The Anglican Archbishop of Sydney, Kanishka Raffel, has encouraged church members to ‘give generous consideration to the case to vote ‘Yes’ to the referendum question of whether the Constitution should establish a First Nations Voice, once the details have been made clear’.

The most vocal supporter of the ‘Yes’ vote has come from senior Anglican clergyman Reverend Dr Michael Jensen (rector of the prestigious St Mark’s, Darling Point).

Michael has written a long essay in support of a ‘Yes’ vote which has been widely circulated. It is a moving and heartfelt plea for the Voice based on Indigenous disadvantage—life expectancy, incarceration rates, under-education, under-employment, domestic violence, substance abuse rates, and so on. Kanishka and Michael make a similar appeal to the hearts of Christians based on Indigenous suffering.

I have had some email exchanges with Michael raising problems with the ‘Yes’ vote. In that exchange, I have not persuaded him, and he has not persuaded me.

My argument is that there are two competing propositions here:

(1) People should be assisted based on race; or

(2) People should be assisted based on need.

The first proposition is simply not on for Christians since Biblically, every human being is made in the image of God, and St Paul’s message in Galatians 3:28 is that we should not treat racial, ethnic, or cultural differences as ultimately significant. The Bible treats race as an unimportant factor, and so should we.

The second proposition is Biblical because the Good Samaritan did not help the wounded traveller because the man was Jewish but because he was hurt. The Good Samaritan is a model of ignoring race and helping based on need.

No one challenges the validity of proposition (2), but Michael says proposition (1) is not what he is arguing for.

The Voice, he claims, is not about race but about a ‘cultural’ and ‘historical’ category. Similarly, Chris Kenny once argued that the Voice is not about ‘race’ but about ‘descent.’ They say this despite the elephant in the room being large and grey and stamping about and trumpeting with its trunk. ‘No, no, it’s not an elephant,’ they insist with increasing desperation.

Their attempts to shuffle in some other group label to replace ‘race’ looks like a linguistic three-card-trick. But they can’t get away from the fact that the words to be inserted in the constitution use labels that are intended to identify people by race: Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander.

And their attempt to shuffle away from the word ‘race’ is pointless anyway.

They still want to identify a group of people (by ‘descent’ or as a ‘cultural’ and ‘historical’ category), and they want to assist people based on their membership of the group.

So, for those dodging the ‘race’ label, proposition (1) can be rewritten as ‘People should be assisted based on group membership.’ That’s no improvement.

It could be argued that the entire group of Indigenous Australians is in need. But that is hard to substantiate.

A recent letter to the Australian lamented the lack of jobs for Indigenous Australians because there are so few jobs in remote Australia, but most Indigenous Australians live in cities and towns, not in remote areas.

Gary Johns, in his book The Burden of Culture, claims that 80 per cent of people who identify as Indigenous Australians are fully integrated and doing as well as any other middle-class or working-class Australians. The remaining 20 per cent is significantly disadvantaged – and we should go out of our way to help them. But that means shifting the focus from group to need.

Jesus commanded: ‘Love your neighbour as yourself.’ Then he told the story of the Good Samaritan, making it clear that for him, ‘neighbour’ meant a person in need, not a member of this or that group (racial or otherwise).

Warren Mundine told me there are 30,000 indigenous Australians with university degrees who are doing as well in their professions as similar professional Australians. Do they need a Voice because of the group to which they belong?

There are any number of groups in this country that are in need: those remote Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities, the 120,000 people who will be homeless in Australia tonight, struggling parents who send their kids to school without breakfast, those people in Lismore who lost their homes in the floods and have been told they don’t qualify for government assistance, and many, many more.

The focus must be on need, not on membership of any group.

Baptist minister, Reverend Martin Luther King Junior spelled this out in his speech at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington D.C. on August 28, 1963:

‘I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the colour of their skin but by the content of their character.’

We have to refuse to judge people on the ‘colour of their skin’ (the grouping they belong to) and recognise all of us as Australians together.

The greatest poet Australia ever produced, the wonderful Les Murray was a devout Catholic, and his Christian thinking is clear in his epic sonnet sequence, The Boys Who Stole the Funeral. There he portrayed Australian culture, and Australian society, as ‘the common pot’—to which everyone contributes and which, in turn, nourishes everyone.

We are not Aboriginal Australians, Celtic Australians, Italian Australians, or Vietnamese Australians – we are all Australians. As Bruce Woodley put it: ‘We are one, but we are many.’ Because, for Christians, we are all image-bearers of God.

And as such, we care for those who are in need.

We do that by paying our taxes and by, donating to charities, and by working as volunteers (on a world scale, Australians have a high level of charitable donation and volunteering).

Of course, terrible things happened in the past. But we don’t live in the past. Someone once said, ‘We can’t change the past, but we can start where we are and build a better future.’

Whenever the Yes campaign starts to obsess about the unchangeable past—or wanting to regard 900,000 Indigenous Australians as a single, homogenous group—we should be sceptical. As St Paul said: ‘Test everything; hold fast what is good.’ (2 Thessalonians 5:21).

We do that by voting ‘No.’

This article has been amended to reflect the fact that Archbishop Raffel has not instructed parishioners in how to vote.

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