this post was submitted on 14 Oct 2023
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chapotraphouse
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Imo the Voice was a toothless tiger.
No treaty, no authority, no nothing. It was a progressive feel-good project with the window-dressing of doing something while achieving literally nothing.
Aboriginal people in Australia have always had voices and they have always been disregarded and even openly ridiculed by the settler-colonial state.
What does a platform achieve to address these critical problems that are fundamental to the state? Nothing.
There have been Aboriginal advisory organisations to the Australian government plenty of times. What did the government do to heed their input? Precious little, at the best of times.
(As a side note, I am often engaged in disability and mental health spaces. One thing that always rubs me the wrong way when politicians and mahogany suite types talk about marginalised groups is discourse around "giving them a voice". Gtfo. These people already have voices and they always have. This magnanimous posturing is just self-flattering nonsense and it whitewashes the inherent problem for marginalised groups, namely that the issue isn't that they need others to give them a voice but instead they need others to listen, and it conceals the truth that these groups have faced active indifference from those who choose not to listen by making the situation out to be as if prior to "giving them a voice" there was nothing being spoken from them which excuses what the powerful have done to those who are marginalised.)
The Voice was going to be very unimportant, by design. We should respond to this situation and the outcome, either way, by recognising this as a fundamental fact and treating it with the focus that is due to something unimportant.
Treaty, now.
beautiful comment, thank you mate!
you reminded me of a conversation I had around when the voice was announced (it might have been a lecture). Aboriginal people have been so completely obliterated that they dont have treaties amongst themselves. Any pittance forced on them by the colonial government completely ignored this fact.
when Europeans arrived there were 100s if not 1000s of groups across the continent, a ceremonial body made up of two people (a man and a woman no doubt, how sweet, it's almost like a performative little show for white people to gawk at) was never going to be any other than a farce.
Anyway I've just woken up so i'm filled with bitter rage, and my original point was to try and remind people not to give up hope.
solidarity, fuck the colony.
Hmm... I'd be cautious about framing the sovereignty-first No position as being a radlib one.
The argument isn't that the Voice would be benign but that it was an intentional step backwards.
Have you engaged with the arguments coming from the sovereignty-first No arguments?
the media went to a huge effort to promote the idea that Lidia Thorpe was isolated, a lone loony, screaming obscenities over nothing, when in reality there were plenty of Indigenous groups who took the same, or similar lines. Articles just last week declared that people supporting Lidia specifically were switching their votes to yes at the last minute, when those same people had been rallying for a yes vote for months.
there's even an example of Darebin council asking their long standing Indigenous advsory body what stance they should take on the voice. When they came back with there's a diverse array of views, please dont take a stance, the council, filled with feelgood bourgeois party members from the greens and labor, sought a second opinion and backed the yes campaign.
I mean this in the nicest way possible, but your comment, and plenty of conversations I had with other people just ooze a kind of white mans burden energy. The colonial government shouldn't be taking away the agency of indigenous people, it should be giving them back their fucking land.
it's the gay marriage plebiscite all over again, the amount of time and energy that went into this, when they could have given it to us with the stroke of a pen. it's not a once in a life time chance to change things for the better, it's a distraction, something for laborites to give themselves a pat on the back for a job well done.
here's a video interview with the president of BPU if you're interested in hearing more
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=__hoHlc81Q0
The voice was a step on the roadmap laid out for reconciliation and for a treaty. That road is a dead end now.
That's disingenuous framing of the issue. Where was this roadmap towards establishing a treaty?
What does reconciliation mean to you?
I also saw things through that lense, taking Voice as a precondition of Treaty and Truth Telling. But while they are mutually supportive, they aren't preconditions to one another.
With the failure of the Voice to be enshrined constitutionally, if Albo wants to uphold Labor's commitment to the Uluru Statement he'll need to look at the other pillars.