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Flat White

Good on the Nationals

29 November 2022

2:06 PM

29 November 2022

2:06 PM

An obsession with race politics is a dangerous direction for any nation to take. Enshrining racial discrimination and supremacy into the Constitution, as Labor Prime Minister Anthony Albanese plans to do in order to construct a new layer of race-based bureaucracy for the public purse to support, is even worse.

The Liberal Party under Peter Dutton has been hopelessly limp, unable (apparently) to dismiss race politics off-hand as a really bad idea. No. They’d rather ‘wait for the detail’.

Thankfully, the other half of the Coalition have found their voice.

Regional conservatives have been a bit nervous about David Littleproud due to his uneven record on the foreign billionaire-backed renewable energy scam. He has come around, beginning to slowly rally against renewable energy which is partly why the Nationals in Victoria did a lot better than their green-leaning Liberal partners.

Building on this, Littleproud has taken a stand against Labor’s ‘Voice to Parliament’ by declaring it will ‘add another layer of bureaucratic red tape’.

‘Crucial questions remain unanswered, including why won’t the federal government focus on local and regional voice bodies and traditional owners – who have a genuine and grassroots connection to the everyday lives of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australians.’

Littleproud clashed with Kenny from Sky News Australia over the issue, with Kenny saying:

‘I heard you make that argument today… I find it particularly contradictory because you’re saying you oppose the Voice because it won’t work. Yet everybody agrees what we’re doing now hasn’t been working.’

Kenny should know that a Voice to Parliament based upon the assumption of racial supremacy that undermines the sanctity of equality for all citizens in the eyes of the State isn’t just a terrible idea – it harks back to shades of the race politics from last century.

No citizen should be granted special rights based upon their race. There’s too much of it in the government already, with students given extra marks or lower course requirements because of their identity. The whole thing is an insulting, racist rort – which is why so many of these race-based ‘voice’ bureaucracies descend into endless pits of corruption.


‘If you’re going to oppose the Voice, what are you going to propose doing differently that might actually improve some of the situations we’re talking about?’ added Kenny.

Go on, Kenny. Where, in the entirety of human history, has state-sanctioned racial supremacy or rewarding people financially for their race improved the situation? I’ll wait.

Surely the answer to Kenny’s question would be to gut the race-based bureaucracies we already have and start leaning hard into personal responsibility, stripping away handouts, making sure kids go to school, and offering real opportunities for all people in regional areas – regardless of race – to escape the cycle of poverty and abuse.

The only astonishing thing is that anyone would argue in favour of adding a racist parallel chamber to Parliament.

Littleproud’s primary commentary is correct: throwing billions of dollars at the (borderline socialist) Indigenous bureaucracy has seen the lives of Indigenous Australians in remote areas go backwards.

‘Chris, this is about empowering those local communities at a local level because each one of those, even within the regions in which they’ll be talking about, will have vastly different challenges, but also opportunities,’ said Littleproud, with astounding sense. ‘And by limiting that to a couple of voices from these regions to come to Canberra to talk around and then go back, it should be flipped on its head.’

He added:

‘To put in place a mechanism that’s enshrined in the Constitution that effectively, if it doesn’t work we have locked ourselves and future generations of young Indigenous Australians into a model that doesn’t work, I think doesn’t pass the test of trying to close the gap. We’re being constructive in understanding. That the people we represent have a different set of needs and circumstances. And you know what? The people in my party room are the ones that have walked them all in. So while you might have a capital city view, let me tell you it shouldn’t be a view. It should be about a full community.’

Not only that, it is irksome to think in this ‘modern Australia’ we’ll have people holding up their ancestry tests as a means of accessing extra rights and money. Do we want white kids in remote communities to have fewer rights than their Indigenous peers? Really? Because that is the blueprint that commentators like Chris Kenny are endorsing by casually brushing over the racist nature of Labor’s proposal.

The problem is that the Voice to Parliament is a lucrative gravy train that plenty of city Indigenous activists are desperate to join. Never mind that Labor hasn’t even tried to explain why tens of billions of dollars in federal and state money every year vanishes into Indigenous affairs without making a dent in regional poverty. What happens to this money? Why doesn’t it work? Can we please have a report of where taxpayer money is actually being spent?

Instead of getting to the bottom of what looks like a fortune’s worth of bureaucratic corruption, Indigenous leader Noel Pearson would rather hurl metaphoric rocks at Indigenous Senator Jacinta Price – who, let’s not forget, is an actual Indigenous ‘voice’ to Parliament elected on the merit of her performance and character. Price should be an inspiration held up by the Indigenous community but instead she is insulted, derided, defamed, and harangued by the press for upsetting the promised ‘rivers of gold’.

Noel Pearson shamefully said that Price was caught up in the ‘redneck celebrity vortex’ after Price accused supporters of the Voice for embarking on a campaign of emotional blackmail against the people of Australia.

Price also described Linda Burney, Indigenous Australians Minister, of ‘dripping with Gucci’.

‘Minister Burney might be able to take a private jet out into a remote community, dripping with Gucci, and tell people in the dirt what’s good for them. But they are in the dark and they have been in the dark.’

Price has a point. Generally speaking, the activist class is getting richer from race politics while disadvantaged communities are getting poorer. Activist politicians too often treat the plight of Indigenous people in remote communities as a political fashion accessory which is probably why city celebrity activists are damaging regional communities while wearing out the trust and patience of the taxpayer who are rightly asking where all the money goes, particularly as they are falling into a personal cost of living crisis that activists couldn’t care less about.

‘This has been a campaign in the making of the past three years and their strategy was to find a black fella to punch down on other black fellas, and it’s very difficult to combat,’ said Pearson. ‘The bullets are fashioned by the CIS and the IPA but… it’s a black hand pulling the trigger.’

Such violent, racist rhetoric would have a non-Indigenous person cancelled immediately. Pearson’s reduction of Price to her race, rather than her character, is an example of what Australia is in for if they choose to empower the race-baiters, race-grifters, and professional race activists.

Have a good look. Is this really what Australia wants?

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