When handing out Yes material at pre-poll I met a bright and cheerful No volunteer … not a neo-con, or Liberal, but a voter concerned about “division”.
She told me that providing a Voice for Aboriginal people makes them different from “us” and “introduces a race division” to our Constitution.
So, why provide a special advisory voice to Aboriginal people?
Answer: Because for 200-plus years we have relentlessly assaulted them with an array of special genocidal policies designed to obliterate their race.
Our behaviour has been immoral and shameful, we have done much damage, we have apologised, and we are trying to fix the beauty we shattered … but we don’t know how.
It’s not about giving someone a cheating head-start in a foot race.
But, it is about repairing damage to people we (our governments) damaged and (almost) destroyed.
It’s about giving Aboriginal people a Voice.
Why them?
Because they are different … we made them different.
How did we make them different?
Despite being here for 50-60,000 years, we said they didn’t exist.
We robbed them of their country while saying they didn’t exist.
We … that is, British and then Anglo-Australian governments … while denying Aboriginal existence so we could more easily rob their country … persistently, wave-after-relentless-wave, systematically cancelled their relationship to the land.
Assimilation, repression, harassment, vilification, intimidation, discrimination, stolen generations of children, exiled to concentration camps we call missions and reserves, raped en masse with impunity, massacred with KKK-like silence and denial, de-cultured and de-languaged as their presence was literally cancelled, dismissed.
Think about that.
Does that 200-plus year history make Aboriginal people different?
Reckon so.
Now, in 2023, we wonder why Aboriginal people are disproportionately represented in categories of the sick, child mortality, blindness, early deaths, prisoners in gaol, under-educated and so on.
So, this attempt at a Voice is an attempt to put back together again the people we shattered as we tried to obliterate.
Over the past few decades we’ve proved that we’re not too good at putting the pieces back together.
We need help; we need help from those who, unbelievably, survived the assaults of our governments.
To do that, people like Langton, O’Donoghue, Dodson, Pearson and many others, have asked us to recognise them and listen to them through an Aboriginal, non-genocidal advisory structure.
How gentle a request is that?
I’ll be voting Yes.
Email, Oct 9
Van Davy, Pearl Beach