Fun facts, not-so-fun facts, terminology tips, and “The Australian Constitution made simple”: The “Voice” Referendum (and why it’s not as complicated as it seems)

By Richard Whitington

Table of Contents

Chapter One: what’s a referendum?

Here you’ll find some simple background and explanations.

How to avoid an informal vote!

Referendums or Referenda?

Amazing number of first-time referendum voters!

What does a Referendum ask you to vote on?

Who can/must vote in a Referendum?

But you must be enrolled to vote!

Chapter Two: The Voice Referendum.

A Two Step Process.

The actual wording of The Voice Referendum:

When will it be held?

Chapter Three: the three branches of “government”

A plain-words explanation of the Parliament, the Executive and the Judiciary.

Chapter Four: words you’re going to hear (probably a lot) during the Referendum debate.

Deciphering: Constitution, Representations, Constituents, Government, Parliament, House of Representatives, Senate, Chamber, House, MP, MHRs, Legislature/Legislation, Amendments, Law, Cabinet, Ministers/Ministry, Executive, Bills, Acts, Lobbying, Private Member’s Bill, Judiciary, Coalition, and more.

Chapter Five: the challenging facts about referendums in Australia.

The quirky history of referendums – winners and losers, and changing our minds (with some “Did you knows?”).

Chapter Six: counting the Indigenous vote.

Brief account of the slow progress on Indigenous peoples’ entitlements.

Chapter Seven: let’s recall what we’re dealing with here, and ask ourselves how this ever happened.

A confronting reminder of how little progress we’ve made.

Chapter Eight: how do other countries treat their indigenous minorities?

From Scandinavia to South America to New Zealand.

Chapter Nine: myths, misconceptions and malice.

Debunking the illogical and misleading objections to “Yes”.

Chapter Ten: dates worth remembering and events easily forgotten.

First Fleet, Myall Creek, some landmarks in progress, and many in shame.

If you want to dive deeper…

Links to other sites & resources.

Chapter One: what’s a referendum?

Here you’ll find some simple background and explanations.

Few of us have the time or the need to learn the workings of Government (let alone the Constitution!) and the often-mysterious language involved.

But we’re expected to be experts when a referendum comes along!

Rather more importantly, if you read nothing else here, remember this:

How to avoid an informal vote!

The ballot paper for a referendum has just one box on it and you must write Yes or No in it. If you put a tick or a cross in it, let alone a number (1), your vote will be invalid.

Here’s a sample ballot paper:

Referendums or Referenda?

The old-school plural of Referendum is “Referenda”. We’re going with “Referendums”, with apologies to the purists.

Amazing number of first-time referendum voters!

The 24-year gap between the last referendum (1999), and this year’s, is by far the longest there’s ever been (the previous longest was the 16 years from 1951 to 1967).

Meaning, that in 2023, nobody under 42 years of age has ever voted in a referendum (i.e., only people now aged 42 or above, were of voting age when the last referendum was held, in 1999). So, this year, more than 40 per cent of those enrolled will be voting in a referendum for the first time. The design of the ballot paper, and how to answer the question, might be a surprise to some seven million Alert your friends, and children!

What does a Referendum ask you to vote on?

Referendums relate only to proposed changes to Australia’s Constitution. The Constitution is the ultimate set of rules which dictates what powers are available to the Australian Commonwealth Government (in our Federal system, the States handle all the other laws).  Using the powers allowed by the Constitution, the Australian Government makes laws (legislation), by passing them through Parliament, and making orders and regulations. Laws, regulations and orders are administered through various arms of the Public Service (which form part of “the Executive” – more on that later), overseen by Ministers.

Laws and regulations can be challenged through the court system (the Judiciary) and often are, occasionally on the grounds that they do not align with what the authors of the Constitution intended.

The Australian Constitution can only be altered by a Referendum. A Referendum passes only if:

1. A majority of voters in at least four of our six states (i.e., a majority of the states) vote “Yes”, AND
2. A majority of all voters in Australia (including voters who live in the Territories of the NT and ACT), overall, vote “Yes”.

It’s entirely possible, mathematically, for a majority of Australian voters to vote “Yes”, but only a minority of states (three or fewer) to vote “Yes”. Equally, it’s mathematically possible for a majority of states to vote “Yes”, without a majority being gained, nationally, among the total voting population. In either scenario, the Referendum fails to pass.

