Australia: The Voice Flies in the Face of the Political Evolution of the Last Thousand Years. By Greg Sheridan.

[The Voice] is a direct repudiation of the central tenet of political liberalism, because it strikes against universal citizenship. Further, it gives life to the pernicious idea that universal suffrage, the rule of law and representative, democratic institutions are somehow inherently deficient when dealing with all the variety of human racial, cultural and ethnic diversity. …

If democratic institutions are insufficient for one minority, they might be insufficient for any minority, or indeed even for the majority. The whole project of the voice represents one part of a tragic wrong-turn in Australian politics towards the sterile, chaotic entropy of identity politics.

If there are different grades of citizen, if people can be different types of citizen because of their racial background, then the nature of citizenship is no longer universal. …

A fundamental tenet of liberalism is that within a liberal society, individuals have civic rights, not groups or categories of people. You cannot therefore justly, or even meaningfully, remedy an injustice from 250 years ago, especially on the basis of race. For that to be even possible, individual identity must be erased, and only the nation, or the racial identity, has a personality. …

A liberal society cannot go back and re-adjudicate historical wrongs and then find descendants of those wronged and pay them reparations, even constitutional reparations. Logically, such reparations would have to be proportionate to the percentage of someone’s ancestry which was in the victimised group.

This is entirely grotesque.

The Voice is at heart an attempt to empower the left and bureaucracy, who can then pressure the aboriginal Voice to veto any legislation they don’t like.

It also gives more political power to that portion of society that gains financially — because it’s their job — to look after the remaining 80,000 or so Aboriginals still living in remote locations. It is this group that has a vested interest in the non-assimilation of these aboriginals, of keeping them in a human zoo while being paid to be their zookeepers.