Well, there’s one thing Australia’s new parliament will be good for — testing how far to the looney left Anthony Albanese’s Labor will let themselves be dragged. Because the truth is that Labor barely won the election at all. Its primary vote was a near-record low and its majority will be lucky to be one.
And it has to deal with a massive cross-bench of nine rabid green-leftists.
It may well be that the one-time student Stalinist will shuck off his new “moderate” clothing and let the watermelons whip him from left pillar to far-left post. This is, after all, what happened to Julia Gillard, whose government was more-or-less controlled by their minority government partners, the Greens.
But with a tiny majority in his own right, Albanese doesn’t have to dance to the Greens’ tune (depending on how the new Senate shakes out). So, it may be that, just as the Morrison government let itself be dragged too far left by the Greens, the Albanese government may be able to pull back to something slightly right of Maoist China in reaction to the Greens’ steady march into the abyss of the Clown World Left.
One of the first casualties of that may be Australia’s own racial separatist answer to He Puapua, the “Indigenous Voice”.
The incoming Indigenous MP for Australia’s red centre says the Greens are a bigger threat to the voice to parliament than the Coalition, as the left-wing party pushes a treaty between the government and Aboriginal people before any national Indigenous body.
Greens leader Adam Bandt on Monday dug in on the party’s official position that a $250m truth commission and a treaty process were higher priorities than Labor’s promised referendum on an Indigenous voice.
Tiwi woman Marion Scrymgour, Labor’s likely victor in the knife-edge count for the seat of Lingiari, said she believed the greatest threat to constitutional recognition of Indigenous Australians did not come from the right but from the hard left.
In which case, I can only say: go, the Greens. Do your watermelon worst!
Incoming Alice Springs Country Liberal senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price said the Greens were hopelessly out of touch with Indigenous issues in regional Australia.
The same can be said for Labor’s roster of “Indigenous” politicians. Not one of whom, along with the Greens, deigned to meet with a delegation of Aboriginal women who travelled to Canberra to raise the issue of domestic violence in Aboriginal communities.
Ms Nampijinpa Price described the new Albanese government’s proposed referendum on the Indigenous voice as “a distraction” from the pressing issues facing Aboriginal people in remote communities.
The outspoken Warlpiri-Celtic woman said she would lobby Labor to keep the cashless debit card – a measure she sees as “a protective blanket for marginalised people” – and to block the reintroduction of alcohol into Northern Territory homelands. Ms Nampijinpa Price said she hoped that Labor’s Indigenous MP in the NT, Malindirri McCarthy, and Ms Scrymgour – if she was elected – could work together on the issues affecting Indigenous women and children in the Territory, such as domestic violence.
Instead of focussing on issues that are a daily, brutal reality for too many Aboriginal women, the left is obsessed with racial power politics.
Ms Burney’s priority was to consult all Australians about the Indigenous voice, its role and the question they would be asked in the referendum. She said it was important people knew the Uluru statement called for an advisory body to the parliament on issues directly affecting Indigenous people.
“People need to be clear what they are voting for and need to be clear on the role of the voice,” Ms Burney said.
“Uluru was absolutely clear … the voice is modest, it is generous and it does not have veto rights that would usurp parliament.”
The Australian
In which case, we’re entitled to ask: what’s the point of the whole thing?
The whole exercise is either a lie or completely pointless. As far as a “voice” goes, Aboriginal people already have one: their vote. They’ve already used that to leverage disproportionate representation in Parliament, where the proportion of “Indigenous” representatives is double that of the proportion of Aboriginal Australians.
If they want to advise the Parliament, they can do so in the same way anyone else does: through their over-generous representation of members.
This means that a “Voice” body is completely pointless.
Unless, of course, its purpose is something else altogether. In which case, what are they lying to us about?
