THE VOICE TO PARLIAMENT: THE CASE AGAINST

As 2023 – the year of Australia’s referendum on The Voice to Parliament – The Sydney Institute began a series of discussions on what would be the question, the model and the arguments for and against constitutional change with regard to Australia’s first peoples. On Tuesday 24 January 2023, Australian journalist, radio and television presenter Joe Hildebrand, joined Warren Mundine, Executive Chairman at Nyungga Black Group Pty Ltd to present the cases for and against a “Yes” vote. It was an unusual event with non-Indigenous Hildebrand arguing “Yes” and Indigenous Mundine arguing for the “No” case.

THE VOICE TO PARLIAMENT: THE CASE AGAINST

 WARREN MUNDINE

Tonight it is somewhat ironic, as Joe says, that you have a white fella who’s standing up for The Voice and I’m against it. But when you actually start looking back through the constitutional history of Australia and the relationship between Aboriginal people and wider Australia, we have been on a journey for a number of years.

This goes right back to colonisation, right through to the setting up the Commonwealth in 1901. As you go through that history, you start to see where the Australian nation was heading. Especially after the Second World War.

When you get to the late colonial period and the setting up of the Commonwealth, it was an interesting gymnastic way of dealing with Aboriginal people. One of the things that was said in the constitution was that if you got voting rights at the state level, you got voting rights at the Commonwealth level. That was a bit strange, because when they had the first election, there were Aboriginal women in South Australia who had voting rights – because in South Australia, women had voting rights. In the rest of Australia, women didn’t have that voting right.

So, women got pretty cheesed off and said, “How come they’re voting there, and we can’t?” That changed the Electoral Act in regard to getting women the vote. We were one of the first nations in the world to achieve that. America and the UK did it decades later.

As a society, we can’t go past our history. We should always recognise our history; we should always talk about our history. I’m a great believer in history. I’m an amateur – I’m not a professional historian; I just love reading about history, researching and doing things about history.

We had an interesting situation in Australia in that we had a two-tiered system of citizenship rights. If you were born in Western Australia, the Northern Territory or Queensland and an Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander, you were a second-class citizen. There’s no doubt about that. You didn’t have voting rights, you were put on reserves across the country. You had very limited rights as a whole. But in South Australia, Victoria, New South Wales and Tasmania, we had a number of rights which Aboriginal people could exercise, like voting rights. Writing my book, I’ve come across archives, electoral rolls, of my grandparents who were voting in 1913.

There’s a lot of confusion and lot of things that overlap about Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders in Australia’s history. You had this two-tiered system – time and geography determined how you were treated. Of course, in NSW, even though we did have voting rights, if you lived on an Aboriginal reserve, no one told you that you did. You were never able to exercise those rights. In fact, they discouraged you very much. But we were a very fortunate family living out on a cattle station where we were able to exercise those rights as a family.

After the Second World War, Australian citizenship was created. Before that, we were all British subjects. As British subjects, we were citizens of this country prior to that. When the Citizenship Act came about, there were restrictions put in place for Aboriginal people. That, overtime, shifted. Despite what a lot of Labor Party people think, it wasn’t Gough Whitlam who made these reforms, it was the Menzies government.

The Menzies government in 1962, gave full voting rights to Aboriginal people and Torres Strait Islanders across Australia. Which then forced states like Western Australia to give full voting rights to Aboriginals. The Queenslanders – always the Deep North – held out until 1965. When you hear all these myths – we need to correct it. I say if you’re going to talk about our history, you’ve got to talk about our real history. 1967 didn’t give us voting rights, and 1967 didn’t give us citizen rights. What it did was push the agenda for equality in Australia, for all Australians.

By 1969 and 1970, all racial discrimination laws in this country were gone. It is over 52 years since any racial discrimination laws against Aboriginals have been in place. There had been a huge push to deal with Indigenous Australians as full citizens – the question of what are we going to do? With the Gorton government we got Aboriginal Studies, and support for Indigenous studies in schools and universities. In 1969, this was how my brother went to Macquarie University to do economics. So, these things were slowly happening.

Then, as we moved forward, there was schools reform because a principal could bar Aboriginal people. There is the story of Neville Bonner in Lismore – when he turned up to school, he was barred.

