The Voice
The Liberal Party’s decision to take a hard “no” position on the Voice is a deliberate move to re-cast the referendum as a Dutton vs Albanese conflict, distracting us from the serious and carefully-considered purpose of the Voice, developed over many years by people of many political complexions who have worked for Constitutional recognition of indigenous Australians.
The Liberal Party and the Voice
There is a swagful of media comment on the Liberal Party’s abrupt decision to campaign for a “no” vote in the Voice referendum. Journalists feast on stories about party divisions and possible challenges to “the leader”.
These are distractions from more important political issues.
Below are links to three articles from the Saturday Paper, and one from Eureka Street, covering the electoral politics of the Liberal Party’s decision. The Saturday Paper has generous but limited paywall-free provisions: you may have to make a choice.[1]
Karen Middleton’s article Aston, we have a problem is mainly about the way Dutton and other party hardliners handled the decision, in a process that pushed aside those who wanted a “yes” party stance, or at least a free vote.
Importantly she also covers Fred Chaney’s criticism of liberals in the party for having been “supine” in allowing “the nasty right wing” to control the party’s policies. (She doesn’t mention Birmingham by name.)
Paul Bongiorno’s article Voice exposes Dutton’s desperation notes that Dutton is re-running the strategy that John Howard successfully used to kill the republic referendum, a strategy based on sowing confusion and raising doubt rather than presenting a coherent “no” argument. It involves the parliamentary party, dominated by hardliners, consolidating their right-wing ideology and hoping that their consistent opposition to the government’s policies will deliver Albanese an embarrassing defeat. In view of the outcomes of recent elections, and Dutton’s consistently poor showing in opinion polls, it’s a high-risk strategy, particularly if the “yes” movement is broadly based rather than centered on the government. James Massola has a similar analysis in Eureka Street: Dutton’s gamble against the Voice.
John Hewson’s regular Saturday Paper contribution is titled The Liberal Party is tragically broken. It is written with the insight of one who knows the party intimately. He exposes the hypocrisy in Dutton’s “no” position, and the general lack of alignment between the party’s “core values” – whatever they are – and its policies in government and opposition, not only on the Voice but also on many other issues. While the electorate is moving away from the hard right, and while Labor has occupied a large part of the centre-right ground, the parliamentary remnants of the Liberal Party are shifting further to the right.
“There is absolutely no alternative to rebuilding the party and the Coalition”, he writes. He compares this task with Gough Whitlam’s patient work over many years and several electoral cycles in the 1960s and 1970s in making the Labor Party electable.
For the Liberal Party, and indeed for the Coalition, Hewson’s prognosis is grim. Maybe, in his comparison with Whitlam’s work in reconstructing the parliamentary Labor Party, he under-estimates the task, because in that period Labor was stronger than the Coalition is now. Its primary vote never dropped below 40 percent, but the Coalition’s vote last year was 36 percent. The possibility of a new centre-right party by-passing the process and displacing the Liberal Party should not be discounted.
In addition to these offerings from journalists and one former Liberal Party leader, at least two academics have contributed articles to The Conversation. Neither can find much coherence in the Liberal Party’s stance. Anne Twomey’s article – How does the Liberal Party’s Voice policy stack up against the proposed referendum? – concludes that there is little difference in principle between the government’s proposal and that proposed by the opposition. When it comes to detail the opposition’s proposals are so fraught with practical problems in Commonwealth-state relations that they would be unimplementable. The article by Sana Nakata, of James Cook University, is summarized in its title: The Liberal Party’s “no” position on Voice signals it’s primarily interested in speaking to a nation that no longer exists.
1. Better still, if you have not already done so, take out a subscription. ↩
Ken Wyatt on advice to executive government
Some opponents of the Voice seek removal of the reference to “Executive Government” in the proposed Constitutional amendment, the relevant part of which presently reads:
… may make representations to the Parliament and the Executive Government of the Commonwealth on matters relating to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples.
Former Minister for Indigenous Affairs in the Coalition government, Key Wyatt, who will be arguing for a “yes” vote, explains the need to retain the reference to executive government on the 730 Program: Ken Wyatt says Indigenous Voice to Parliament must be allowed to advise ministers. (12 minutes)
It’s a matter of practicality, because that’s the way all interest groups, from the Minerals Council of Australia through to the Bunyip Gully Progress Association, try to influence public policy. By the time a bill has gone to Parliament, however, it is usually too late for interest groups to have any influence, unless they can achieve some amendments in those few bills that go to committee.