We’ll have more on the history of Referendums, and how difficult they are to win!

Who can/must vote in a Referendum?

Like an election, it’s compulsory for all enrolled voters to fill out a ballot paper which, in a Referendum, asks a “Yes” or “No” question.

Voting is conducted at polling booths, just as it is at elections. If you are eligible and can’t make it to a polling booth on Referendum Day, you may apply for a postal vote. Or vote before Referendum Day (usually up to ten days ahead) at special “Pre-Poll” booths. If you’re not near your usual polling booth on Referendum Day, you can vote “Absentee” at any polling booth outside your own electorate.

If you’ll be overseas on Referendum Day, you’ll need to carefully research your voting options (usually a postal vote).

The Australian Electoral Commission will provide more information on all this, closer to the “Yes” Day (Referendum) and we’ll update this page accordingly.

But you must be enrolled to vote!

And you can do that, right now:

If you’ve turned 18 since the last Federal Election (21 May 2022), or have simply never enrolled, you can do it here: Enrol to vote or update your details – Australian Electoral Commission (aec.gov.au)

And here’s a tricky one: Provisional voting! That’s a vote you’re allowed to cast if your name can’t be found on the electoral roll, or when your name has been marked off the list, as having voted already.

In short, it’s a vote you can cast pending resolution of a dispute about whether you were eligible, or if someone else has cheated and voted in your name. It’s a rare occurrence, but in a tight contest, it might make a difference. If you know people who might be affected by this – let them know their right to assert their entitlement to vote.

Chapter Two: The Voice Referendum

A Two Step Process

The proposal to have a “Voice” for Indigenous people involves two steps (the Referendum is just the first of them):

1. Seek approval, from all Australian voters, for the Constitution to include a permanent mechanism (The Voice) to assist Indigenous people to express their views to the Australian Government; that’s the Referendum question.
2. Then, if that’s approved at the Referendum, the elected Parliamentarians have the job of designing how The Voice will be organised and operate.

It’s also easy to overlook the fact that our Government, through the Parliament, already can easily set up structures and processes to listen to Indigenous people. But currently, on a whim, Governments can also just as easily abolish those structures and processes, as they have – three times – in the past: the National Aboriginal Consultative Committee (1977), the National Aboriginal Conference (1985) and the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission (2004).

The point of The Voice referendum is to say to any and every Commonwealth Government, into the future: “The Constitution of our nation now requires you to establish and keep a mechanism – something – which is obliged to listen to Indigenous viewpoints and convey those to the Government on matters which directly impact Indigenous people.”

In plain, simple language, it’s also saying to the Government, forever: “The design of the mechanism is up to you, assuming you can convince a majority of the elected members of Parliament; but if you stray too far from what the Constitution intends, you’ll be challenged in front of the “Judiciary” – the High Court of Australia”. Writing this into the Constitution is also saying to the Government and the Parliament: “You’re required to have something permanent; you can’t keep creating organisations and agencies to represent Indigenous people only to abolish them later, leaving nothing in their place.”

The actual wording of The Voice Referendum:

After detailed consultation with the Referendum Working Group (which was established by a previous Coalition Government), Prime Minister Albanese announced the proposed referendum question on 23 March 2023. The Bill was introduced to parliament on 30 March 2023, and passed the Senate on 19 June 2023.

The question is:

A Proposed Law: to alter the Constitution to recognise the First Peoples of Australia by establishing an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice. Do you approve this proposed alteration? [Write Yes or No in the box]

Introducing the Bill to Parliament on 23 March 2023, the government proposed that if the referendum passes, the Constitution will have this added to it:

Chapter IX Recognition of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples

129 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice

In recognition of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples as the First Peoples of Australia:

1. There shall be a body, to be called the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice;
2. The Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice may make representations to the Parliament and the Executive Government of the Commonwealth on matters relating to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples;
3. The Parliament shall, subject to this Constitution, have power to make laws with respect to matters relating to the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice, including its composition, functions, powers and procedures.

As noted earlier, it’s a two-step process: first, a change to the Constitution which gives the Parliament the power to design how The Voice will work; second, our elected representatives, by a majority, agree on the mechanics for implementation.

When will it be held?

