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Features Australia

The Voice is a national disaster

It can never close the gap

29 July 2023

9:00 AM

29 July 2023

9:00 AM

Emerging from a long mainstream media honeymoon, Anthony Albanese no doubt finds it difficult to believe his  Voice referendum is as doomed as this column said it was when he first announced it.

What he is proposing is nothing less than a national disaster.

Ian Callinan, a strongly federalist High Court judge, foresees ‘a decade or more of constitutional and administrative law litigation’.

This can only mean national paralysis and consequent decline.

Given the way far-left dogma flows into Australia from the US, the Voice will offer a constitutionally guaranteed path for that destructive latter-day communist ideology, critical race theory, to wreck this country just as it has been doing in the US.

The leading American author and commentator, Mark Levin, warns that CRT has already spread throughout US academia and into the media, politics and corporations, manifesting itself in the Black Lives Matter movement. Just as we are told that ‘gender‘ is not biologically grounded, so it is claimed of race. Rather, proponents say, it is a socially constructed and culturally invented category used to oppress and exploit people of colour. Whites, they say, must therefore admit their culpability by confessing the advantages white supremacy confers on them. Donald Trump tried to stop its teaching in schools, but this was reversed by Joe Biden on his very first day in office.

No serious observer will have failed to see how the latter-day communists and their allies have already penetrated many of this and other countries’ institutions.

That a constitutionally entrenched Voice would prove a particularly attractive channel is undeniable. Given their success in penetrating academia, media, politics and the corporate world, it is undeniable that a Yes vote would hand over the keys to some significant influence in Australia, especially in making it ungovernable for a reform government.

It would be a serious mistake to think that some good could still come from the Voice.

It will be incapable – totally – of closing the gap.

That can only be achieved by what Menzies and Hasluck meticulously planned, full assimilation. This would ensure that Aboriginal people, including those in the remote communities, would have exactly the same rights and the same obligations as everybody else. CRT dismisses such equality.


The solution to closing the gap lies neither in sit-down money, welfare dependency, preferential treatment nor what has just been created in Western Australia, a burgeoning race-based rentier class whose sole function is to collect the ‘rent ‘ from the rest of the population, both old and immigrant.

But with defeat staring them in the face,  Voice proponents are now giving every indication of panic.

Albanese demonstrated this in his recent 2GB interview.

When he accused Ben Fordham of reading from the No pamphlet, Fordham rightly pointed out he was actually reading from his own notes. Later, Albanese actually denied making the accusation. When Fordham proposed reverting to just a recognition referendum, Albanese claimed no amendments were proposed in parliament. In fact, Julian Leeser, Richard Colbeck and Lidia Thorpe each moved amendments.

When Fordham pointed out that declared government policy was to implement the full Uluru statement including a treaty and truth-telling with the potential for compensation, Albanese denied what is factually true.

Had John Howard or Tony Abbott similarly denied several times what was true on a matter of crucial importance, this would have dominated the mainstream media as an outrage for days.

It barely caused a ripple.

Contrast that with the days of headline media when Tony Abbott dared recommend a knighthood – one over quota – for the late Prince Philip, who had risked his life in the defence of this country and long worked, without pay, in our interest.

Incidentally, the argument advanced by Fordham that Albanese should retreat to a referendum only on recognition is well  addressed by expert author, Peter O’Brien, in this magazine and on ADH TV.

Meanwhile, Yes case grandees in the political class and on several Big Business, Big Sports and Big Banks’ boards are no doubt astounded. They had all wrongly decided that Australians were no longer what former Labor man and Victorian governor and judge Dick McGarvie said, a ‘wise constitutional people’ but would vote as the grandees desired.

The importance of opposition leader Peter Dutton insisting that great Labor invention, the Yes/No pamphlet, be retained was demonstrated when a well-drafted No case quoted from both sides.

But when Greg Craven was quoted accurately as a Yes supporter saying that the Voice was ‘fatally flawed’, he said he was  ‘beside himself with rage’ and ‘apoplectic’. He even complained, pointlessly, to the Electoral Commission.

As an example of an untrue claim in a No case, he wrote that ‘the monarchist side in the republic referendum had argued that if Australia became a republic we would be thrown out of the Commonwealth’.

This is the second time that Professor Craven has made this false claim against Australians for Constitutional Monarchy in the Australian.

The facts are that the Coalition attorney-general Daryl Williams, who supported the Yes case, in a speech during the referendum campaign repeated the Australian Republican Movement (ARM) argument that, were Australia to become a republic, we would seamlessly continue as a member of the Commonwealth and in the Commonwealth Games.

As I knew this to be untrue, I explained that the process required that the approval of every one of the other 53 members be sought, and just one could block our continuing membership, as had happened twice.

Australia’s problem was that the Malaysian PM, Dr Mahathir, seemed to detest Australia.

In the previous year, notwithstanding the support of 24 other member states for our joining an important EU Asian economic forum, ASEM, Mahathir had vetoed our admission.

I argued that the Yes case should at least know this and try to counter any opposition.

But I was then liberally denounced, Bob Hawke calling me a liar.

Professor Craven can read a letter from the Secretary-General of the Commonwealth, Chief Emeka Anyaoku, confirming that my understanding of Commonwealth procedure was correct. It is published in The Cane Toad Republic, 1999.

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