Nick Cater, “The Vision of the Anointed, in the Quadrant Special Digital Edition, August 2023, discusses the argument commonly made that the Voice is needed to deal with terrible problems facing some Aboriginal communities, including alcoholism, domestic violence and child sexual abuse. Child sexual abuse is a shocking problem that the Left intellectuals shy away from; clearly even if there was historical racism, that would not explain this, and would in fact deny agency to Aboriginals, which is arguably “racist,” or worse, in itself:
https://bmcpublichealth.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12889-022-13982-4
Cater argues that it has not been shown how the Voice will solve these crippling social problems: “Supporters of the Voice have conspicuously failed to explain how it will change conditions on the ground. Framing contemporary welfare challenges in the legacy of colonialism and lingering prejudice is an intellectually weak argument that had fallen out of fashion in Australia until the influence of the Black Lives Matter movement revived it. It is a claim with no empirical basis. Is historical injustice causing higher rates of cardiac illness and cancer? Or might it be tobacco consumption, which is five times higher in remote Aboriginal communities than in the rest of the country? Might the high incidence of kidney failure be related partly to higher rates of alcoholism? Could higher rates of type 2 diabetes partly be due to poor diets?” The answer is, of course, yes to all questions.
The point needs to be made in debate, that anything the Voice is alleged to be able to do, can be done without constitutional change, and in fact, should have been done decades ago. Put this argument to the liberals; I have and it gets them thinking. Tell them that when the referendum fails, everything will remain the same, and of course, action is need, today. The energy put into the Voice agenda could have been devoted to saving Aboriginal lives, but the urban elites do not care about anything beyond their agenda. The suffering of outback Aboriginals is not at the top of the agenda of the white inner-city elites who infest the universities.