It just can’t be killed, this Zombie thing called The Voice. In South Australia, despite two in every three citizens rejecting a (constitutionally-enshrined) Indigenous Voice to Parliament in the national referendum, and despite over nine in ten Indigenous people voting with their feet by staying away from the recent poll to elect members to a substitute (legislated) State ‘First Nations Voice to Parliament’, the undead creature simply refuses to die.

Yet, after both models of a Voice have received a voter hiding, the state Labor government of the very ‘progressive’ Premier, Peter Malinauskas, with his (Indigenous) Attorney-General riding shotgun, are ploughing ahead with their Woke Voice vanity project.

This is the state Voice, let us remind ourselves, where the ‘successful’ vote turned out just 8.7 per cent of the Indigenous electorate at a cost of $10 million. Each of the 46 elected Local Voice representatives (basically local electorate members) will receive $3,000 of taxpayers’ money each year. Two from each electorate will, however, become ‘presiding members’ of their Local Voice electorate for an extra $10,800 whilst the plum gig of membership of the statewide Voice (two from each Local Voice) will garner an additional $18,000. The cherry on the top will be the Director of the supporting Secretariat (almost certainly to be Indigenous) who will line their bank account with a cool $250,000 a year. That all adds up to one expensive, taxpayer-funded Indigenous job creation scheme.

So who are the lucky recipients of this taxpayer largesse? Well, it will be an activist elite who get to board this new Indigenous Grievance Industry gravy train with embarrassingly low voter support. Of the 46 elected members, only one made it to three figures (receiving 178 votes) whilst eleven winners scored in the paltry teens (after preferences). Two candidates failed to trouble the scorers at all with duck eggs next to their own name.

Adding democratic insult to electoral embarrassment, two candidates were elected despite scoring fewer votes than another candidate. This is the bizarre outcome of the government’s legislation which specifies that equal numbers of Indigenous males and females must be elected. So, in two cases, a (narrowly) more ‘popular’ male candidate was knocked out of the race at the finish line despite getting more votes than the female who was declared the winner. With 26 votes after the distribution of preferences, one female candidate beat out a higher-scoring male with his 29 votes whilst another eleven vote tally for a female candidate was enough to pip the male with his 12 votes.

It is hard to know whether this provision for ‘gender equality’ is patronising (here’s how you Indigenous people must vote) or is simply undemocratic but it looks like a case of the ‘gender’ spoke dominating the Woke wagon wheel. Whatever happened to voters (of either sex) being free to vote for candidates of their choice (of either sex) on the basis of policies rather than chromosomal makeup?

The excuse mill is working double shifts in trying to explain away the massive failure of the SA Voice.

One strand of excuse-making is that the tiny number of votes that got most candidates elected is no different to how some of the micro-parties used to get elected to the Senate in national elections. The ‘preference whisperers’ gamed the compulsory preferential voting system, however, to get some micro-party, any micro-party, elected through an iron exchange of preferences.

This arrangement, however, did not apply during the SA Voice voting, and the preference whispering Senate loophole has been considerably tightened. It is also not much of a principled augment to try and justify your undemocratic Voice election by saying that, well, everyone does it. Rise above it, please.

The line of argument most favoured by the Indigenous activists (and their Woke white auxiliaries) is that the Indigenous population have been so traumatised by the ‘racist’ referendum rejection of the national Voice that they have retired to their bedrooms to nurse their grief and will have nothing to do with any formal Voice. This is rather odd, I would have thought, because having their very own Voice, gifted to Indigenous people at state level, free from any ‘bigots’ gleefully jumping on the ‘platform of hate’ that supposedly was the referendum, would have allowed Indigenous people to realise their deepest desire.

Perhaps the conclusion is, rather, that Australians, Indigenous and non-Indigenous alike, don’t want undemocratic, financially wasteful, racial division in Australia. The Voice is dead, it just doesn’t know it, yet.