A group of high-profile Indigenous Australians has banded together with a former deputy prime minister to co-ordinate the No campaign in this year's Voice referendum, running on the slogan "Recognise a Better Way".
It comes as Opposition Leader Peter Dutton accepts an invitation to attend this week's Referendum Working Group meeting for a briefing on the proposal to enshrine an Indigenous Voice in the constitution. Mr Dutton has been demanding more detail from the Albanese government on the Voice before the Liberal Party settles on a formal position.
While Mr Dutton is torn between members of his party who want to back the Voice and those who are vehemently opposed, the grassroots campaigns are starting to take shape.
The Yes group, led by "Australians for Indigenous Constitutional Recognition", will formally launch its campaign with a "week of action" in late February. Get ready for plenty of pointless virtue-signalling!
Calling itself the "No Case Committee", the first formal No group has emerged with members including firebrand Northern Territory senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price, former ALP president turned Liberal candidate Warren Mundine, former federal Labor MP Gary Johns and former deputy prime minister John Anderson.
The six-member committee will broadly support symbolic gesture of recognising Indigenous Australians in the constitution while opposing the Voice, arguing it is divisive and will do nothing to improve the lives of First Nations people. "Bureaucracies have been built in the past and they have all failed miserably," Mr Mundine said. "We need to be getting down into Alice Springs and all of the other communities and working there, not working in Canberra."
In July last year, Conservative firebrand Jacinta Nampijinpa Price made a furious, impassioned entrance into the Senate, railing against "false narratives" of racism and calling the push for an Indigenous Voice to Parliament a symbolic gesture that could divide black and white Australia. As she said, "It would be far more dignifying if we were recognised and respected as individuals in our own right, who are not simply defined by our racial heritage, but by the content of our character." Hear, hear, Jacinta! You're my kind of politician!
Personally, I am with the No group, and I am becoming increasingly concerned by attempts to shame people who dare to ask questions. Is this just a fraudulent, empty gesture by mostly-white, so-called aboriginal academics seeking power, money and status? May this lead to special "Voices" for other racial groups? For specific religious groups? For the growing number of 'other' genders? Where and when will it all end?
I am usually fairly apolitical: I keep my head low and my nose clean and I pay my taxes. I have been doing so for the past fifty-eight years [1] as I think we live in a pretty good country where everyone gets a fair deal.
We're not perfect; as Winston Churchill said, "Democracy is the worst form of government – except for all the others that have been tried."
Listen to the YouTube clip. I think the presenter Kel Richards nailed it!
[1] I arrived in Australia in August 1965
