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I hear Gina Reinhardt and her mining buddies are quite happy there isn't an Aboriginal advisor that could cause problems with digging up sacred sites and blowing up ancient art.
Then they should leave a 5-star review of the sleazy marketing companies they hired with no offices at their registered address.
Many of those leaders would have worked for years with the Coalition to get them onside for this referendum. It was a massive betrayal of trust.
"Indigenous leaders break their silence..."
Mmmmm. Perhaps the time for leadership and not being silent was before there was a vote ...
In their defence the moment an Indigenous leader engages in anything other than peace, love, and harmony rhetoric they are treated as an 'angry black' and taken less seriously. It's a damned if you do, damned if you don't type situation.
Yeah, you're right. It's easy for me to type it on a keyboard, and totally different living it.
I'm half frustrated and half in despair that I just can't see a way forward. With the way the Voice campaign went, my god, just imagining the level of FUD around a treaty hurts.
Honestly I'm a pretty cynical person but even I overestimated how ready Australia was to discuss these issues. Misinformation certainly played a role in how things played out but I can't help but think there wasn't already quite fertile ground within our culture for it to grow. I personally think if people couldn't really get behind the voice then treaty is going to be very tough.
Yeah - they're all calling out the coalition now, but they should've done that before. Maybe they hoped that the coalition might change their minds
considering the death threats they and their families faced from Australians, I don't blame them for keeping a low profile.
What was this vote even about? Weren't people of aboriginal descent already able to be MPs and influence the country? If they want some sort of quota where there must be aboriginals in parliament that sounds like 'positive' discrimination, and it's good it didn't get passed.
Edit: I am a non Australian interested in this from an outside perspective. I have since been corrected on what the vote was actually about.
I think your comment sums up what a large portion, more than 60% of the country, felt about that referendum.
And thats the unfortunate thing because the Voice was none of what you've suggested.
At its simplest it was, 'hey politicians! You can't get rid of this government department because things are awkward for you on the news.' It was a more complicated, and interesting proposal than this, but that part drove necessary constitutional change and thus required a referendum.
But the change was declined. Most reasons i suspect have their root at: Lack of engagement with the subject matter due to unclear/tenuous benefits to their own lives. Not to mention a fair amount of ambivalence rising to dislike of the Aboriginal peoples of Australia in the broader community.
Noel Pearson's statement, "we are a much-unloved people." was and is very poignant.
This atmosphere meant anything, and i mean anything, (even contradictory statements from the same person days apart), could be thrown around as possible effects of the referendum and people would latch onto those reasons as an answer then carry on with their lives.
Sorry, i've rambled a bit. There was a lot to it.
It's honestly a little sad that you didn't find out the answer before the vote...
Indigenous leaders have been asking for "proper" representation in the Australian parliament since 1933 and there have been multiple failed attempts to grant them that. Some have tried to do too much and outright failed like this one did, others took a softer approach and essentially were a waste of time - the chances didn't actually achieve the intended goal of providing better representation.
The voice would have made sure there is a body of people dedicated to advising parliament on matters that are important to indigenous Australians. It was only an advisory body, they wouldn't have had any votes or anything, but whatever they said in parliament would have been an official government record and the response by politicians would also be officially recorded (even no response, would still be recorded).
The problem, right now, is indigenous people are 3% of the population and therefore they are routinely ignored. Politicians wouldn't have been able to ignore them anymore... the could still have chosen to do nothing at all, but if a sensible proposal was presented in parliament (such as a solution to the alarming fact that indigenous Australians have in the highest incarceration rate of any people in the entire world) and the government chose not to implement those changes they'd be raked over the coals.
Solving those problems is good for everyone, it's not free to put people in prison for example. It costs tax payers tens of billions of dollars... assuming you're an Australian who pays tax, thousnads of dollars of the tax you pay each year goes towards imprisoning indigenous Australians and far too often for ridiculous charges like "failing to appear" in court for a court case they either couldn't physically get to (e.g. you live on Mornington Island and were given a court date in Cairns) or sometimes might not have even known they were summoned to court in the first place.
I'm not Australian, just interested in this from an outside perspective. You make good points, and, to be fair, as a non Australian I hadn't heard much about this vote at all. I may have been a bit hasty to form opinions based on what I thought the vote was about.
Ah I see. A little more background then...
The indigenous people of Australia have never formally accepted the rule of the current government — legally, the Australian government was founded on a bullshit declaration that there was no human life living on the continent - only animals lived here according to the documents and formal letters and statements made when white people settled on this land. The continent is massive and had thousands of tribes who spoke 250 individual languages. It's estimated humans have been living here for somewhere between 60,000 and 120,000 years (there's strong archeological evidence for "at least 60k", and work is ongoing to verify evidence that suggests 120k years).
The current government was forced on those people, and there horrific crimes committed (mass murder, arbitrary killings, children were systematically stolen from parents and raised by the church, in some regions the local government paid a cash bounty for anyone who brought an indigenous head to them, etc. It was bad). Things are not that bad now, but they are still far from perfect, and they need to be solved. There also needs to be some form of treaty between Australia and the indigenous nations who's land was blatantly and obviously stolen (some of the land that white people aren't using has been given back, but that's not a treaty).
Our constitution does not acknowledge the existence of indigenous people. Our national anthem claims this is a "young" country when, at 60,000+ years the indigenous people of this country are in fact the oldest still living civilisation in the world. It's very very clear that the founders of this country did not consider indigenous people to be part of the country, and the constitution needs to be updated to reflect the modern legal state where they are an integral part of Australia.
Just a quick response about the National Anthem. The official words were changed to "for we are one and free" to remove the reference to the age of the country.
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Here's a link to the actual letter: https://ugc.production.linktr.ee/2e09849a-25e6-4743-8317-e33dfb437728_Statement-for-our-People-and-Country.pdf
It is unclear who signed the letter but the ABC understands some Aboriginal leaders had distanced themselves from an earlier draft of the statement, and did not want their names associated with it.
Seems like a lot of anger in the community that they are no longer waiting for leadership and there true feelings are being posted.
The best part of the referendum was when it finished, tired of hearing about it and the constant brow-beatings and moral high-horsing pumped out from the traditional mainstream media outlets
"The best part of the referendum was when for-profit media and internet shills went back to not giving a fuck what aboriginal leaders thought"
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this post was submitted on 22 Oct 2023
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