What will history say about the Voice to Parliament?
This essay has been updated.
Despite its very conspicuous lived history of indifference and neglect towards indigenous people, the Federal ALP touts the Voice to Parliament as an opportunity to ‘make history,’ like it’s own capacity for avoiding hubris reflects any competency on that count. For prominent economic rationalists and market fundamentalists amongst the governing party, it is a ‘critical moment in Australia’s history.’ For the Greens, the passage of the Referendum bill was ‘a historic day.’ This it may have been, but not necessarily for the reasons imagined by anyone involved. Will history in fact be any more favourable to the Voice to Parliament than it will the legacy of ALP policy towards indigenous people in general?
The fact is that history is rarely, if ever, kind to the status quo. While no one will admit openly to hating and fearing the lessons of history, militant ignorance is written into the DNA of a capitalist modernity dependent for its existence on the major historical crimes against humanity associated with European Colonialism. Indeed, so dependent is the existence of international law on historical criminality as vast as it is inadmissible that critical legal scholars note a deep paradox, namely that
To show that international law exists, with some degree of rationality, the modern lawyer needs to show that the law is simultaneously normative and concrete—that it binds a State regardless of that state’s behaviour, will or interest, but that its consent can nevertheless be verified by reference to actual State behaviour, will or interest (Wilson, The Savage Republic, 69; Koskenniemi, From Apology to Utopia, 46).
When the lived actions and histories of states is being questioned, we rationalise international law by referring to the Utopian, a priori thinking of liberal capitalist naturalism (as successor to the Divine Right of Kings in the self-rationalisation of fait accomplis of European conquest). We rationalise international law on the basis of a Utopian appeal to values espoused but never lived, articulated in the main through Natural Rights discourse (Koskenniemi, From Apology to Utopia, 48). On the contrary, when questions are asked about these values, we rationalise international law on the basis of Apology, the institutionalised, paternalistic Civilision Mission of the European colonialism and its violent coercion and imposition, as a fait accompli of power, of allegedly ‘natural‘ justice. If the system doesn’t work, it is only because liberal capitalism is misunderstood by its detractors, not that it works well enough as desgined as an extraction machine.
The characteristic statist avoidance of due diligence in making sure actions are in harmony with speech appears to account for, amongst other things, the Lockean proclivity for improving wasteland all the way back to wasteland. Not only do practitioners of international law, like statists generally, tend to spurn living political values, regarding any respect for harmony between goals and the means used to achieve them as an anarchist deviation from respectable orthodoxy, but invoke the values they destroy in the name of defending them with conspicuous regularity.
It is not wholly unfair then to argue that respect for lived values is alien to societies based on social, political and class hierarchies; from the Civilising Mission onwards, values have been useful for rationalising fait accomplis of conquest and facilitating elite crisis management through performative spectacle. The intellectual history of political hierarchies tells us that the logic of ‘if you think for yourself, the communists win,’ and ‘if you think for yourself, the enemies of communism win’ work equally well to sustain elites whose hubris and conceit then destroy society from within.
Where the Voice to Parliament is concerned, the central focus of history on the perils of hubris either figures, or it doesn’t. If hubris does figure, then we might expect the Referendum around the Voice to take it into account. If it doesn’t, we might expect to see it at play. A history of the Voice that wasn’t simply a whitewash perpetrated by servile Victor bootlickers would then have to take it into account.
Elite overconfidence
In light of the history of indigenous struggles for self-determination, the confidence of Anthony Albanese and the federal Labor Party appears to derive from the pretence that an approach that indigenous people have not demanded is more meaningful to them than one they have—repeatedly. If Australian history matters, as is widely and loudly proclaimed, not least of the indigenous struggles that matter are those around demands for Treaty.
As indigenous voices remind us endlessly, Treaty is only foundation they consider meaningful for self-determination, land rights and the recovery of their culture post-colonisation. The history of indigenous activism in pursuit of Treaty began with the building of the Aboriginal Tent Embassy on the lawns of the old Parliament House in Canberra in 1972. The Tent Embassy remains on the lawns of Parliament House to this day, a full half-century and a year later. After a solid half century of activism, the wishes of indigenous people are hardly unknown to anyone: a sign at the Embassy reads in large letters: TREATY. This history reminds us that indigenous Australians have never ceded sovereignty, even if those of us who only like to think of history when we find it suitable to our purposes forget.
