When the bill to authorise a referendum on the Voice to Parliament was passed in the Senate on June 19, members on the Labor side stood and clapped and cheered, along with a partisan gallery. As if the date was January 1, 1901, when the Australian Federation came into being in the first Federal Parliament of the time. It was as if the chamber was introducing the body that would consider the needs of Aboriginals for the first time. Applause well deserved.

Had I landed in Australia yesterday instead of January 1966, I would have wondered why the other side of the chamber was not cheering…

Having just landed, I would surely have read the news thinking that it had taken the Australian nation a very long time to set about considering the needs of Aboriginals. I would then learn, within a few days of monitoring the media if nothing else, that actually, Australian governments all have had ministers responsible for Aboriginal affairs. For years. That there were dozens if not hundreds of organisations spending billions of dollars each year on the very same issue. And that there were almost a dozen Indigenous Australians in Federal Parliament. I would have landed in the middle of an acrimonious debate that pitted Aboriginals against Aboriginals, well-meaning citizens against well-meaning citizens, politicians demanding a voice against politicians fearful of the voice. Had I just landed, I would have heard the arguments against establishing this voice. But those arguments came mostly from the right of the political centre.

Then I would have begun to understand why the other side of the chamber was not cheering.

Perhaps, I might have thought as I searched alongside thousands of other newcomers for somewhere to live, the reconciliation part of the proposal should have happened after the extraordinarily successful 1967 referendum. I might have been pointed to the many apologies made by post-colonial Australian leaders – and the lack of any acknowledgement by leaders of the Aboriginal tribes, whose ancestors suffered from the early colonial violence that drove the population apart. Whitefella sorry … blackfella silent?

What are all the Ministers with Aboriginal portfolios doing; are they now to be made redundant? What have all those well-funded organisations been doing all this time to make lives better for the people they are supposed to support? Where have all the billions gone? What will make this new organisation achieve what none of the others had? Why is that not spelled out? Naive new migrant me might ask, who is standing for election to the Voice? I can’t believe my new neighbours who say they won’t be elected.

It reminds me of the famous Bob Newhart comedy routine in which we hear his side of a phone conversation (as a 16th century English merchant) with Sir Walter Raleigh ‘from the colonies’ when Newhart learns for the first time how tobacco is used.

Then you do what!?

So now I know. The public is asked to endorse the Voice but doesn’t know who will be appointed to make ‘representations’ to Parliament about issues not yet known, that only a ‘brave government’ could ignore. The Voice seems destined to be the tobacco you stick in your mouth and set on fire.