The date hasn’t been set, yet! But most likely it will be the second Saturday in October, the 14th. The first Saturday in October (October 7) probably wouldn’t work because we’d all be recovering from various footy grand finals held on the previous weekend (and a public holiday, in several states). Any later than Saturday 14 October and we’d be too close to the Melbourne Cup for anyone to concentrate. Neither Grand Finals nor the Melbourne Cup are mentioned in the Constitution, surprisingly.

Chapter Three: the three branches of “government”

A plain-words explanation of the Parliament, the Executive and the Judiciary

Don’t feel bad if you don’t “get” where power resides and how it is exercised in Australia’s system of government. Not many of us have the need, the time or the interest to dwell on the subject. But, when it comes to holding a referendum on changing “who has power over what”, suddenly we’re expected to become constitutional experts.

Democracies, like Australia, generally have three arms of government: the Parliament, the Executive and the Judiciary. There are variations – country to country – in how the arrangements work, and which of the three is ultimately the most powerful. And there are differences in vocabulary and terminology in describing them!

Whatever language we use, the arrangements in Australia are set out in a Constitution, a document which says who is responsible for what. In our case, one of its main purposes was to define and describe the powers that Australia’s six existing colonies/States would hand over to the Commonwealth of Australia at Federation (when we became a nation) in 1901.

It’s important to understand that, in Australia, ultimate power lies with the people, voting at elections or occasionally, in referendums (to alter the Constitution). Every three years we elect some of our fellow citizens to the Australian Parliament (sometimes referred to as the Legislature) – ordinary people: 151 members of the House of Representatives and 76 Senators. Those parliamentarians, representing the voters, have the power to adopt, or block, or amend anything the Government proposes. The Parliament, and only the Parliament, makes laws.

The laws Parliament makes must comply with the Constitution, which can only be altered if a majority of all Australian voters, and a majority of voters in at least four of our six states, agree to that (vote “Yes”). We’re a timid lot – after all six states agreed to become one nation, and did so in 1901, we’ve said “Yes” to changing the Constitution only eight times, out of the 44 times we’ve been asked to!

The things the Parliament (OK, the Legislature) considers are usually proposed by the so-called Executive of the Government. In Australia, the Executive is created by the Prime Minister, the leader of the party that has the support of a majority in the House of Representatives (often called “the Lower House”, as distinct from the Senate or “Upper House”). The Prime Minister appoints about 30 Ministers from those elected to either house of Parliament (usually from the ranks of his or her own party). Each of them is then responsible for at least one department. These employ public servants (the Public Service – more for the vocabulary) to implement and administer the government’s policies. Well known departments include Treasury, Defence, Social Services, Education, Health, Environment, the Arts etc.

Each of those departments, or government “agencies” (crikey, another word) has a boss. Sometimes it’s a Secretary, sometimes a Director General, sometimes a Chief, sometimes just a “Head of”.

In Australia, the most senior of the Ministers, drawn from elected members of parliament, and appointed by the Prime Minister, form a Cabinet (another word!) and the Cabinet is at the core of Executive Government. Cabinet proposes laws and regulations, and the parliament approves or rejects them. The responsibility for implementing those laws and regulations, as enacted by Parliament (by both the House of Representatives and the Senate) passes down through Ministers, to their department heads, to the lowest levels of the public service.

But wait, have we forgotten about the Judiciary, the third arm of our system of government? Let’s demystify that – it’s the courts. In Australia, the highest of them is, not surprisingly, the High Court. In our States the highest court is the “Supreme Court”, but they do not interpret the Australian Constitution, only the laws of their particular State.

The most significant function of the High Court is to decide, if asked to settle an argument, on whether a law, passed by the parliament, elected by the people, actually complies with what (the High Court thinks) the Constitution intended. Irritating as we might think it is for seven people (the High Court judges) to over-rule what 227 members of parliament might have agreed to, it’s an accepted safety check. The Constitution included this role for a permanent “umpire”.

Maybe much more importantly, Australia has heaps of other lower-level branches of what might be called the judiciary: courts and tribunals which rule on the “legality” and fairness of decisions taken by governments and implemented through the public service – everything from employment and pay disputes, through to entitlements to welfare benefits, and how much tax you owe. It’s all far from perfect, of course, but there’s a system in place that every day deals with disagreements between the government and the people government is meant to serve.

