The “Indigenous Voice” is Australia’s version of co-governance. With one very important difference: we’re at least getting to vote on it, rather than have it imposed by the political class. Otherwise, the same secrecy about the true agenda rules (for instance, the attempt to hide away the full, radical text of the Uluru Statement).
And so does the same hypocritical pearl-clutching about “racism”.
Anthony Albanese has criticised the no campaign’s decision to give Gary Johns a prominent position in its campaign while the Liberal MP Matt Kean has accused the top voice critic of treating colleagues Warren Mundine and Jacinta Nampijinpa Price with “complete disrespect” and “cowardice”.
This, it must be remembered, from the Yes camp who regularly deride Mundine as an “Uncle Tom”, and shower Nampijinpa Price with worse racial abuse.
And, as Chris Trotter recently wrote for Insight, “Fuck ’em if they can’t take a joke!”
The rebuke of Johns came as voice supporters also criticised a comedian’s joke about Closing the Gap and suicide prevention at the conference. The health minister, Mark Butler, said such jokes “cannot be tolerated”. Recent Closing the Gap data showed Indigenous suicide rates on the rise. Yes campaign supporters also called on their opponents “to end the use of racist jokes and misinformation”.
What “racist jokes”, pray tell?
Butler, the federal health minister, was critical of comments made by the comedian Rodney Marks, who spoke at the event in “character” as a UN diplomat. In his speech, he parodied the standard Indigenous acknowledgement of country by saying he wanted to “acknowledge the traditional rent-seekers” and “acknowledge the traditional owners – violent black men”.
You can always tell when a joke has hit square on the target, from the gasps of outrage from pearl-clutching elites.
Where is Marks wrong, after all? Traditional Aboriginal culture was and is depressingly violent. Aboriginal women and children suffer astonishingly disproportionate rates of violence and sexual abuse from Aboriginal men. Even in recent weeks, “traditional culture” has been named in the suspected murders of a vanished Aboriginal man and woman in WA, who married in defiance of “traditional” rules, including “promise brides”. That is: very young girls “promised” to old men.
Gotta love that “world’s oldest culture”, eh?
Marks also joked that “Closing the Gap” should be the name of Sydney’s suicide prevention program. Closing the Gap is the federal Indigenous health and welfare program seeking to improve outcomes in life expectancy, suicide rates and other indicators. The Gap is a clifftop area on Sydney’s coastline that is infamous for suicides.
Harsh, but funny.
The real reason for the unconvincing huffing, of course, is that the No case is wiping the floor with the Yes liars, shonks and bullshit artists.
The CPAC conference, which is chaired by Mundine, was dominated by criticism of the Indigenous voice referendum. Mundine and Price, the leaders of the Fair Australia campaign from conservative political group Advance, were the headline speakers on the opening morning of the two-day conference, while other speakers including the former prime minister Tony Abbott, former Liberal MP Bronwyn Bishop and several sitting Nationals MPs also urged attenders to oppose the referendum.
They’re also telling some harsh truths that the troughers of the Aboriginal Industry would rather not hear.
In Johns’ speech, he said: “If you’re not trying to get those people either out of that remote community or out of the stupor in which they live, or give them the tools to allow them adapt to life in the modern world, the world we inherited, then you’re doing wrong.
Again, where is he wrong? Where’s the future in lying around, getting hammered all day, in a remote community where there are no jobs?
Johns then claimed to quote Price’s father.
“As Dave Price, Jacinta’s dad, has said to me often enough: ‘If you want a voice, learn English. That’s your voice,’” Johns said.
Just another harsh truth. In many remote communities, English is a second language. As parents across Asia know, the key to success in today’s world is learning English.
Johns last month rejected calls to resign from his position in the no campaign after he was criticised for suggesting Indigenous people should undergo blood tests to access welfare benefits.
The Australian
An argument which really enraged the Aboriginal Industry troughers, mostly because doing so would put nearly all of them out of a job. While real Aborigines too often languish in poverty, well-off city-dwellers who gin up a just-so story about an almost certainly imaginary distant Aboriginal ancestor are riding the gravy train for all they can swill. Pale, pasty white, blond-haired European faces dominate nearly every “Indigenous” board, scholarship, Arts funding program and academic sinecure.
A blood test would quickly sort out the box tickers.
And that’s just what they’re afraid of.
