for a future parliament to abolish the Voice without consulting First Nations or being subject to scrutiny.”
This is important. I continue to see the talking point that the Voice would be “just another symbolic gesture”, that it would be “powerless”, etc., and it’s rarely contested, despite the opposite being true. The history of attempts to create meaningful change for Indigenous people in this country is also a history of cancellations, a history of unmade and dismantled processes, whenever governments change from one set of white hands to another, and this referendum, this Voice, is specifically designed to counter that and ensure permanency. The creation of a Voice does not mean any government has to agree or comply with what’s said, but it does mean it can’t be ignored or taken away, and whatever is said will have to be contended with seriously. Whatever is said will be recorded and dealt with not just by the government, but by the public, who will be able to assert pressure on their elected officials, one way or the other. This is particularly important considering the second step, Makarrata, can only occur if there is a permanent body that isn’t subject to the politics of the day. The treaty process, which will in actuality be many treaties, is going to be long and complicated and take place over many years—if it is to succeed, it requires this exact defence, this precise mechanism.
Let’s talk for a minute about why this “powerless” talking point isn’t contested because it’s symptomatic of a broader problem in progressive politics. Conservatives communicate primarily through breathless, near-hysterical hyperbole divorced from facts or reality but which is emotionally legible, and here that translates to such nakedly stupid, absurd messages like “this will create apartheid”, or give Aboriginal people super powers over white/settlers. In response, left-wing politicians and media types usually run as far in the other direction as possible, leaving them mouthing toothless, witless rhetoric that fails to animate their base. “It's too powerful, too much” has led to “it’s powerless, just another advisory body”—both points of view that ultimately serve the conservative agenda, and support a No response. When really, what we should be saying, full-throated, is Yes this is powerful, Yes First Nations peoples should have more provisions in our legal system to counter the staggering inequities created to oppress them, Yes it will lead to Treaties, Yes we want reparations because we want a fairer society.
What is the Voice? We want more details.
The Voice is a constitutionally protected body of First Nations people which will advise the Federal Parliament and the executive government, able to influence laws and policies at the point they originate.
That seems clear enough, but it’s the second part of this heading that has proven to be the real stopping point. Now, the question for the referendum is deliberately simple and deliberately broad in scope, it concerns the desire to have the Voice first of all, and to ensure its existence is protected from political malice. The reason for this is that any further detail enshrined into the Constitution would also be binding; it would in fact restrict Indigenous communities in how they went about establishing the Voice, which runs counter to the principle of self-determination.
The referendum question is not about how the Voice will function, it is about there being a Voice at all:
“A Proposed Law: to alter the Constitution to recognise the First Peoples of Australia by establishing an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice.
Do you approve this proposed alteration?”
Making the referendum about the body itself enables further unrestrained consultations at all levels of Indigenous community. In order for it to exist with full protection, we must all agree to it, but how it exists and what Indigenous people use it to say is entirely up to them. That’s the reasoning, but what this failed to take into account is the breadth of hate, fear, and suspicion that can be whipped up by our conservative media and political apparatus. Absence of detail means they can say whatever they want and have the dubious appearance of possibly being right. In a colonial country entrenched in anti-Indigenous ideology, the insecure settler has been given full license to envision their every racist fantasy, to project their guilt-laden terror. This is the quiet part only sometimes said out loud, but the other part is the reasonable “we just want more details so we know what we’re getting into.” The patronising implication being that these shifty blackfullas are trying to pull one over on us, they can’t be trusted, if we give them any kind of agency, who knows what they might do with it? If that sounds fucken gross, it’s because it is.
The sudden reveal of the detail-lover is a tried and tested conservative strategy. The detail-lover lies dormant until triggered by something they can’t express out loud (say, for fear of being called racist, or sexist, or homophobic, or just generally a bad person) at which point, they will spring into being as newborn experts, judicious lawyers with an all-consuming need to interrogate every word and possibility ad nauseum. The detail-lover exists to fuel doubt and speculation, to stall progress of any kind on proposal, to drench the discourse around it in so much spurious nonsense of what it might be or might do that what it actually is remains obscured or difficult to see. Now you might be thinking, Omar, I feel like you’re being a bit glib about this; there are genuine reasons to want to know more about it, and there are Indigenous No-campaigners amongst them, as well as those who are undecided.
Well, okay. I’m being glib only because a substantial amount of detail does exist, and has for years in the form of the reports and communications generated by the extensive continent-and-surrounding-islands-wide consultation process. This didn’t come out of nowhere, it’s a process designed by Indigenous leaders who have the backing of traditional owners, and if you don’t know enough about it, you aren’t looking hard enough.