Chapter Four: words you’re going to hear (probably a lot) during the Referendum debate.

Deciphering: Constitution, Representations, Constituents, Government, Parliament, House of Representatives, Senate, Chamber, House, MP, MHRs, Legislature/Legislation, Amendments, Law, Cabinet, Ministers/Ministry, Executive, Bills, Acts, Lobbying, Private Member’s Bill, Judiciary, Coalition, and more.

The Australian Parliament consists of the House of Representatives (151 members) and the Senate (76 members). Sometimes they are known as the “lower house” (the House of Reps, or just the “Reps”) and “the upper house” (the Senate – which is also sometimes called “the House of Review”). All of these parliamentarians can be referred to as MPs (short for Member of Parliament, not Military Police). MPs in the lower house are sometimes called MHRs – Members of the House of Representatives. Senators are just, well, Senators.

Each of the rooms in which these Houses meet is also sometimes called “the chamber”. The lower house chamber and the upper house chamber are not to be confused with the toilets in an English mansion. Even though parliamentarians are described as “sitting” in parliament, or as a “sitting” member.

Nor is the House of Review a place where you see a university student stage show.

The building which accommodates both these chambers, is Parliament House! Although in England they call it the Houses of Parliament, or the Palace of Westminster.

Our parliament is also referred to as “the Legislature”, because it’s the place, and the only place, where legislation is passed. More on that later but, for now, keep in mind that legislation is really just another word for “law”. That is, only parliament can make laws. Read on…

Government is formed in Australia when the man or woman who is supported by a majority of the 151 members of the House of Reps, goes to the Governor General (who represents King Charles III of England) and asks to be sworn in as Prime Minister. Whether the Prime Minister, and his/her party, has majority support in the Senate, has nothing to do with this.

[For more than 80 years our Prime Minister has been either the Leader of the Australian Labor Party, or the Leader of the Liberal Party (supported by the National Party, in a partnership known as the Coalition).]

The PM then appoints Ministers, to supervise the various functions of government. These Ministers are selected (usually by the PM; sometimes by a vote of the parliamentary party the PM leads) from the ranks of parliamentarians in both othe two houses. That is, in Australia, before they are eligible to serve as a Minister, a person must first be elected to either House of Parliament, as a direct representative of the people. This is one of many safeguards in our system of government, ultimately giving voters more power than anyone else, over who runs the place.

All the ministers, together, are known as the Ministry, but the most senior of them form the Cabinet. The ministry is nothing to do with a collection of priests in a religious order; and the Cabinet is not a cupboard.

The terminology here is loosely applied. The junior ministers, who aren’t in the Cabinet, are sometime referred to as “the outer ministry”. The senior ministers, who are actually in Cabinet, are sometimes known as the “inner cabinet”.

Laws are made in Australia when the Cabinet agrees to bring a proposed law (legislation) to Parliament, for Parliament’s approval. At first, this is called a Bill. To become law, the Bill must be approved, separately, by a majority of the House of Reps, and a majority in the Senate. Sometimes a Bill is amended, along the way, as it is debated. This happens less commonly in the House of Reps, because the Government usually commands a majority there (although not necessarily on every single issue); amendments to Bills are made more frequently in the Senate because the Government hardly ever has a majority there.

This is a subject for another lesson, another day, about how the Senate is elected and how the Constitution provides for each State to have the same number of Senators regardless of the huge variations in population between the States. Suffice to say the Senate is another safeguard in our Constitution. It was included to ensure big states don’t have a dominant advantage over smaller states.

Once a Bill has been approved (amended or not) by both houses, it becomes an Act – it becomes the law from a specified date (well, once King Charles’s representative, the Governor General, has OK’d it – which is called “giving Royal Assent”).

Much of parliament’s work actually involves making amendments to existing legislation, when the government wants to change a law, for whatever reason. This can range from the highly significant, to minor tinkering.

For completeness, sometimes legislation is introduced to parliament as a Private Member’s Bill. This is not a Bill introduced in private, but by an MP, from any party (in the House of Reps, or the Senate), who is not a Minister. It’s rare, and even more rare for private members’ bills to be passed by the parliament.