Australia is not a racist country. We do have racists in this country, like every country in the world has. We have not had a good birth, but no new country in the world has had a good birth. Every country in the world, in Europe, Asia, Africa have had horrendous beginnings. I don’t rate a country by its history but by how it overcomes its history, forges together and moves forward. Post Second World War, a whole lot of migrants came to Australia and made a huge difference in helping the economy, helping us move forward and doing a great job about that. I went to a Catholic school; we had 39 kids in my class and probably had about 39 different nationalities in there. Since 1973, and even in the 1960s with the Coalition government, we have put in place bodies to deal with Indigenous affairs.

It was the Whitlam government in 1973 that set up the National Aboriginal Consultative Council. That was a group of Aboriginals who came in and wanted to do things. Then they became radical – that’s what happens when you get a bunch of Aboriginals together – and they decided to declare their independence. After that, they had to get rid of that committee and they got another one, the National Aboriginal Conference. There’s a whole lot of other bodies that have come in – about five different bodies over the years who have been advisory groups to government and to parliament about what we should be doing in Indigenous affairs.

There was one body, ADSIC, that was an advisory group but it also was different because it had a monetary control, so it was able to look at money. Then we had later groups that did that. Einstein is credited with saying this is about doing the same old thing and waiting for a different outcome. And now we have proposals for a committee to be called The Voice that will be giving advice to government.

It will be advisory; it won’t have any legislative or monetary power. It will just be an advisory group of people. My first question is, wasn’t that what we did with the other five committees that we set up over the years? They were advisory groups. Except for ADSIC, they had no monetary powers. All of them had no legal or parliamentary powers. So, The Voice is putting forward an old idea of another committee that is an advisory committee, which is going to be the same as every other committee.

But this is going to be better, we hear, because we say it’s going to be better. That started raising alarm bells for me. Then I went along to the Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry where we listened to briefings from Tom Calma and Marcia Langton. From what they said, I could see a huge bureaucracy forming. You had regional groups, and they had to have advisors and experts. Then you have the national group which needs advisors and experts to work with them. And there’s going to be 20 of them.

Yesterday, Noel Pearson was interviewed by the ABC’s Patricia Karvelas. She said that one of the questions raised by people is that when you’re talking about The Voice, it will only deal with issues dealing with Aboriginals. I paused and the first question I raised was, what doesn’t affect Aboriginals? They’re citizens of this country. So, every law in this country affects Aboriginals like it affects every other citizen in this country. Noel’s answer was taxation and other things that affect Aboriginal people and he started going through the whole lot. When he finished, I was sitting there thinking, The Voice will have a say on everything. So, what does that mean for us a nation? It means that legislation is going to come up, it’s going to go through the parliamentary process, through the Aboriginal Voice process and I’m going to be about 92 years old before it’s actually completed and goes through.

I have not seen anything that is going to show us any change from The Voice in Indigenous betterment. In fact, I see the opposite. I’ve got my own couple of businesses; I work out there and I look at the energy industry, the mining industry a number of other things and see the successes that have happened in those areas. A lot of people here in Sydney wouldn’t know that the mining industry is the second highest employer of Indigenous Australians in the country; 7000 Indigenous men and women work in the industry. You’ve got 2000 businesses that work within the industry. You’ve got a $4 billion economy coming out of that industry and training people. If you look at the IPP, which we put in place, we’ve come up with a group of people which we look at how we can develop industry and investment into Aboriginal groups. Through that process we set up this idea of setting up commercial, private Indigenous businesses. On the 1 July 2015, there were $6.2 million going to that business sector. Just before Christmas, the figure was $6.7 billion. It is employment going through the roof.

I know from looking at history that the only way you drag people out of poverty or get people out of poverty is through an economy; it is through jobs. The problem we had in the past is that we were always putting the cart before the horse. It’s about getting small to medium businesses into regional and remote areas, getting investment into those areas and that’s what lifts people out of poverty. It becomes an umbrella because when you’re doing that, you’ve got to have an educated, skilled workforce. That’s what I’ve pushing for years.

We’ve got a good cohort of Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people working together. We’ve set up investment funds looking at Indigenous entrepreneurs and funding their businesses. These people are going international, they’re getting on the London Stock Exchange, the New York Stock exchange, and this is what will make the difference. Not a bunch of people sitting in Canberra, which we’ve had for decades, talking about policies.

As an Indigenous person, I want government to get out of the way. I want them to get out of the way so we can start building our own communities and moving forward from there. There is nothing more self-determining than an Aboriginal person or Torres Strait Islander person running their own business, employing people and making profits.