Let’s look at some of that information now.
The Proposal
Here’s a report from 2018 that demonstrates a) this has been years in the making and b) the design principles have remained consistent over that time:
In October 2020, an interim report outlining the proposed Voice Co-design was tabled to federal government, followed by a final report in January 2021. Then there was a 4 month consultation process with the Australian public that over 9,400 people and organisations participated in; 115 community consultations were held, as well as over 120 stakeholder meetings, and 4000 online submissions were received.
This is the proposal, easily accessed on the government’s Voice website:
The Final Report of the co-design process outlines an Indigenous Voice made up of two parts that work together: Local & Regional Voices and a National Voice.
The Indigenous Voice would provide a way for Indigenous Australians to have a greater say on the design, development, and implementation of policies and programs that affect them. It would also provide effective partnership mechanisms at the local and regional level for all governments and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australians to work together and improve outcomes.
The actual report runs to over 270 pages. It is free to download and read. It is replete with enough detail to make your head spin, because of fucking course it is, it’s the culmination of several years worth of dialogues, research, and collaborations led by Indigenous experts like Professors Megan Davis and Marcia Langton, among others; their efforts were broadly ignored by the public until the Albanese government actually moved to make it real, and consequently, the extraordinary labour that led to this moment has been dismissed or denigrated by those who did nothing to contribute to it, and who haven’t bothered to engage with it in good faith.
No, Treaty First!
This is a head-scratcher for me. The so-called “progressive No” camp wants Treaty to come first as this is apparently a “real” change… without having a proposal as to how to make it happen, or with whom. Somehow no one ever pulls them up about this lack of detail. Who is empowered to make decisions on the contested boundaries of various communities? At the local, regional, national level who, um how do I word this… who will have a voice at those tables? If you can’t even agree that there should be a recognised Voice to begin with, how on earth are you going to arrive at a binding treaty?
It’s worth noting as well that the same argument about substantive change, the imagined “real” versus the imagined “symbolic”, applies just as much to treaties as it does to the Voice. (I say imagined because we can’t actually measure the impacts of either). In the States, and in Canada, treaties have not insulated First Nations peoples from harm. Treaties between unequal powers are always symbolic when only one party can enforce the terms.
What If…
Typically, speculation that begins with What if… is geared toward the negative, it encourages and rewards the cynical, the disengaged or popularly bitter. Underneath all of it though, is the same idea: what if we try, actually try to put our shit aside, vote yes and it still doesn’t work? What if we try and fail?
It’s a real possibility. Will any of the systemic violences currently causing harm suddenly and magically cease to do so? Will the brutality of the carceral system and the racist cops that enforce it stop killing Black people the day after a Yes vote? No, and no. For some reason, whenever a progressive change is proposed, there are a broad range of people who are determined to shout it down because it doesn’t solve every single problem, heal every single wound. If it isn’t a miracle, they don’t want it.
I hate to break it to you, but the reality is that a Yes Vote, if it succeeds, is more likely to increase settler violences against Indigenous people than ease it—at least in the beginning. Even symbolic positive changes invoke white supremacist rage: you need only look at white America’s fascist, Nazi response to President Obama, despite his policies being deeply conservative and deeply violent. Meaningful systemic change is the work of generations, and it’s incredibly hard to maintain when it is opposed by the status quo.
It goes from being incredibly hard to impossible if we don’t try, though.
What if we Voted Yes and actually shifted the tired, stunted colonial discourse out of the rut its been in for decades? What if we tried out this process for local, regional, and national Voices of elected Indigenous representatives advising government and it worked? What if we saw positive connections made and progressive, equitable outcomes throughout all the Countries in this region? What if we achieved things we never dreamed possible, simply by stepping forward together for once? What if we unlocked new futures, ones we currently can’t believe in, shrouded as they are in the toxic blanket of the same old shit, same old villains?
Honestly I’m as tired, jaded, and defeated as the next person, but I choose to keep my pessimism in my heart and optimism in my actions. Which is why on October 14th, I’ll be saying Yes.
Salaam,
Omar
I wrote my honours thesis about the voice at a time when government was very much ignoring all the work of the voice co-design committee(s). it's been interesting hearing "we weren't consulted!" from people who didn't give a shit over the course of several years when they had a chance to respond to calls for submissions or attend public hearings. it's also been interesting being reasonably well-educated about a topic every guy in the pub suddenly thinks they're an expert on.
anyway, I'm voting yes as well, of course.
Omar, this is a fabulous piece of thinking. As always. Everyone should read this!