The Voice Propaganda in Action By James Reed

Dr David Barton “The Voice Roadshow Comes to Town,” Quadrant Special digital Edition, August 2023, has some interesting remarks about what is actually said in the Voice roadshows going on across the country. As one would predict, it is woke falling over itself:

“Langton led the charge with a potted history of Aboriginal activism since the 1960s, then moved to focus on more recent events like the Northern Territory Intervention, of which she was scathing (“harming our people”), Aboriginal deaths in custody (“institutionalised racism”), stolen generations (“attempted genocide”), child abuse (that’s “the churches”) and the usual grab-bag of victimhood complaints. Langton argued that the Voice is needed to “limit the ability of the Parliament to cause us harm”—just how precisely is that to occur? And, of course, what “harm”—the annual $36 billion spent on Aboriginal affairs? Langton also trotted out the old “terra nullius” furphy, and the audience drank it all in with rapturous applause. She also spent some time drilling into us that there is “no biological evidence whatsoever for ‘race’—it doesn’t exist”, which is highly disputed, plus the usual claims to 65,000-plus years of history, also hotly contested. Langton seemed blithely ignorant of the inherent illogicality of her own argument. If “race” does not exist, then why do we need a race-based “Voice”? She said indigenous “spirituality” and connection to the land make Aborigines special, but there’s no biological evidence of intergenerational genetic or DNA transfer of “love of land” to suggest that contemporary Aboriginal people have any greater feeling of attachment to the land than anybody else. Langton continued to bang the drum of “disadvantaged tribal Aboriginal people in Central Australia” as justification for the Voice. But these tribal people represent a minuscule fraction of the 3.4 per cent of Australians who identify as Aborigines, and much of their current situation is a direct result of their own choices. Tribal Aboriginal people have bad diets because that’s what they want to eat. White colonialists don’t make them eat unwisely. The panel made reference to the high prevalence of diabetes in Aboriginal communities, again implying it’s the whitefellas’ fault, without making any reference to tribal Aborigines’ lack of tolerance for sugar, which promotes the increased incidence of diabetes. There was more of the same about the “housing shortage”. Tribal Aborigines’ homes get trashed because so many families and individuals live in them communally because of “humbugging”. But no mention was made of that, yet Perkins and Langton would be familiar with the problem. We don’t need a “Voice’ to sort out those problems, which have been around for over five decades. We need to admit that much so-called “Aboriginal culture” is very damaging to Aboriginal people and that only by greater integration into our modern Western society will these problems be solved.”

There is clearly a kind of mythology being pushed here which is self-confirming and does not touch reality. And it is quite detrimental to Aboriginal people, since it gives false causes of their plight. It is not colonisation producing intergenerational trauma, but poverty and violence, things not discussed in the cosy, comfortable world of the modern Left, Dr Barton notes, and not addressed by the ultra-woke Voice.