Frank
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Always central to the Enlightenment tradition, the principle that all citizens have the same constitutional rights and obligations endured as a beacon of Western thought. It is therefore no accident that Rene Cassin, the great French jurist, placed it at the heart of the UN’s 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which he co-authored in the wake of the Holocaust.
Now, spurning that tradition, we are told the key to building a fairer Australia lies in reversing the arc of democratic progress: for all citizens to eventually be equal, it seems, some citizens must be made more equal than others.
Yet that catchcry, which has always been the calling card of democracy’s worst enemies, has invariably been falsified by history; and there is little reason to believe the political inequality we are being urged to adopt will prove an exception.
In effect, rather than reducing the differences that separate us, the voice will cement them into an effectively irremovable constitutional reality.
At the same time, it is likely to engender the conviction that Indigenous Australians have some inherent trait that defines them and makes it impossible for their interests and aspirations to be fully represented by their non-Indigenous fellow citizens. And by reinforcing those stereotypes, it risks hardening the lines of division that have wreaked so much harm.
Nor do the dangers end there. If there is a lesson to be drawn from the indigenous representative bodies that have been established in the Nordic countries, it is that determining who is and who is not “Indigenous” will be intensely and perpetually controversial.
That question, which nearly toppled the Finnish government just a few months ago, inevitably draws the state into decisions that all too readily degenerate into matters of race.
Is that really what we want to leave our children and grandchildren: a country in which abhorrent distinctions based on biology are used to bestow constitutional privileges on some Australians and deny them to others?
Yes, powerful forces – such as the High Court’s ill-judged decisions in the cases of Love and Thoms – have helped push us in that direction. However, the fact those forces are already so strong only underscores the folly of stoking racial separatism’s flames.
In the end, the voice will undoubtedly make its supporters feel virtuous. Equally undoubtedly, it will create jobs: in some cases for people of good will; in others for the industry that feeds off what Peter Sutton aptly called the politics of suffering. But as the experience of its counterparts overseas has repeatedly shown, what it will not and cannot do is address that suffering’s root causes.
Rather, it smacks of the symbolic politics which, by confusing illusions for solutions, has done so much to create the mess we’re in. With Alice Springs spending the Australia Day weekend gripped in an epidemic of dystopian violence, this country’s future deserves better.
HENRY ERGAS
The Voice referendum must fail.
The paradox is that it is such a stupid and sinister idea that there will be immense damage to reconciliation whether it fails or succeeds.
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