General News
12 October, 2023
OPINION: Voice proponents have only created division
By GAVAN HOLT IT IS a fact that Aboriginal affairs in Australia are in a complete mess. The well intentioned and generous welfare bestowed upon a minority of disadvantaged Aboriginal people has achieved little. It has been incompetently administered...
By GAVAN HOLT
IT IS a fact that Aboriginal affairs in Australia are in a complete mess.
The well intentioned and generous welfare bestowed upon a minority of disadvantaged Aboriginal people has achieved little. It has been incompetently administered and perhaps rorted.
The hundreds of agencies and huge bureaucracy that make up the Aboriginal industry in Australia have failed. And it is true that once such agencies and bureaucracies are in place they are difficult to remove. They become self-serving.
There is a huge amount of goodwill towards Aboriginal people in Australia. Most Australians support their being recognized in the Constitution as the first peoples of this country.
To brand Australians as racists in one of the most successful multi-cultural countries in the world, as some of the Yes supporters in the Voice campaign have done, is unacceptable. This has damaged the Yes campaign in the eyes of many Australians.
At the 2021 census 812,000 Australians identified as being of Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander descent. This is 3.2 per cent of the population. There are 227 members of the Federal parliament of which 11 or 4.8 per cent identify as being of Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander descent.
There is no doubt that upon the colonization of this continent by the British there were injustices done to Aboriginal people. Professor Geoffrey Blainey, in my opinion Australia’s pre-eminent historian, has said, “it may be that as many as 20,000 Aborigines were killed predominantly by Europeans, but sometimes by Aborigines enrolled as troopers.”
He has also said after they arrived, “the frequent contempt for Aborigines’ culture, sometimes contempt for the colour of their skin, the removal of their freedoms and the breaking of their links with their precious tribal lands is an undeniable fact”.
British settlement of Australia has led to the security, prosperity and liberty that we now enjoy. The majority of people of Aboriginal descent have been beneficiaries. Australia’s successes outweigh its failures by a very large margin.
How have we moved from that fact to a position where there are many people in influential positions such as journalists, educators, politicians, sports administrators and heads of large corporations who believe that our British heritage is a matter of shame?
Surely not just because of the failure of Aboriginal affairs in this country. Maybe they have been reading too much Critical Race Theory. More likely they simply want to show us their virtue.
Every now and again in our communities, in our country, a person comes along who stands out from the rest. A person who has a clarity of purpose and can make a positive difference. One such person is Jacinta Nampijinpa Price.
She has turned the Voice debate on its head. She believes that all Australians are created equal and should be treated in the same manner, regardless of how many generations they have lived here.
She believes we should not be stereotyping “people of colour” as victims which leads to a self-perpetuating cycle of dependency. She has lived and worked with the issues of Aboriginal people in the settlements and town camps and believes the serious problems bedeviling this minority of Aboriginal people will not be fixed by creating another chapter in our constitution that creates a Voice to parliament and executive government. It will continue to produce more of the same failure.
The apple has not fallen far from the tree with Jacinta. Her mother Bess Nungarrayi Price is a full blood Warlpiri woman born in Yuendemu whose father first saw kardiya (white men) when he was around 12 years old. Bess was pregnant at 13 but pulled herself up to become a trained primary school teacher and also become a member of the Northern Teritory government.
In a recent opinion piece Bess opined, “Those who control the national debate are people of indigenous descent who speak English well and are educated kardiya way. They have access to the media and politicians and are loudest in their criticisms of governments and kardiya in general. They don’t live by the Old Law and never have. They romanticise it, creating what I call a Disneyland version. They never talk about the down side, the acceptance of violence as a way to settle conflicts, the misogyny and acceptance of violence against women, the forcing of young girls into marriage with old men, the belief in sorcery. These old ways still cause a lot of problems, like continued violence against women, family feuding and humbugging that forces so many to give their money to addicted kin for grog and gambling. All of these things come from the culture we were taught as children. The so-called First Nations leaders tell us these things are caused by kardiya, by racism and colonisation. They have made everything worse but all of these things come from our own culture.”
For her views Jacinta Price has often been vilified. There is no doubt that Noel Pearson has done many positive thing for Aboriginal people, but Jacinta got under his skin.
You know you are winning the argument when your opponent resorts to personal criticism as he allegedly did by saying that she operated in a “redneck celebrity vortex” and was “punching down on blackfellas.”
The Voice campaign in Australia has been terribly conducted by its supporters and the Australian Government, not the least Prime Minister Anthony Albanese.
It has divided us not united us. They have not convinced a large number of Australians of its benefits. Leaving aside the issue of creating a special position in our constitution for some people because of their ancestory, the worst aspect has been not telling us its details. To change our founding document you need more than a feel good vibe.
I ask you two questions if you are considering voting yes in the referendum. First, what is it that you think you will be doing to solve the problems of Aboriginal affairs in Australia? Second, are you across how this proposal will actually work?
The Yes campaigners, including our Prime Minister, have not adequately prosecuted their case and consequently Australians are turning against this proposal. We cannot alter what has happened in the past, but we can do better in the future.
* Gavan Holt is a Wedderburn resident and long-serving shire councillor