It is thanks to this history of activism that few remain unaware at this point that the original inhabitants of the land have never ceded sovereignty, or that a treaty is necessary to recognise it, and enable self-determination in so doing (in the 1990s, momentum was even enough to yield Yothu Yindi’s hit song ‘Treaty’—a piece of history to which the Laborite and Tory architects of Constitutional Recognition are very conspicuously deaf).
The history behind the deprivation of indigenous sovereignty is known. Historical scholarship in recent decades has told us more about our violent history, from the frontier wars (including remarkable episodes like the Battle of One Tree Hill), the attempted cultural genocide of the Stolen Generations, and the most tawdry history of ALP indigenous policy, its complicity in the Northern Territory land grab not the least of which. Just as the the history behind the deprivation of indigenous sovereignty is known, so is the necessary response. For his part, Anthony Albanese takes pride in sporting Radio Birdman t-shirts to show off his cultural smarts; if this is the case, he is also no doubt also aware of Midnight Oil, whose anthem to the historical legacy of settler colonialism in Australia is nothing short of an idiosyncratic feature of the Australian national identity.
Nevertheless, the Australian government has responded to these long-standing indigenous demands for the recognition of indigenous sovereignty through a Treaty with a campaign to mobilise popular support for constitutional recognition. The fact that this settler colonial constitution was the means by which indigenous sovereignty was destroyed in the first place somehow manages not to figure in this campaign, almost as though on purpose. If Albanese and federal Labor are confident in their own historical importance, an elephant in the room like this one suggests overconfidence.
The history of advisory bodies
Federal Labor flout history to express overconfidence in approach that indigenous people have not asked for, perpetrating the pretence that an advisory body is as good as the Treaty indigenous people have been demanding from their very doorstep, continuously, for the past 51 years. Would this history figure in a future history of the Voice to Parliament? To not be a whitewash by the Victors, it must.
The history of ALP advisory bodies would also have to figure. This history is not hard to access; what we don’t recall from our own memories of living through history is readily available on Wikipedia, reminding us that, since 1973, indigenous people have been treated to not one but four national Indigenous bodies advising Australian governments.
- 1973–1976: The National Aboriginal Consultative Committee (NACC)
- 1977–1985: The National Aboriginal Congress (NAC)
- 1990–2005: The Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission (ATSIC)
- 2004–2008: The National Indigenous Council (NIC)
The fates of these bodies suggests not only that advisory bodies have a tenuous existence, beset by all the long-term consequences of tokenism, but that successive governments have some sort of motivation for repeating failed approaches that takes priority over the lessons of history. Perhaps this has something to do with the recent history of untraceable dark money political donations to federal parliament, more than enough to reduce it to a wholly-owned corporate subsidiary. Perhaps tokenism has more value for dark money-funded ALP politicians as a form of co-optation, or ‘endorsement without consent’—a popular management strategy for helping workers reconcile themselves to changes that affect them adversely. Indeed, as a 1979 Harvard Business Review notes,
In some situations, managers also resort to covert attempts to influence others. Manipulation, in this context, normally involves the very selective use of information and the conscious structuring of events. One common form of manipulation is co-optation. Co-opting an individual usually involves giving him or her a desirable role in the design or implementation of the change. Co-opting a group involves giving one of its leaders, or someone it respects, a key role in the design or implementation of a change. This is not a form of participation, however, because the initiators do not want the advice of the co-opted, merely his or her endorsement.
As the Wikipedia history of the Voice tells us, the managerial approach of ‘giving one of its leaders, or someone it respects, a key role in the design or implementation of a change’ is reflected in the origins of the campaign for Constitutional Recognition, not in the First Nations National Constitutional Convention of 2017 behind the Uluru Statement from the Heart, nor the Aboriginal Tent Embassy demanding respect for sovereignty and self-determination, but in a Quarterly Essay by Noel Pearson: A Rightful Place: Race, Recognition and a More Complete Commonwealth. This was taken up not long thereafter by noted indigenous activists Malcolm Turnbull and Bill Shorten, the pair hand-selecting a 16-member Referendum Council that included First Nations Professor Marcia Langdon, but mysteriously not First Nations Professor Gary Foley. A critical history might ask what it was about their respective approaches that lead to the White Gubbament favouring one and not the other.
