On March 16, elections to South Australia’s legislated ‘State First Nations Voice’ will be held with 113 candidates nominating for 46 positions in six ‘Local Voice’ regions. With the national ‘Voice to Parliament’ having retired to lick its wounded pride after receiving a drubbing in the referendum, this state Voice is something of a consolation prize courtesy of the state Labor government of Premier Peter Malinauskas.

South Australians voted 61.4 per cent ‘No’ at the national referendum compared to just 28.6 per cent voting ‘Yes’ (the rest were informal/spoiled ballots), dashing the ‘Yes’ campaign’s expectation that South Australia would lead the ‘Yes’ vote nationally, but the Voice will not be silenced, even against the popular will, in South Australia.

The state Labor government, in its program for the state election back in March 2022, had proposed a state version of a Voice and in March 2023. In a Hail Aquarius moment, the new Malinauskas government – to noisy fanfare from the usual red, yellow, and black street extras – passed the First Nations Voice Act establishing the first ‘Voice to Parliament’ in Australia.

This, however, was when the national referendum had early ‘Yes’ wind in its sails, according to the polls, but when the latter developed a dangerous list to ‘No’ and threatened to sink all ‘Voice’ vessels caught in the wake, the state’s own version went into abeyance until the choppy waters subsided. As a result, proposed elections for the State Voice were deferred from September of that year to now.

Smoother sailing subsequently came to be expected because, as the government progenitors of the state Voice have been at pains to emphasise, the South Australia Voice ‘will not have any powers to veto legislation or stop Parliament undertaking its duties and functions’, unlike the defeated national voice which would have introduced a two-tier, race-based system of rights. Now, the state Voice is steaming ahead, free of constitutional encumbrance.

The 46 members to be elected to the South Australia Voice will represent a state Aboriginal population of around 36,000, or one member per 780 voting-age Aborigines, a sweet deal compared to the one member (lower and upper houses combined) for every 18,500 of the rest of us in the state. From these 46, 12 will be selected to make up the state-wide Voice, which is where all the real ‘speaking’ action happens, consisting of the two ‘presiding’ members from each regional Voice. One of each of these pairs must be male and one must be female – the exhalations of relief must have been palpable when the Electoral Commission of South Australia announced that 55 per cent of the nominating 113 candidates were women.

South Australia’s Voice will be able to directly address both houses of Parliament by being able to speak at the second reading stage of any bill and it will be able to formally speak to cabinet and to public service department heads twice a year on anything that takes their fancy. Malinauskas has said that the scope will be limited to ‘matters that pertain to their [the Aborigines’] future’, adding the kicker that this future ‘is indivisible from our own’. So there we have it – 100 per cent of everything will be in scope.

And you can be sure that none of this will be just limited to polite discussion around a conference room table. These ‘speaking occasions’ will be a spectacle of flags, painted faces, gum-leaf burning and all the rest of the black identity politics circus.

And what will the South Australian Voice be keen to discuss? Not, as one might hope, that grog bans and cashless welfare cards have potential merit as a strategy to reduce public disorder, crime and domestic violence in Indigenous communities, but the old faithful of ‘Native Title and Stolen Generations’, according to the press.

Another shake of the government magic money tree

The cost of all this state Voice virtue-signalling will not be trivial. $10 million dollars over four years has been allocated for the ongoing operation of the state Voice bureaucracy in South Australia, consisting of $6.1 million for the 46 elected members and a secretariat of six, plus $4.2 million to the South Australia Electoral Commission for running the inaugural and then the second elections. Nevertheless, no cost is too high for keeping special treatment for Aborigines, and the seemingly permanent sins of dastardly white colonialism, front and centre of the agenda, as we found out with $363 million incinerated for the defeated national Voice referendum and ongoing direct government expenditure of $100 million a day on Indigenous Australians.

The costs of a formal state Voice, however, are just the softening-up stage for the big money transfer to Indigenous South Australians envisaged through treaty reparations, pay-the-rent, etc. as spelled out in the Uluru Statement to which the South Australian government is committed – ‘The government is committed to implementing the Uluru Statement from the Heart at a state level, starting with the Voice’, said Malinauskas. Thus do we have it, straight from the (Trojan) Horse’s mouth. The state Voice is just the enabling stage for a much bigger enrichment of Indigenous Australians – or at least an elite slice of them.

Who is an Aborigine?

The South Australian government is also playing fast and loose through a radical change to the definition of who is an Aborigine for the purposes of the election. The South Australia Voice Act still defines a First Nations person (someone eligible to stand or vote for the South Australia Voice) according to the long-accepted tripartite criteria of being of biological ‘Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander descent’ who ‘regards themselves as Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander’ and who ‘is accepted as an Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander person by the relevant Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander community’.

Although this definition can be rorted, at least some effort has to be put into clearing admittedly low hurdles for racial self-identification but the accompanying explanatory memoranda to the South Australia Voice legislation dispenses with all that bothersome nonsense about actually ‘proving’ descent through furnishing family tree records or other documentary evidence.

Now, however, simply brandishing a self-declaration ‘through a statutory declaration that they are Indigenous’ will suffice. As well as facilitating outright identity fraudsters, a simple stat dec will also allow those people who genuinely, but mistakenly, believe they are Aboriginal somewhere along the line to legally join the self-identification rush. It is only a criminal offence to wilfully provide a false statement on a statutory declaration but if, to the best of their (mistaken) knowledge, based on the oral family history of some auntie, they subjectively believe they are of Aboriginal descent then, that is not illegal in a stat dec and the South Australia Electoral Commissioner is legislatively bound to accept it. This will open the door even wider to what Ramesh Thakur calls the ‘proliferating numbers of self-identifying, city-dwelling neo-Indigenous part-Aboriginal activists’ who, wilfully or mistakenly, self-declare their Aboriginality.

This is the way the Voice ends, not with a constitutional bang but a legislated whimper. A legislated state Voice, however, will be more than an expensive talking shop because it still concedes special representation, enshrined in law, based on race. It will do nothing practical to address Indigenous community dysfunction and its only concrete outcome will be to perpetuate the Aboriginal Grievance Industry and enrich its activists, whilst bathing the state government in feel-good platitudes. South Australia’s Voice will simply feed the woke obsession with race in Australia.

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