Cultural and Historical Lies of the Voice By Peter West

Keith Windschuttle in “Hiding the Voice’s Content from Voters,” Quadrant Special digital Edition, August 2023, is required reading for those wanting to know the now less than hidden agendas behind the Voice. Windschuttle has been a strong and early critic of the voice and the neo-Marxism behind the Aboriginality movement of the Left, seeing it as leading to the breakup of Australia, as detailed in his book of that name, The Break-up of Australia (Quadrant Books, 2016).  

In his paper he notes that the key document is the 2017, the Uluru Statement from the Heart which defined the Voice as a proposal to change the Australian Constitution. The Council was clear that this was a stepping stone to a treaty, as the document states:

“Any Voice to Parliament should be designed so that it could support and promote a treatymaking process. Any body must have authority from, be representative of, and have legitimacy in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities across Australia. It must represent communities in remote, rural and urban areas, and not be comprised of handpicked leaders. The body must be structured in a way that respects culture. Any body must also be supported by a sufficient and guaranteed budget, with access to its own independent secretariat, experts and lawyers. It was also suggested that the body could represent Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples internationally. A number of Dialogues said the body’s representation could be drawn from an Assembly of First Nations, which could be established through a series of treaties among nations.”

And “nations” means each individual clan or language group, and here are hundreds of them. The document is totally hostile to the British settlement of Australia:

“We have coexisted as First Nations on this land for at least 60,000 years. Our sovereignty preexisted the Australian state and has survived it. We have never, ever ceded our sovereignty. The unfinished business of Australia’s nationhood includes recognising the ancient jurisdictions of First Nations law. The Law was violated by the coming of the British to Australia. This truth needs to be told. Australia was not a settlement and it was not a discovery. It was an invasion. Invasion was met with resistance. This is the time of the Frontier Wars, when massacres, disease and poison decimated First Nations, even as they fought a guerrilla war of resistance. Everywhere across Australia, great warriors like Pemulwuy and Jandamarra led resistance against the British. First Nations refused to acquiesce to dispossession and fought for their sovereign rights and their land.”

It does not require much historical knowledge to see that this is myth, but the point is that this the founding myth of the Voice. The significance of this intrinsic hostility of the lobby should not be under-estimated, because once power is obtained, we will see where it leads, and it is far from a healthy start.