A meaningful future history of the Voice would have to juxtapose the hand-picking of blacks by whites on the one hand, with long-held demands for self-determination on the other. The reader can draw their own preliminary conclusions as to what that might look like. Suffice it to say, prior to the writing of such a history, that the origins of the movement for self-determination, Treaty and land rights are far from the same thing as the origins of the movement for Constitutional Recognition. One is black-led; despite the massaging of the proposed fifth instalment of tokenism and ‘endorsement without consent’ though the cruel and heartless manipulation of the Uluru Statement from the Heart and gaslighting of indigenous people by corporate-captured politicians, the other is patently not.
The white-led movement does however offer a ’key role in the design or implementation of a change,’ in line with the history of managerialism, social control and societies divided turned against themselves through class polarisation. As a future history would note, taking into account the broader context of the post-Referendum era, the changes will have already been decided on by the bought and paid for dark money subsidiaries—now endorsed by an advisory committee whose endorsement of a settler colonial constitution is of far more value than either their social inclusion or human rights.
If the likelihood of the failure of the Voice to Parliament is suggested by the history of the four (4) indigenous advisory bodies that preceded it, its failure to achieve anything meaningful is also assured by its lack of binding powers. Indeed, on this count, a future history of the Voice would have to record how Anthony Albanese bent over backwards to reassure federal opposition leader Peter Dutton that a Voice to Parliament would not be able to mount challenges to the High Court knocking back demands from the Voice for a Treaty. ‘The nonsense and falsehoods that have been put around of course are just absurd,’ Albanese was quoted as saying—or, in other words, ‘of course there will be no Treaty.’ As The Age reported on the development of indigenous endorsement without participation,
The tweak to the wording, which has not yet been revealed, is designed in part to win over support from conservatives who feared the proposed amendment could open the door to High Court challenges of parliamentary decisions if someone could argue that the Voice body was not properly consulted.
A critical history of the Voice would have to record the deep value put on the voices of white conservatives in the Liberal Party in the earliest and most crucial stages of the process. On the basis of these historical facts, it might lend towards the conclusion that the Voice is old wine in new bottles. It might find that the incorporation of Advisory Body #5 into the Constitution permanently forestalled Treaty via a favoured modality of illiberal technocracy that couldn’t be removed afterwards. This history of the Voice would then proceed to the practical consequences for indigenous mob, denied the alleged fair go but endorsers of the Constitution that dispossessed them nonetheless.
On embarrassment to the Victors
Thanks to the protracted history of courageous indigenous struggles, everyone in Australia already knows—whether we acknowledge it or not—what indigenous voices demand. The Tent Embassy has been on the lawns continuously for 51 years. A history of the Voice would recall that federal politicians have read the big sign that accompanies it every day for every one of those 51 years; at this point, we should hardly need reminding what the sign says, those who crow the loudest about how important history is when it suits their purposes ideologically not least of all.
As we saw at the beginning of this article, behind the Constitution is a history of chronic disrespect for lived values, and a characteristic avoidance amongst statists of due diligence in making sure actions are in harmony with speech. The Civilising Mission that British empire-builders used to justify invasion and land theft to themselves, legalising conquest through Terra Nullius, established the legal basis for a Constitution later overturned by its own highest court. A history of the Voice might consider its role in buttressing a legal superstructure reliant on appeals to Utopianism and Apology otherwise.
In considering the value of ‘endorsement without participation’ on this count, a non-Victor history of the Voice would also have to consider the habitual propaganda of three-word sloganeering. Perhaps it could bring in the history of propaganda, of ‘repeating a lie until it takes on the appearance of truth’ (as per Goebbels), and the many unspoken assumptions behind this strategy that betray the disjuncture between rhetoric and actions consistent with broader issues globally with international law. The fact of the matter is that, while the rhetoric of constitutional recognition is inclusive, the actions of the ALP in proposing it sweep a litany of betrayals of indigenous people by past Labor governments under the rug, tending to frustrate meaningful self-determination.
