The great Australian poet Les Murray called them the elite Revolution that rules unsullied by elections. Britons have seen it on the issue of immigration: no matter how the British people vote, the elite in Whitehall just keep flooding the country with millions of the detritus of the developing world, legal and illegal.
In Australia, the starkest example of the elite ruling unsullied by elections is the ongoing campaign of Aboriginal grievance and racial separatism. The so-called ‘Voice, Treaty, Truth’ campaign. In a move as uncharacteristic of Brexit, the elite actually deigned to allow we hoi polloi to have a vote on the matter. To their obvious shock, we the people overwhelmingly rejected it.
Whereupon, they simply carried on as if the vote had never happened.
When the voice referendum was resoundingly defeated last year, 61 per cent to 39 per cent, most Australians would have expected some official recognition that the electorate had spoken and decisively rejected the Indigenous separatism inherent in the Uluru agenda. But the Albanese government has never definitively ruled out a legislated voice; is still committed to treaties (even if these are to be negotiated between “First Nations” and the states); and still has $6m in the budget for Makarrata or a so-called truth-telling commission.
The language of the left, as Orwell noted, is always telling. ‘First Nations’, for instance. There were nothing even remotely resembling nations in Australia prior to 1788. Scattered family bands of rarely more than a few dozen people, speaking hundreds of mutually unintelligible, usually mutually hostile, with no established settlements or polities, were not by any stretch of the imagination ‘nations’. Even seven colonies were not nations.
The only nation on the soil of Australia was and is the Commonwealth of Australia, established on 01 January, 1901.
Chris Merritt, from the Rule of Law Institute, has said that First Nations talk is “a modern fairytale that does more harm than good”. He points out that former High Court chief justice Harry Gibbs said: “There is no Aboriginal nation, if by that expression is meant a people organised as a separate state or exercising any degree of sovereignty.” Another former chief justice, Anthony Mason, said the Mabo case “is entirely at odds with the notion that sovereignty, adverse to the Crown, resides in the Aboriginal people of Australia”.
But the ‘First Nations’ lie is a lie with a purpose. It tacitly makes the claim that is often explicitly made: ‘Aboriginal sovereignty’. Sovereignty is not simply a buzz-word, it’s a specific term in international law: the sole, supreme and indivisible, law-making authority in a defined territory. If, as the left claim, ‘Aboriginal sovereignty’ was ‘never ceded’, it logically follows that the Commonwealth of Australia cannot be sovereign.
Whenever he’s talking about Aboriginal people, the Prime Minister (and all his ministers) habitually use the term First Nations despite its implications for who is really entitled to call the shots in modern Australia.
The same point is rammed home to Australians every time they take a plane flight, go to a school assembly, or even attend a Zoom meeting.
Despite spending millions on a voice proposal that their customers and their staff, by and large, didn’t support, woke public companies such as Qantas and Virgin still acknowledge the “traditional owners” whenever a plane lands; and still welcome Australians to the country of the relevant Aboriginal clan rather than to the city or town that belongs to everyone.
Likewise, despite the voice referendum’s defeat, just about every building and landmark in the country, with more than one flag pole, continues to fly the Aboriginal flag co-equally with the national flag, as if the flag of some of us should have equal honour to the flag of all of us.
Remember when Voice peddler Marcia Langton promised that there would be no more ‘Welcome to Country’ if the referendum failed? Turns out that that was just another lie.
What’s becoming clear is that it wasn’t nearly enough simply to defeat the voice. As long as our mental landscape is dominated by the various manifestations of Aboriginal separatism – the First Nations talk, the welcomes to country and the different flags – the voice referendum will simply be a battle won in the lost war for one Australia.
As far as the left are concerned, it was just further proof that democracy needs to be saved from the grubby hands of the people.
