In 2017, the Uluru Statement from the Heart defined the Voice as a proposal to change the Australian Constitution to give individual Aboriginal communities complete autonomy to advise the Australian government and parliament what they want. The government would not be compelled to accept these recommendations — the Parliament would retain its existing executive and legislative status — but the Referendum Council’s response to the Uluru Statement asserted there were some non-negotiable conditions if the Parliament was to properly respect the wishes of this new Constitutional authority. The Council said:

Any Voice to Parliament should be designed so that it could support and promote a treaty-making process. Any body must have authority from, be representative of, and have legitimacy in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities across Australia. It must represent communities in remote, rural and urban areas, and not be comprised of handpicked leaders. The body must be structured in a way that respects culture. Any body must also be supported by a sufficient and guaranteed budget, with access to its own independent secretariat, experts and lawyers. It was also suggested that the body could represent Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples internationally. A number of Dialogues said the body’s representation could be drawn from an Assembly of First Nations, which could be established through a series of treaties among nations.

In other words, the eventual goal of the Voice would be to make treaties between the Commonwealth and what it calls the First Nations. Its proponents don’t just want to keep their adopted title as “nations”, they want to become real nations. The Council’s report notes that the demand for treaties was a priority of the indigenous conventions leading up to the Uluru Statement of May 2017:

The pursuit of treaty and treaties was strongly supported across the Dialogues. Treaty was seen as a pathway to recognition of sovereignty and for achieving future meaningful reform for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples. Treaty would be the vehicle to achieve self-determination, autonomy and self-government.

So, the actual objective of the Voice is that each individual clan or language group should be recognised as a First Nation and for the Commonwealth to make a treaty with each one, as if it were a separate state. As I record in The Break-up of Australia (Quadrant Books, 2016), Aboriginal activists now want statehood, self-government and an independent legal system for each self-identifying Aboriginal clan that gains native title. And they want the Australian taxpayer to fund it all.

This is obviously a program for a radical revision of the Australian federation — all of it in the interests of Aboriginal people, but with no thought about how it could possibly be in the interests of the rest of us.

There were no First Nations on this land for 60,000 years, as the Uluru Statement asserts. This was confirmed in 1836 in the seminal judgment of William Burton of the New South Wales Supreme Court and has been repeated several times since by Australian judges, including the High Court’s Harry Gibbs, who said in 1979:

it is not possible to say … that the aboriginal people of Australia are organised as a “distinct political society separated from others”, or that they have been uniformly treated as a state … They have no legislative, executive or judicial organs by which sovereignty might be exercised. If such organs existed, they would have no powers, except such as the law of the Commonwealth, or of a State or Territory, might confer upon them. The contention that there is in Australia an aboriginal nation exercising sovereignty, even of a limited kind, is quite impossible in law to maintain.

Aboriginal activists now want statehood, self-government and an independent legal system for each self-identifying Aboriginal clan that gains native title. And they want the Australian taxpayer to fund it all.

This is obviously a program for a radical revision of the Australian federation — all of it in the interests of Aboriginal people, but with no thought about how it could possibly be in the interests of the rest of us.

The Voice will simply be another expensive broken promise that will make national identities of a handful of activists who will rise to power briefly within its ranks but who end up like their disappointing predecessors in the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission. The only difference will be that, if they get the Constitutional recognition they demand, no government of the day will be able to do what the Howard government, with Labor Party support, did to ATSIC in 2005 and shut down their office. Instead, if the Yes vote wins, the Voice will be there forever, an expensive, permanent embarrassment for the nation and a permanent contagion on the Aboriginal body politic.

Nobody will buy this manure


The Voice will simply be another expensive broken promise that will make national identities of a handful of activists who will rise to power briefly within its ranks but who end up like their disappointing predecessors in the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission. The only difference will be that, if they get the Constitutional recognition they demand, no government of the day will be able to do what the Howard government, with Labor Party support, did to ATSIC in 2005 and shut down their office. Instead, if the Yes vote wins, the Voice will be there forever, an expensive, permanent embarrassment for the nation and a permanent contagion on the Aboriginal body politic.

FutureTheLeftWant wrote on Jul 19^th, 2022 at 11:16am:





Multimillionaire wailing boomers with guitars and drums is the answer!!! Yay!!
What next? Pippi 'how dare you" Longstockings from Sweden? Skolstrejk för första nationen???

FutureTheLeftWant wrote on Jul 19^th, 2022 at 12:06pm:

Their commentary, your answer, ratty.

Skolstrejk för första nationen!!

What defines nation?

Encyclopedic entry: —A nation is a territory where all the people
are led by the same government. The word “nation” can also refer
to a group of people who share a history, traditions, culture and,
often, language.

Australia's indigenes—according to this definition—were collectively
never a "nation".    They were just disparate groups of nomads.

Aborigines in the west of the continent had no idea of those in the
east, or in fact more than a couple of hundred kilometres in any
direction.  In 1788 there were up to 700 indigenous languages
spoken across Australia.

So the term 'first nations' is somewhat of a misnomer I think.