We Raised Our Voices but They Just Won’t Listen

Labor may have wanted a Voice, but it doesn’t want to listen. Having been resoundingly rejected at the referendum, the Albanese government is carrying on as if the whole thing had never happened. As leftists will, they’re refusing to be told, “No!”, and going right on ahead and doing what they just got smacked on the arse for.

The Albanese government will consider pushing ahead with local and regional voices after the resounding defeat of the referendum on a national voice, as ­Indigenous leaders say the high Yes vote in remote communities means there is a clear mandate for the advisory bodies.

The Australian

Imagine if, after losing the 1916 Conscription referendum, the Hughes government had gone ahead and imposed conscription only in WA, which strongly voted “Yes”?

Labor’s arrogant persistence is, firstly, only underscoring its utter dearth of ideas in regards to Aboriginal matters, and in particular the heinous uselessness of Minister Linda Burney. Burney announces, with the air of making an astonishing revelation, that, “Asked whether the government was considering pursuing local and regional voices as it ­determines what to do next, a spokesman for Indigenous Australians Minister Linda Burney said: “We are going to take the time to listen, engage and seek advice from Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people”.

Um, isn’t that what she should have been doing, from the moment she took up her job?

Secondly, Labor is only making itself look sneaky, desperate and arrogant.

Labor backbencher Michelle Ananda-Rajah is not the sort of woman who takes no for an answer. Australians may have responded negatively to “a specific question” about the Uluru statement but they still may be up for the rest. “They said no to a particular way,” the member for Higgins told Guardian Australia, “so we need to find another way.”

Are these people completely deranged? Australians overwhelmingly rejected even the mildest point of the radical, racially divisive Uluru statement: what makes these presumptuous cretins think that we’re going to be overjoyed at the really nasty stuff in it?

You would have to live in La La Land or inner-city Melbourne to believe that voters who picked up a stubby pencil and wrote the word No on their ballot paper would sign off on the other demands in the Uluru statement. That a voice Mark 2 is even being considered indicates that Labor does not know how much trouble it is in.

The Yes side is paying the price for trying to win a debate by talking over the top of their opponents and covering their ears. They have deprived themselves of learning why the dickhead, racist dinosaurs wouldn’t buy their product.

Had they listened, they would have known that voters were not just rejecting the voice but the whole woke social justice shooting match.

What makes a referendum different from any other election is its specificity. Unlike a general election, which is a fog of issues, from economics to health care to foreign policy, a referendum is sharpened to one issue. In this case, as Spectator editor Fraser Nelson noted, it was the world’s first referendum on identity politics.

It has furnished us with the data to declare, once and for all, that dividing people into categories to pursue the nebulous goal of social justice is a minority obsession. Australians object most strongly when the division is according to race. The referendum result is our assertion of the principle upheld in the US 14th amendment. Our Constitution should be colourblind.

Labor would be making a big mistake if it were to dismiss the referendum result as misinformed or unintentional.

And, yet, that’s exactly what they’re doing. Like the rest of their elitist chums, Labor is simply assuming that just over 60% of Australians are just too stupid to be listened to.

Anthony Albanese’s peculiar challenge is to wake up every day and remind himself he must govern for the people of Newtown, who voted nine to one in favour of the voice, and the good people of Tottenham in the central west of NSW, who voted nine to one against. He must find the self-awareness to realise that when they hail you as a conquering hero in Marrickville, you’re in big trouble everywhere else.

The Australian

But self-awareness is precisely what Labor, and the rest of the left, completely lack. Because there’s no self-awareness in an echo chamber.