Australia's referendum votes on a constitutional change, but nobody knows what it does
Who or what is actually going to speak with this "Voice"?
Australia goes to the polls on October 14 over whether to change its constitution, and the lunacy is mind-boggling.
Every morning I drive a bus to pay my bills, which makes it easy to ask ordinary people what they think it’s all about.
Here’s a sample:
“It’s to give Aboriginal people a bit more of a say, it’s no big deal.”
“It’s quite nuanced, you’ll have to see SBS to understand it.”
“It will create a division with Aboriginal people and then if they disagree with something it will go to the Supreme Court, and there is a Makarrata, and it will divide us and give special rights only to some people.”
“It’s so the UN will grab the land.”
Huh?
The reality becomes clear when you ignore the spin, craziness and propaganda, and look at the words of the proposed change.
Forget “In recognition of” - you don’t create new organs of government to recognise people. That’s just spin.
This creates a new government body at i), ii) and iii).
The Voice, according to the actual words, would be an organ of unknown powers, that may advise the government on indigenous affairs (but doesn’t have to).
We don’t know what its composition, functions, powers and procedures will be, because Parliament will make those laws later.
Perhaps Parliament will pass a law enabling The Voice to make regulations of its own. We don’t know.
It will advise the elected Parliament and, importantly, the unelected executive, which is the powerful departments and career bureaucrats that make up Permanent Canberra.
The Voice will be selected, not elected - so there is no guarantee it will give ordinary indigenous people any say in anything.
I am sure you can imagine exactly the type of person the government will select, and that is who will speak with The Voice.
Governments will select people whose views they like. That way they can do whatever they want while pretending to listen, even when ordinary indigenous people oppose them.
People who oppose the government won’t be The Voice.
In a nutshell, this referendum sets up a permanent organ of the state, cloaked by race, that Australians can’t vote for, but will pay for. It will have a lot of power in Canberra, and may not actually speak for indigenous people at all.
And all the rules come later.
The Rule of Law Education Centre notes that Australians should all be equal not just before the law but also before the makers of the law and those who apply the law.
Aboriginal people, like everyone else, are divided. Many don’t like the way this referendum has used them to stir up racial division, dragging old grievances out for political gain.
They have been used like wrapping paper on a box.
Ordinary people are, sadly, fooled by the wrapping and think this is about Aboriginal people. They are called racist if they want ‘no’, but it’s racist if they want ‘yes’. Most people just want it over.
For the people tricked into thinking it’s got anything to do with Aboriginal recognition, it all boils down to this: do you think there is such a thing as “good racism” - yes or no?
If you think “good racism” evens the score for past injustice and watch the ABC, then you’ll probably vote “Yes”.
If you think racism is always wrong, fuels resentment and creates more racism, then you will vote “No”.
Proud Aboriginal man and leading “No” campaigner Nyunggai Warren Mundine told the National Press Club on September 26 that he did not want racist “for your own good” constitutional segregation of Aboriginal people brought back.
“These ‘protection regimes’ kept us down and held us back from a full Australian life. They were abolished after the 1967 referendum when Australians overwhelmingly voted to remove racial segregation from the constitution for everyone to be equal under the law. Now the Albanese Government wants to put racial segregation back into our constitution,” he said.
“No other group of Australians will have a body entrenched in the constitution to speak on their behalf with a single voice, only one race of people will be treated in this way.”
And of respect?
Is there anything more disrespectful to the dignity of a human being than to reduce them to a physical characteristic over which they have no control - and then judge them on it?
This referendum throws Aboriginal people out for public commentary on their race and then segregates them in the constitution so they are treated differently forever - for their race. That is racist.
Remember Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream” speech?
That speech on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, Washington DC, defined the civil rights movement that brought equality under law to all.
“I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character,” he said.
And then he went on:
“But there is something that I must say to my people who stand on the warm threshold which leads into the palace of justice. In the process of gaining our rightful place, we must not be guilty of wrongful deeds. Let us not seek to satisfy our thirst for freedom by drinking from the cup of bitterness and hatred.” - Martin Luther King, 1963.
I submit that it would be a wrongful deed to entrench racial discrimination in the constitution.
Why do corporations want to meddle in our democracy?
Ignoring the propaganda, I observe the following:
People appear to have been paid to dance around with expensive professionally printed “Yes” signs by the side of the road. I see them as I drive the bus, distracting peak-hour traffic on The Spit in Sydney’s posh northern suburb of Mosman (pic at top).
I’ve only ever seen people with the “No” signs once. They were few in number and painted their own signs themselves.
It is obvious that corporate money is overwhelmingly behind the “Yes” campaign but not the “No” campaign. The corporate advertising is everywhere. Why is that?
Why do global corporations want to interfere in Australia’s democracy?
Look who is supporting the “Yes” campaign:
Mining giants BHP and Rio Tinto gave $2 million each. Both are WEF partners.
Qantas donated free travel and painted three aeroplanes with the Yes23 logo.
The ‘big four’ accounting firms PwC, EY, Deloitte and KPMG. PwC is a WEF strategic partner. EY is a WEF partner. Deloitte is a “long-standing” WEF strategic partner. KPMG is a strategic WEF partner. They all champion “public-private partnerships”.
The Big Four banks donated: ANZ “in the region of $2 million”, NAB $1.5 million, Westpac $1.75 million, Commonwealth Bank, $2 million, ABC reports.
Diversified industrials Wesfarmers (which owns Bunnings) donated $2 million. Wesfarmers is listed on the WEF website.
Australian billionaire Anthony Pratt donated $1 million. Mr Pratt and his family own Visy, a multinational corporation operating 180 facilities worldwide that is listed on the WEF website.
