Henry Ergas has zeroed in on the fundamental problem with the Yes case for the Voice. The issue is, that while the details of how the Voice will operate in fine detail are being kept by the prime mister under wraps until the thing is in, he hopes, in which case we will find out why it is a bad idea to sign blank cheques, the Voice by definition will give a special racial status to one ethno-racial group, the indigenous. It will be discrimination by race. The Yes side may argue that this is necessary to right historical wrongs, but that has not been shown, and such programs elsewhere in the world, have created division, and have not generated equity; instead they have rewarded a New Class who reap the benefits of these racial schemes.
The No case is consistent with the liberal democratic ideal of equality of all citizens.
“Like many supporters of the Yes case, Judith Brett, writing on these pages earlier in the week, has tried to justify the differential status the voice would grant Indigenous Australians by claiming the Constitution’s “special treatment” of Tasmania already breaches the principle of political equality.
In reality, federal systems typically embody two levels of political equality. On the one hand, each citizen is represented in the lower house, which in Australia is the House of Representatives; on the other, each of the units that formed the federation is represented in a “states’ house”, in our case the Senate.
There are, as a result, two planes of representation: personal and territorial. The underlying principle is that as a federal government can impose laws on its territories, any other arrangement would allow populous states to exploit their less populous counterparts, effectively making them unequal.
It is, in that sense, confused to regard federalism as violating political equality. Rather, as all Australians are citizens of the federation and residents of one of its territorial units, our citizenship rights are defined in two dimensions, with every citizen enjoying both.
In stark contrast, the privilege conferred by the voice accrues to one group and one group only.
But that is not the most significant difference. Whatever one makes of federalism, it is obvious the Constitution does not bestow any “special treatment” on Tasmanians. Being born in Tasmania grants no constitutional privileges; the moment Tasmanians move to (say) Melbourne their treatment becomes identical to that of Victoria’s other residents.
The rights of territorial representation the Constitution confers are, in other words, not ascriptive – unlike those attached to the voice, they are not defined by a person’s descent and are neither inheritable nor exclusive.
That should be no surprise: ascriptive political rights are the antithesis of liberal democracy, whose premise is – as the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen put it – that all citizens “are born and remain equal in rights”.
Nowhere was that principle more foundational than in Australia: when WK Hancock, in his classic Australia (1931), identified our political culture’s defining feature as its emphasis on “the conception of equality”, he was echoing the prominent Victorian Federationist, Henry Wrixon (1839-1913), who said “We may well hope our descendants will preserve freedom; we may be perfectly certain they will insist on equality”.
That the newly established federation did not respect the principle it proclaimed is undeniable. But it is every bit as undeniable that the arc of democratic progress in Australia has always involved broadening the circle of equal citizenship, extending full political rights to those who were unjustifiably excluded.
Extending the circle of citizenship is not merely a question of justice; rather, equal political rights are the very essence of a democratic society. In effect, democracy is an assertion of collective agency over the future. Whatever their yesterdays, it holds all citizens equally accountable for shaping the nation’s tomorrows.
Inherently forward-looking, it does not bestow one set of political rights and obligations on the descendants of the First Fleet and another on those refugees who centuries later braved the crossing from Vietnam. Instead, as Martin Luther King eloquently put it, it recognises that “We may have all come on different ships, but we’re in the same boat now” – and being in the same boat, we bear an equal responsibility for what this nation becomes, regardless of when we or our ancestors landed on its shores.
The counterpart of equal responsibility is equal representation. As the great political philosophers have long argued, it is being represented in the same place and in the same way that forges and reforges the nation: it is when we all turn out to vote that we become “the Australian people”, rather than a disparate collection of individuals.
And it is the fact of knowing we are one people that makes democracy tolerable, for democratic politics is a perpetual lesson in disappointment, invariably creating nearly as many losers as winners – losers who accept the result not only in the hope of someday changing it but because they know their rights have been properly weighed in the balance, just like those of their fellow citizens.
Nor is it merely the equal right to vote that matters: it is also the equal right to be consulted. Even before the modern concept of representation emerged, the “right to petition” was recognised, with mass petitions flooding England’s parliament in the 16th century. Protected in the 1689 Bill of Rights (which erased restrictions on “humble petitioning”) and enshrined in the First Amendment to the US Constitution, the freedom to petition spawned the notion that citizens are equally entitled to be heard, participating on the same terms in the process of public decision-making.
Each and every one of those principles – equal responsibility, equal representation, equal consultation – is breached by the voice. Reversing the arc of democratic progress, it establishes two classes of citizenship, separate and unequal, cementing that discrimination in the Constitution.
To make things worse, it bases that discrimination on race. In a liberal democracy, that is no small thing; nor is it a small thing for the Constitution to effectively require the government to classify citizens by race, racially determining eligibility for the rights the voice confers and enhancing and entrenching the salience of race in defining personal identity.
According to its supporters, the permanent racialisation of our political institutions is the price we must pay to address Indigenous disadvantage. Previous governments, says Megan Davis in her recently released Quarterly Essay, “didn’t listen”. It was deafness, she claims, that made “the gap” intractable, empowering hardhearted social workers and dilatory bureaucrats at Indigenous Australians’ expense.
Perhaps. But it seems much more likely that it is spending billions of dollars so as to maintain communities in places where there are no real jobs, where education is poor and the incentives to learn poorer, and where substance abuse is the main form of recreation, that has created an abyss of misery no social worker or bureaucrat could possibly cure.
Far from deafness being the problem, it is the willingness of governments, ever since the goal of integration was abandoned, to listen to elites who relentlessly advocated, and often benefited from, separateness that has prolonged the devastation, destroying countless lives. And having dominated the voice’s three (failed) predecessors, those elites are set to dominate its latest incarnation – with the same tragic consequences.
There is an alternative: to rekindle the promise of political equality, which lay at the heart of the 1967 referendum, and the vision of an integrated, colourblind Australia that is political equality’s logical corollary. Misrepresented, misunderstood and maligned by the voice’s advocates, that has always been democracy’s lodestar. Today more than ever, it should be ours too.”