From now until referendum day, we have removed the paywall on all Voice coverage. Read and share this article for free. <\/p>\n
It is becoming clear the Voice referendum is our Brexit moment. The No case is being built around misinformation and fear. The basest anxieties are being stoked. As with Brexit, the choice made on October 14 will say a great deal about the country that made it. <\/p>\n
A defeat would lead inevitably to a loss in international standing and influence a perception, quite inaccurate, that Australia has not forsaken its racist past. As occurred in Britain, there will be, a few months hence, asevere case of buyers remorse. <\/p>\n
Lord Acton, the great English liberal Catholic historian, famous for his aphorism about the corruption of power, wrote: I exhort you never to debase the moral currency or to lower the standard of rectitude, but to try others by the final maxim that governs your own lives, and to suffer no man and no cause to escape the undying penalty which history has the power to inflict on wrong <\/p>\n
We would do well to remember these words. <\/p>\n
No campaigners in the current referendum, the first in Australia since 1999, are encouraged to concentrate on generating fear and doubt in voters, avoiding any discussion of evidence, history or statistics. In this appalling campaign, the No side just makes stuff up. <\/p>\n
The No campaign slogan If you dont know, vote no is morally bankrupt. It encourages citizens not to engage with an important issue. Really, if you dont know, you should find out. This is basic decency on a question of such importance. <\/p>\n
Coalition politicians have been circulating material in their electorates that asserts various falsehoods. This, from Dan Tehan, is an example: <\/p>\n
If the Voice is approved, it would be the biggest change ever to our Constitution (rule book), in our history <\/p>\n
They want the Voice to cover all parts of the government. <\/p>\n
This would give the Voice a lot of power and control over everything, from the Reserve Bank to Centrelink. <\/p>\n
It means there would be no issues, like the economy, national security, infrastructure, health, education, and more, that the Voice could not be involved in. <\/p>\n
Instead of Parliament deciding the Voices powers, the High Court would decide. This could cause legal problems. <\/p>\n
Do they really believe any of this stuff? Would any be prepared to sign an affidavit asserting that the claims are accurate? <\/p>\n
The assertion that entrenching the Voice as an advisory body would represent the biggest change to the Constitution in our history is not only wrong but palpably absurd. <\/p>\n
The Constitution of the Commonwealth of Australia never operated as written. <\/p>\n
From the first week of the Commonwealths establishment in 1901, executive power was in the hands of a prime minister and cabinet (not mentioned in the Constitution) and Australia operates as a democracy (a word missing from the Constitution). Aboriginal people are now counted in the census (1967), the High Court is no longer subordinate to British courts (1975) and the Australia Act (1986) provides that the British Parliament can no longer legislate for us. The royal veto over legislation is still preserved. <\/p>\n
No campaigners assert the 1901 Constitution is a non-racist document and that a Yes vote would introduce a racist element, so much so that Australia would be adopting Apartheid. That is both wicked and silly. <\/p>\n
The decades leading up to Federation in 1901 coincided with powerful arguments, internationally, about scientific racism, the concept of a hierarchy of races with Nordic types at the top, then people from the Mediterranean, Asians, Africans and, at the base of the pyramid, mainland Australian and Tasmanian Aboriginal peoples. <\/p>\n
Scientific racism, often misnamed social Darwinism, led to the appalling doctrine of eugenics with the premise that unfit individuals, and even races, could be culled. Eugenics had powerful scientific supporters, both from the left and right. Until the 1970s, that support was especially strong in Australia and central to the White Australia Policy. <\/p>\n
Charles Darwin, to his credit, had rejected the hierarchy of races, proposing that all humans had similar physical and intellectual potential, with differences not being innate but the result of climate, diet and disease. <\/p>\n
Throughout the 19th century, Aboriginal skeletons were eagerly sought by European and American museums and it was assumed that the passing of the Aborigines was imminent. <\/p>\n
There was more interest in Indigenous Australians as specimens than as people. <\/p>\n
White Australia was a powerful driving force in the Federation movement, and Alfred Deakin, a liberal reformer on most issues, was a zealot on race. <\/p>\n
When the Commonwealth of Australia was inaugurated in January 1901, the premier of New South Wales, William Lyne, observed: Of the three great colonial possessions, Australias lot has been the happiest. Unlike Canada and South Africa, she has not had arace problem to solve. <\/p>\n
C.E.W. Bean, our pre-eminent war historian, asserted Australia was the only continent without racial mixture. He did not count Indigenous Australians, seeing them as marginal, irrelevant or headed for extinction. He shared these views with his collaborator Keith Murdoch, Ruperts father. <\/p>\n
The Australian Constitution was an artefact of the contemporary consensus about race and eugenics. First Nations people were dismissed as irrelevant out of sight, out of mind. <\/p>\n
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people are now estimated to number just 3.8per cent of the Australian population. A third are below the age of 15. <\/p>\n
In the campaign for constitutional recognition through an Indigenous Voice to Parliament, the burden of arguing the Yes case has fallen on Linda Burney, Patrick Dodson, Noel Pearson, Megan Davis, Thomas Mayo, Marcia Langton, Pat Anderson, Pat Turner, Tom Calma, Ken Wyatt, June Oscar and others. <\/p>\n
This is a dangerous strategy. The referendum involves all Australians, not just First Nations people. <\/p>\n