A ‘No’ vote on the Australian Voice is a victory for democracy (against the ruling class). By Greg Sheridan.
If Australians vote No in the voice referendum it will constitute the most magnificent, heartfelt, courageous and supremely democratic act of independence and national pride in our modern political history.
Voting No in the 2023 referendum is exactly the same as voting Yes was in the 1967 referendum. It’s a vote for a common and universal vision of humanity in which all Australians enjoy exactly the same civic status, regardless of their race or background.
This is because never before has so much institutional power — big government, big corporations, universities, taxpayer-funded lobby and advocacy groups of all descriptions — been so determined to force its corporate will on an unwilling electorate and to make sure if possible that the electorate doesn’t get to hear all sides of the argument.
There is no sense at all that the voice is a grassroots movement. It’s an ideological attempt by the activist class to grab power and re-engineer elements of our civic identity and governance structures in accord with the dismal, and almost universally failing, ideological obsessions of our moment. …
They divide and rule us:
All over the West, but nowhere else in the world, identity politics is tearing societies apart, deepening existing conflicts and creating new conflicts. Identity politics undermines and denies the magnificence and transcendence of human nature by trying to trap human beings in allegedly essentialist identities, and forever divide them on the basis of those identities. …
Be magnificent:
The Yes campaign, after years of relentless government-funded activism, is now about to spend something like $35m to $50m or more bashing Australians over the head to make them vote Yes. If in the face of this Australians actually vote No, there will be a kind of magnificence in their independence, their defiance and in their mastery of democracy. …
Vote no to blatant racism:
Nothing could be more ridiculous than infants at school being divided on racial lines, some instructed in how to recite welcome to country ceremonies while others learn to apologise for their racial identity.
This is pure, 24-carat insanity. One of the greatest gifts of childhood is innocence. Friendships formed incidentally across racial lines, without consciousness of race at all, are precious, just the sort of thing that cannot happen if we “re-racialise society”, as Peter Dutton correctly suggests the voice will do.
