The Voice is Australia’s Brexit, or Trump 2016 Moment. By Paul Kelly.
Australian democracy is about to be shaken up. It has been a nasty week on the campaign trail and in parliament, where the voice is in trouble.
But something else is emerging — an assertion that rejecting the voice is the gateway to a better destiny for Indigenous peoples. If the voice is rejected on October 14 much can be attributed to indigenous senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price, who is turning into a new and powerful figure on our landscape — among both Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples — and whose vision is a systemic rejection of the orthodoxy surrounding the voice and Indigenous political power. …
Price says the essence of her campaign is “a fight against those who want to divide our nation”. But her targets are both establishments, the non-Indigenous and the Indigenous power structures. This is a unique position; we haven’t seen it before. This is what makes the referendum so potentially significant in its consequences. …
Price says “it is only an elite few” who want the voice. She says its Aboriginal proponents “have had years at the table”. She thinks the voice seeks to perpetuate an unrepresentative Indigenous industry. Price wants no treaty, and an end to the constant debate about racism, rejecting the remarks this week from high-profile Indigenous academic and leader Marcia Langton that the No campaign is based in racism or stupidity. …
Price dismissed as a lie that Aboriginal people did not have a voice, saying they had 11 voices in parliament. She branded as another lie the insistence by Anthony Albanese that the voice was an act of courtesy by Indigenous Australia. …
The comeuppance of our ruling class:
Price, unsurprisingly, will interpret any defeat of the voice as having far wider implications for Australia.
This is not what the Prime Minister envisaged when he launched this referendum, backed by an alliance of elite, corporate, celebrity, institutional, professional and sporting bodies on a scale unprecedented since World War II.
Australia’s elites are in the process of being administered a huge shock. …
For Price, there’s a danger: beware the mad populist right claiming any referendum win and claiming Price. She will need astute political advice. Her worst mistake would be to allow herself to be manipulated and exploited by the extreme right and inept conservatives in this country. They are political poison. These people will be a menace after any referendum loss and would represent the sure path to diminishing her remarkable brand. …
They didn’t see it coming:
Australia’s mainstream and corporate elites have been taken by surprise in this campaign. They never saw this coming; they never did proper due diligence on the referendum….
A referendum defeat will repudiate their judgment and their conception of their own country. It will show they misread Australian values, knew nothing of Indigenous politics, ventured into territory they didn’t understand and demonstrated that they cannot be trusted on the strategic decisions about the nation’s future identity. …
It is doubtful if there has ever been an insiders-outsiders contest on this scale in our history. The strategy of the Yes camp was to build an alliance of institutional and community support. Albanese still invokes this alliance.
The Voice will lose for the obvious reasons: it is racist and therefore immoral, and it gives some Australians more rights than others.
After the Voice is trounced at the ballot box, and the ruling class gets over its fit of calling us names, our ruling “elite” will correctly feel that we spurned them, that we failed to recognize how superior they are.
One by one over the next few years, they will come to their senses. Quietly, some will admit to themselves that what they wanted to foist on Australia was racist and immoral. But they will probably never admit it in public.