No history of the Voice would be meaningful without such embarrassment to the Victors; the same may well also prove true of the role of ‘endorsement without participation’ disguising the self-interested and ulterior motives of a neoliberal, technocratic shell of a party who seeks legitimacy from those it has long abandoned. The nominal benevolence in ‘allowing’ indigenous people to have what, without any kind of binding powers, amounts to the same kind of suggestion box as the first four indigenous advisory bodies arguably reflects in fact the same kind of paternalistic arrogance of the mining, financial and rentier interests who colonised the land in the first place, robbed indigenous people of country, culture, identity, life, sovereignty and self-determination, and reduced the Australian Parliament to a wholly-owned subsidiary.
To the extent that a future history of the Voice became a history of the co-optation of indigenous struggles by illiberal technocratic oligarchy, it would be able to draw on comparable processes taking place in the face of calls for meaningful action on the climate emergency and degrowth; in this instance, of course, Labor has responded with waxing lyrical about ‘Green Wall Streets,’ biodiversity markets, net-zero greenwashing that requires extra planets for all the necessary offsets. Indeed, in response to demands for labour rights, Labor responds with reheated arbitration and the historic decline of the union movement. In response to demands to lift Jobseeker, Labor gives us tax cuts for the rich and nuclear subs to the tune of the best part of a trillion dollars (not aggravating inflation though). At this point, a competent historian might surmise that Laborism functions in the main to neutralise dissent in the interests of its true masters (ie capital), and discipline and manage the peasants for the greater good of quarterly profits.
Such conclusions would hardly be unfair if successive governments did 16 years of consulting with indigenous communities and were still unsure what exactly their grievances were, had had a Tent Embassy on their front lawn for 51 years and were fuzzy on what the exact problem was, or were familiar with Yothu Yindi but were still hanging out for a version where they sing ‘Constitutional Recognition’ instead. They would hardly be unfair if Labor said ‘Sorry’ in Parliament but then acted like they needed Advisory Body #5 to figure out what they were sorry about, and liked history except for any history book talking about the violent arrival of white people for whom colonial class and social hierarchies were positively sacred (though personal boundaries not so much).
A future history might also question why it was necessary for a process around things people already knew took so long to happen, and how many quarters of mining and pastoral profits passed in the meantime. It might ask why the same alleged deep circumspection, reflection and introspection was not applied when starting wars, or approving the mining of new coal or gas reserves. As a facet of intellectual history, a future history of the Voice might delve into the culture of capitalist individualism rooted in the same kind of narcissistic exceptionalism of co-dependents who need to devalue and control those they bleed like vampires, and ask how much is just the realpolitik of holding onto power until we’re like empty coke cans rattling around in the breeze.
As we noted at the beginning of this essay, political leaders have demonstrated a particular habit of resolving crises historically though variations on DARVO-type logic—either, ‘if you think for yourself, the communists win,’ or ‘if you think for yourself, the enemies of communism win.’ It would seem as though the ideological history of the Voice has a bit more to do with the perpetration of the kinds of manipulation and control tactics statists seem to take out of their co-dependent personal lives in applying much the same to their social attitudes and belief systems as well. In this light, Anthony Albanese might as well convene a working group of landed boomers to investigate a voice to parliament for anyone who isn’t a landed boomer, and then accuse critics and historians of hating voters who aren’t landed boomers (endorsement without participation also has the ancillary benefit, of course, of enabling technocratic virtue hoarding).
This could be one version of the history of the Voice to Parliament—a Voice that’s deaf to Yothu Yindi, isn’t that some shit, and one in which social and class hierarchies remained positively sacred to our culture, but personal boundaries (especially of Indigenous mob) not so much. The thing about history though is that it doesn’t need to be this way. Maybe with the help of a boycott of a Referendum and some agitation in the spirit of the 51-year tradition of the Tent Embassy, the Australian people—the mass of the people, not alleged representatives—might use our Voice to augment those of the people still waiting for personal boundaries to become at least as sacred to whitefella culture as hierarchies and the almighty dollar. Wouldn’t a history of Treaty be a much better read?
