The Voice is Racist

The proposal for a so-called ‘Indigenous Voice to the Australian Parliament’ and now a Treaty with disparate Aboriginal tribes are part of a woke fiction that Australia engages in that most other countries don’t.

Go to any nation throughout Asia, Africa or Europe, and you will find they all had their own displaced indigenous peoples — some of whom still inhabit the land — and there is absolutely NONE of the nonsense that Australia carries on with.

By nonsense I mean having a separate flag for that particular displaced or dispossessed ethnic group, special segregated government services for that ethnic group, special communal land ownership rights for that ethnic group, special ethnically-exclusive welfare payments for that ethnic group and special recognition at formal events for that ethnic group.

The current proposal for an Indigenous Voice to Parliament is one whereby a special chamber of people from one ethnic group, presumably elected by people of that same ethnic group, will have say over proposed laws put forward by the actual legislature, which is comprised of people elected by all Australians.

(Actually, an ‘indigenous voice’ already exists in an amplified way in the Australian parliament with approximately 10 per cent of that parliament made of up indigenous people, despite the indigenous population being only about three per cent.)

Then there is a new proposal for some sort of treaty.

The question is, with whom? There are a myriad of Aboriginal tribes — about 500 in fact — which the left-wing lovies like to call ‘nations’.

Also who has the right to sign a treaty when no one is at war, except in the imagination of radicals like Senator Lidia Thorpe and her ilk.

And what will be conceded in this treaty?

To be blunt, all of that stuff — special services, special welfare payments, special chambers, special treaties — is simply racist. I don’t know how else to describe special treatment for a select ethnic group over and above other ethnic groups in a particular nation other than racist.

All of this racist nonsense stems from the poor and extremely consequential High Court Mabo determination in 1992 that claimed the legal concept of Terra Nullius — a Latin term meaning “empty land” whereby a colonising power considers a land uncivilised or unoccupied, allowing them to claim that land — was a fiction.

By that precedent, the descendants of dispossessed people the world over, going back time immemorial should be able to make spurious claims for special land rights and associated privileges.

Should the descendants of the Berber people of North Africa — the indigenous peoples of places like Morocco and Algeria — be able to claim land back from the settled dominant Arab population in that area?

Should the descendants of the Celtic people of Britain, dispossessed by the Romans and then the Germanic Angles, Saxons and Jutes, who were in turn dispossessed by the Normans be able to file for compensation?

Should the descendants of Ndwandwe and Hlubi people take out legal action against the conquering Zulus of the 19th century, who were in turn conquered by the British?

What about the Austronesian people of the Philippines who were displaced by the Malayans over several centuries?

Or the displacement of the indigenous Caucasian people by the conquering Rus that established Russia, which under Soviet rule continued to displace indigenous Caucasus groups in the 20th century?

The reality is most civilisations and peoples in the world have displaced other ones by conquest or colonisation.

It may not be right.

It may not be pretty.

But it’s reality and there is just simply no point continually fixating on that moment in time and trying to undo it with platitudes and virtue signalling.

None of this is to say that Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander peoples and their cultures should be disregarded.

Like every other Australian, they are an integral part of the nation and stand equal as citizens of the land, not apart.

Their culture — perhaps one of the oldest in the world — should be respected and taught in Australian schools and preserved in galleries, museums and with living individuals and communities that choose to continue with elements of that culture that do not contradict the law of the land.

However the special, ethnically-biased segregation of government services and welfare needs to end.

By segregated services, I mean things such as taxpayer-funded health services, schools and housing programs that are exclusively for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.

By welfare, I mean payments like ABSTUDY.

If you need social support, there should be a safety net there but not based on the colour of your skin!

These special segregated services and payments are justified by the so-called ‘elite’ class as measures that will help ‘close the gap’ in Australia, and by ‘gap’ they mean the statistical disparities between indigenous and non-indigenous Australians in education, employment and health outcomes.

But there is no timeframe for closing those gaps; no set date for these segregated services and welfare payments to end, where Australians all just become one people rather than different classes of citizens.

There is a flipside to the continuation of these special services and payments to Aboriginal Australians: it ingraines the mentality of victimhood, thereby perpetuating those aforementioned gaps.

The one thing in Australia that will undo most if not all of the woke nonsense that goes on in relation to indigenous Australia is for the current racist element of the Australian constitution to be removed.

Section 51(xxvi) of the Constitution of the Commonwealth of Australia disgracefully allows for the Parliament of Australia to make laws for the “people of any race for whom it is deemed necessary to make special laws”.

Can you believe in this day and age that a constitution of a modern nation has a clause in it that is so blatantly racist?

Instead of a referendum on whether or not there should be an ‘Indigenous Voice to the Australian Parliament’, Australians should be having a vote on ditching that racist constitutional clause.

But the so-called political ‘elite’ won’t allow that.

They want to divide and conquer, and maintaining a situation where black is played against white and vice versa does exactly that.

George Christensen was a Member of Parliament from 2010 - 2022 who popularly represented the federal electorate of Dawson in north Queensland for the LNP, part of the Government coalition. He explores both the big philosophical questions of our time and current events from a conservative worldview. He comes from a farming family and his background is in journalism and business.