Australia Votes Down Voice
smh.com.au
smh.com.au
Yes, they have some areas of overlap, but also many unique individual features.
Consider for example the great diversity in how Australian Aboriginal cultures understand kinship – https://escholarship.org/content/qt3xp687g1/qt3xp687g1.pdf – very different from traditional European understandings of the topic, but also with a great many differences from each other
> We've boundless plains to share...
But not for those who were already there, apparently.
For those HN readers who aren't familiar with Voice: Australia has a long and poor history with its indigenous citizens, who were not even able to vote until 1967. Voice was a consititutional amendment to give Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders a body by which to speak [1]. How and in what way was vague (unfortunately) but it would have been a large step forward.
There was wide misinformation about the issue too.[2]
I'm not in the country currently, so I can't really speak to what the debate was like in Australia itself. But out politics have a history of adding fear, uncertainty, etc in debates and seizing on that to achieve goals.
[2] https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2023/10/06/australia-vo...
The government could have legislated a statutory Voice, let it operate for a few years, and then have a vote on entrenching it in the constitution. If they’d done that, (1) there could have been a Voice right now; (2) greater odds an eventual referendum would have passed (voting on making an existing institution more permanent vs voting to create a whole new thing), and would have eliminated the “we don’t have enough information” argument. Whereas, in the situation we are now in, there is no Voice, and with a clear majority of the nation voting “No”, even a purely statutory one is now a political non-starter. If you want the Voice, this referendum should never have been held, since not holding it would have greatly increased the odds of a Voice existing. The referendum had the odds against it all along, given the low success rate of constitutional amendments in Australia; made even worse by the government’s decision to push ahead when bipartisanship was lost, instead of taking that as an opportunity to pause and re-evaluate their strategy (it could have been a good time to pivot to a purely statutory Voice and save constitutional entrenchment for later)
I hope it wasn't like that, but your analysis is compelling. You can almost hear the aphorism echoing down the halls of power: "Issue too big? Make a referendum out of it. Nothing will ever happen." ...
God, hope it's not like that. Sickening if so...but when you relate the play by play of what could have been, it sadly sounds sickeningly plausible...
I am not in Australia and I'm out of touch with the feeling 'on the ground', and the same with the political realities. So I really appreciate comments like this that are both insightful about the situation, and dig into strategies and what should have been done.
What's the point of that? There's already the media, social media and every other forms of communication. If it's an advisor and can be ignored anyway, what's the difference?
If the government is really feeling remorse and feel that someone else is the rightful owners - give it back. Otherwise it's just lip service. More pretense. The world is fake enough.
Subtitle: "A Rabble Fled the Test of Nationhood"