Thirteen of the largest 20 companies listed on the Australian Securities Exchange (ASX) including Woodside Energy, Al Jazeera reports.
A grab-bag of powerful family foundations and rich philanthropists including The Myer Foundation and the Paul Ramsay Foundation gave $17 million.
The Business Council of Australia and the Minerals Council of Australia.
The Australian Institute of Company Directors. This institute trains businesspeople in “corporate governance”. They make submissions to the government on everything from artificial intelligence, privacy, gender equality and the climate.
985 directors signed a full-page ad promoting the “Yes” vote in the Australian Financial Review, on August 28 (pictured below)
This list of 985 directors is stacked with exactly the kind of people you might imagine. They walk the corporate offices of Australia’s biggest businesses and banks. Some have backgrounds on Labor-linked superannuation boards such as former chair of AustralianSuper Elana Rubin, who is now chair of the Australian Business Growth Fund, a “public-private partnership” joining six large banks and the Federal Government. Ms Rubin is also on the board of law firm Slater & Gordon, which also supports the referendum.
Some of the 985 directors are linked to the World Economic Forum (WEF), a lobby group for the world’s largest global corporations and billionaires, based in Switzerland.
The WEF promotes “public-private partnerships” which is another way of describing textbook fascism: the marriage of corporation and state.
The WEF wants to replace democracy with “stakeholder capitalism” in what it calls the “Fourth Industrial Revolution”.
Instead of corporations being simple businesses concerned with making profits for shareholders, they will engage in politics and social engineering. You can’t vote for them, but their technocrats will decide how and where you live, what kind of dwelling you live in, what injections you must take, what you can eat and how far you can travel.
The WEF regards its corporate partners as “stakeholders” to govern you for “the greater good” with technology. It’s in their Davos Manifesto. It’s selection not election and it is cloaked in the language of philanthropy.
The “charity” foundations of oligarchs (such as the Gates Foundation) are used as a political tool to buy more corporate power at national and international level, in a phenomenon called “philanthrocapitalism” as detailed here by journalist Alan Macleod.
It’s a self-reinforcing system that enables the billionaire class to meddle in everything. They are using hot-button issues such as climate change and racism to get influence over regulations, laws and tax revenue.
They are using this referendum.
Since when do corporations care about Aboriginal people?
The corporate class like The Voice because it will be top-down centralised control in one body that they can more easily influence. For an example of this, see how the WEF influenced media regulator ACMA (another unelected government body) to change our censorship laws here.
This is not corporate piety. This is about power.
The billionaire class and the WEF have created a movement, a millieu of people across academia, philanthropy, business and politics who reinforce each other, creating a culture that promotes their own corporate interest.
“First principles, Clarice. Simplicity. Read Marcus Aurelius. Of each particular thing, ask what is it in itself? What is its nature? What does he do, this man you seek?” - Hannibal Lecter, Silence of the Lambs.
A perfect example of this confluence of interests is the lynchpin role of Maria Atkinson, one of the 985 directors listed in the full page “Yes” ad in The Financial Review.
Ms Atkinson, who no doubt has the best of goodwill, chaired a discussion about the Future of Sustainable Construction at the WEF Inaugural Summit on the Global Agenda in Dubai, 2008, her profile page says.
A former Lendlease executive, Ms Atkinson is now chair of the Holcim Foundation, a philanthropic organisation created by the Holcim Group in 2003 as a vehicle to lobby for “sustainable design”.
Holcim is based in Switzerland and is one of the world’s largest corporations. It makes building materials such as concrete, aggregates, cement and asphalt. It operates in 70 countries. It is a WEF partner.
Its website says its ready-mix concrete is now “low-carbon” which enables “low-carbon construction” at scale. That would help Holcim get big supply contracts for government infrastructure projects even if it wasn’t the cheapest supplier - as long as the government had to meet some artificial “low-carbon” target by using “sustainable materials”.
So Holcim has a financial interest in governments setting rules about “sustainable materials”, the exact same thing its charity foundation lobbies for.
Ms Atkinson also founded the “Green Building Council of Australia” which says on its website that it wants “a plan for net zero emissions buildings by 2050”. Just like the WEF says it wants.
This Green Building Council lobbies the government to divert taxes into the Clean Energy Finance Corporation and the Australian Renewable Energy Agency, for funding “sustainable development”. It petitions the government to “improve decision making” on land-use planning and infrastructure investment, and to make “sustainable cities”, it says on its website.
It also set itself up as the authority to rate the “sustainability” of projects. It gives “green stars” to buildings that are “low-carbon”.
Winning “green stars” helps projects secure funding when they have to comply with new government rules about “sustainable cities” - that the Council itself lobbies for. So developers and governments are incentivised to choose suppliers like Holcim, which is also a member of the Green Building Council, supports the UN development goals, and has a very high Environment Social and Governance (ESG) rating.
This creates a barrier to entry for Holcim’s competitors. Smaller companies might offer cheaper or better concrete, but if they haven’t got the right contacts or green stars then they won’t be getting any big contracts - no matter how good they are.
See how that works? A self-reinforcing culture that incentivises government to promote the interest of the large corporation.
That’s how public-private partnerships work to destroy freedom and channel public money into the private hands of only the largest and most powerful combines.
Corporations donate to causes that promote only the conditions that benefit them and their networks. This is universally true.
So I ask: why do the corporations want to “help” Aboriginal people?
Why do they want The Voice so badly?
I spent 10 years in the Northern Territory. If I know one thing, it’s that this referendum has nothing at all to do with the lives of Aboriginal people.
So: what does he do, this Voice you seek?
Excellent post Alison. The Voice is a vehicle to further the Deep State.
A wonderfully constructed expose Alison.