For the most part interest groups present their views to public servants well before there is any notion of legislation needing Parliamentary approval, and most policy outcomes are shaped by administrative decisions rather than legislation. Much of the work classified as “representation” is technical, involving mid-level public servants, working through details and solving administrative problems. Only the most important issues come to the minister’s attention and even fewer go to legislation.
“Executive Government” is a reference to that whole administrative process. That’s how government works.
Wyatt also dismisses the opposition leader’s claim that the Voice, as presently proposed, would be a forum for Canberra-based academics, with little or no connection to indigenous Australians living in hard conditions in rural and remote Australia. It has been developed by people from all over Australia.
Adam Triggs on the economics of the Voice
Many opponents of the Voice base their opposition on the claim that there are more urgent needs for indigenous Australians than a Voice. Education, public health and housing are all important economic priorities to which governments should be attending, rather than the Voice.
They don’t explain how or why a choice has to be made. Remedying physical conditions calls on physical resources – teachers, builders, health care professionals and so on – with the authority of budgetary allocation. The Voice calls on the resource of the goodwill of all Australians – indigenous and others – to engage in the work of democracy. It makes no economic sense to suggest that we can do one only at the expense of the other.
Adam Triggs, writing in The Canberra Times – Indigenous Voice to Parliament makes economic sense(outside the paper’s usual paywall) – makes an even stronger economic point, based on the established research of development economics.
He reminds us that economists on the “left” and the “right” have observed, to their disappointment, that programs that spend money on physical development, in themselves, do little to establish enduring prosperity in “developing” countries.
Rather, “half a century of data has led economists to an important finding: the critical thing which determines whether an economy will successfully develop (and how effective foreign aid will be) is the quality of institutions”.
He sees the same phenomenon in relation to the money that has been spent on programs to address the material living standards of indigenous Australians. As the Closing the Gap monitors keep reporting, on some key indicators there has been little or no enduring progress.
He writes:
Economics would recommend a focus on institutions. It would recommend a focus on making sure government processes, policies and rules are properly informed by Indigenous perspectives so they support economic and social development in Indigenous communities.
To put it bluntly, economics would recommend exactly what the Voice is offering.
…
The core idea of the Voice is straight out of an economics textbook: ensuring institutions support development.
Stan Grant on the Voice
Stan Grant has two articles on the Voice, both well outside the arena of partisan politics.
The first is The Voice referendum is an appeal to the people, not politics, and it needs to rise above Canberra to succeed. He wrote it three days before the Liberal Party decided to oppose the Voice, but it’s doubtful if he would have written anything different had he written it later, because, as its title suggests, the referendum is not about partisan politics. Rather, it’s part of a slow process that’s been in train for a long time – as long as 235 years by some reckoning – and will go on. That’s a time span in which political parties, and their “leaders” arise and disappear.
The second, As we debate the Voice, I can't think of a more profound meditation than affliction, relates the affliction of the Aboriginal people to the Easter story. It’s a story of the intense burden of feeling forsaken, even by God.
Crispin Hull on the arithmetic of referendums
Supporters of the Voice are well aware that so far no constitutional referendum has succeeded unless it has had support from both major parties.
Crispin Hull’s post – Despite Dutton history is on Yes’s side – looks more deeply at our 44 constitutional referenda, and throws in our 3 plebiscites (most recently the marriage equality plebiscite). He finds that if voters believe a change is likely to make for a fairer society, they are likely to support it. This perception is a stronger predictor, he argues, than “bipartisanship” – whatever that means in 2023.
As the trend in their voter support base demonstrates, the Liberal Party and the Coalition as a whole have far less following than they once had. From opposition they did successfully campaign against referendums in 1988 (driven by Peter Reith’s bloody-mindedness rather than any considered argument), but that was 35 years ago, when the Coalition had a primary vote of about 45 percent. Now its support is down in the thirties. Also in 1988, when John Howard was opposition leader, the Liberal Party was much more united. (Crispin Hull wrote his post before Julian Leeser’s resignation from shadow cabinet.)