Whose Voice? And who stands to benefit? Quite apart from the moral, legal and constitutional questions raised by the Albanese government’s proposed referendum on an Aboriginal Voice to parliament, which of the varied (and often conflicting) indigenous agendas will it promote? Will it be that of the activists from what the latest Census describes as the ‘urbanised’ four out of every five of the 3.7 percent of the Australian population claiming Aboriginal heritage? Much of this urbanised majority also has a non-indigenous background; about half of them live in Australia’s capital cities.

Or will it represent the real concerns of the only one in every six First Nations people who actually live in remote communities suffering the huge disadvantages and demoralising consequences of maintaining as much of their traditional lifestyle as is possible for marginalised people living in the old style in a new world? Their problems extend far beyond the alcohol that features in the media headlines; they result from a conflict of cultures.

Governmental bureaucracies lumping together the significantly different problems facing these two very different indigenous groups is one of the many reasons that Aboriginal policies have consistently failed. And now comes the Voice, the outcome of 2017’s Uluru Statement that emerged from a series of twelve indigenous ‘dialogues’ (the majority held in capital cities!) and one regional meeting whose purpose was ‘to consult and educate First Nations people’. There was no plebiscite, like that now suggested for remote settlements on the alcohol issue; that the organisers had to ‘educate’ them on the need for the Uluru Statement raises questions about the extent to which remote indigenous people really shared the activist views of the overwhelming urbanised majority. And ‘consulting’ carries no implications of formal support, as recent judgments on resource projects have shown.

Any rational discussion on Aboriginal issues depends on some knowledge (not evidenced in many of the public exchanges) of the statistical reality of the wide differences (in composition, location and circumstances) within  the close to one million (out of Australia’s total population of 25.7 million) who described themselves in the latest (2021) census as Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander.

Significantly, the census reveals an extraordinary jump in the recorded indigenous population of 23 per cent over the previous five years, four times the rate of rise in the non-indigenous population. The Australian Bureau of Statistics Demography Director Emily Walker saying this rise is ‘partly explained by changing identification’. This impact of part-Caucasians choosing to identify as Aboriginal is most evident in Victoria, playing a part in the remarkable 36 per cent rise since the 2016 census in those doing so. This is in striking contrast to the modest three per cent increase in the Northern Territory’s indigenous numbers (comprising almost one-third of the Territory’s total population and many of whom are in remote communities), indicating a minimal contribution, if any, from the sort of ‘status change’ that is clearly altering the nature of the indigenous populations in urban Australia..

Whatever the motive, overall it is evident that increasing numbers of Australians are deciding to prefer their indigenous background, however tenuous, ahead of that of their non-indigenous forebears. Although no statistics are publicly available on the extent to which Caucasian-Aboriginals, particularly those urbanised, outnumber the fully indigenous, it is evident that the more people with mixed backgrounds who choose to identify as Aboriginal, the smaller will be the proportion of First Nations people made up of traditional tribal Aboriginals. So whose Voice would predominate?

Inevitably, the Voice of traditional indigenous remote communities will become relatively fainter. The Australian Bureau of Statistics projects Aboriginal population growth in remote communities as low as 0.5 per cent a year to 2031, only a fraction of the five-times higher 2.6 per cent rate for city-based Aboriginals, lifting them to 40 per cent of the total. With regional areas remaining steady at 44 per cent, the result is that remote areas will slide further to only 15 per cent of the indigenous population, leaving them by 2031 at only 161,000 out of Australia’s total population by then of 30 million, or less than half of one per cent.

The ABS says the reason for the falling share of remote communities is not only that their age structure is relatively stable so that the population of child-bearing age increases relatively consistently, but also that they are ‘largely unaffected by an increasing paternity assumption as the Northern Territory has the lowest proportion of children born to indigenous fathers and non-indigenous mothers’. Make of that what you will! But it seems to indicate that tribal Aborigines are less likely to mate with non-indigenous women than do those males with a Caucasian background who claim Aboriginal status and thereby enhance the indigenous birth-rate statistics in the cities and regions.

But this is only the tip of an iceberg of significant differences the census reveals between the growing proportion of urban and relatively diminishing share of remote community indigenous people. In education, the differences between urban and remote results are immense. The census revealed that Year 12 completion rate for 20-to-24-year-old indigenous residents of urban areas was 50 per cent, double the Northern Territory rate. It also reported a considerable gap between labour force outcomes. And even on such mundane items as indigenous access to the internet, the range is from the ACT’s 85 per cent to Victoria and Tasmania’s three quarters to only 55 percent in the Northern Territory.

The evidence is clear that there is no ‘one-size-fits-all’ solution to the range of significantly different problems facing indigenous Australians, however defined. What suits vocal and activist urban Aboriginal people, many of whom have access to the benefits of other cultures, is not necessarily of benefit to remote communities (and in some instances, like alcohol, may be to their detriment). As the Menzies Research Centre’s Nick Cater wrote recently, ‘The Voice would certainly empower an elite group of indigenous men and women. It is less certain what difference it would make for the disempowered individuals in remote communities, town camps and the streets of Alice Springs’; a concern given substance by the census revelations.