Frank
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Instead of being accountable to everyday people who happen to be Indigenous, the real power over the voice would be vested in local and regional “voices” that would decide the membership of the new organisation.
There would be no requirement for the powerbrokers at these local organisations to be elected to office; and once in office they would control who sits on the national voice.
But there would be no need for them to conduct elections. Selection would be perfectly acceptable. This is spelled out in the report that, according to Albanese, describes how the voice will operate.
The Langton-Calma report also shows that the distribution of members of the voice between the states will be done in a manner that is best described as a gerrymander.
According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, NSW has 339,546 Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders, which gives that state 34.5 per cent of the nation’s Indigenous population of 984,002 – the highest proportion of any state.
Yet the Langton-Calma report would give NSW a total of just three representatives on the voice, the same as South Australia which has just 52,083 Indigenous people, the Northern Territory (76,736) and Western Australia (120,037).
But the greatest anomaly is due to the fact that the report treats the Torres Strait Islands, which are part of Queensland, as a separate jurisdiction and gives them two seats on the voice plus an additional seat for islanders who reside on the mainland.
When those three seats are included in Queensland’s tally, the sunshine state looks set to gain disproportionate influence over the direction of the voice.
Queensland, including the Torres Strait Islands, will have six of the 24 seats on the voice — twice as many as NSW.
Yet last year’s population estimates by the ABS show that Queensland had just 273,224 Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders, which is 66,322 fewer than in NSW.
If this is how the new institution will operate the government has some explaining to do before we are asked to embed such an undemocratic entity in the Constitution.
Why will Queensland benefit from a gerrymander that will allow it to dominate the voice?
Why will Indigenous people in NSW be under-represented?
Why will Indigenous people everywhere be denied the right to vote for members of the voice and – more importantly – to vote them out of office?
And if the government plans to allow membership of the all-important local and regional voices to be determined by what the report describes as “traditional law and custom”, will the Federal Court be asked to settle disputes about the content of those traditional laws and customs?
The bigger issue is that the voice looks like a throwback to less enlightened times. It will suffer from the same democratic deficit that once existed in this country under the authoritarian rule of colonial British governors. But this time, those exercising unaccountable power will be black, not white. Chris Merrit
This referendum must fail.
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