In deciding how they will vote, on anything, MPs are meant to take into account the views of their constituents – that’s us, the people who voted the MPs into parliament. The process of voters presenting an argument to an MP is called making representations. This can happen anywhere, like the sideline of a Saturday afternoon footy game, or by letter and e-mail, by phone call, or – more formally – to committees of parliament which are set up to enquire into or recommend policies on a wide range of subjects.

Representations can be made by individuals, or by bodies representing particular interests, or organisations – business councils, trade unions, religious groups and many more. People or organisations that are paid to do this on behalf of others are called lobbyists. In addition, many individual organisations do their own direct lobbying.

So that deals with Parliament, the Cabinet and legislation. Let’s move on to what is known as the Executive. The (inner) Cabinet – the PM and the senior ministers – form the pinnacle of the Executive. It’s a bit like the Board of a company (or the local RSL club).

In general, every minister has a department – sometimes several – and each department has a “Head” reporting to the minister. These departmental heads also sit near the top of the Executive structure; in Australia, strictly speaking, that structure runs all the way down to the lowest levels of the public service.

Critics of the proposed wording of the Voice argue that, in providing for indigenous people to make representations to “the Executive”, lower levels of the public service will become bogged down in disputes with indigenous people who claim to have “the constitution” on their side. More on that later.

It’s important to keep in mind that the actual design and functions of The Voice will only be determined by the Parliament, after the Referendum succeeds.

There is no point agonising about these details until after the Referendum is passed. The fact is that various alternative models will be proposed for the Voice, for the Australian Parliament to consider and vote on. Whatever structure and roles are given by Parliament to The Voice it will be no different to other existing structures within our government, which are all subject to various forms and degrees of accountability.

And all are subject to challenge, at a variety of levels – whether it be to the constitutional validity of legislation or administrative actions relating to the way representations are made to, or responded to, by executive government. These challenges are heard and adjudicated by the judiciary, from the High Court down to bodies like the Administrative Appeals Tribunal (and many more!).

The fact is that the role proposed for The Voice is no different to that of others which operate in the existing structures of our government.

The broad guidelines for how all this operates, and particularly what power is available to the various arms of government, are written in the Constitution. The constitution was agreed to by the six Australian states, prior to them joining together to become a single nation, back on 1 January 1901. The only way the Constitution can be changed is by a referendum. From the 44 attempts to change the Constitution, since it was fist adopted, only eight have succeeded.

Chapter Five: the challenging facts about referendums in Australia

The quirky history of referendums – winners and losers, and changing our minds (with some “Did you knows?”)

Since Australia became a nation, in 1901, there have been 44 Referendum questions put to voters, on a range of issues, seeking approval to change the Constitution. In only eight cases did the “Yes” vote prevail (it was a “No”, to the other 36 questions).

Let’s put aside the 18 questions asked from 1906 to 1937 (three of which won a “Yes”), being longer ago than most of us can remember.

Modern referendums:

Since the start of World War 2, Australians have voted in referendums on 11 occasions (first in 1944, most recently in 1999). Let’s call 1944 to 1999 the “modern era” (even though 1999 is also longer ago than some of us can remember). In this period, voters were asked a total of 26 questions. They said “Yes” to only five of them.

Which party has more success sponsoring referendums?

During those 55 years, nine of the 26 questions were asked while the Liberal/National Coalition was in power. Four of the nine scored a “Yes”, gaining a majority in four of the six states, and a majority among the Australian population, as a whole (these are the two requirements for a referendum to pass). Not bad, by referendum standards, when you consider only eight of 44 questions have passed, since we became a nation in 1901.

The other 17 questions, from 1944 to 1999, were put up while Labor was in power. Only one received a “Yes”, and that was back in 1946.

So, on this analysis, the Liberals are four out of nine; Labor only one from 17.

Occasionally we’ve changed our minds, over time.

In 1974 the Labor government put up a referendum to allow electors in Territories (the ACT and the NT), joining those in the States, to vote in… well, referendums. It lost. In 1977 the Liberal Government put up the same question; it passed.

In 1944, Labor ran a referendum which sought to give the Commonwealth power, for a period of five years, to legislate on 14 specific matters, including the rehabilitation of ex-servicemen, national health, family allowances and ‘the people of the Aboriginal race’. Nope, it lost.

But in 1967, when the Liberal government put up the question to enable the Commonwealth to enact laws for Aboriginal people (and to remove the prohibition against including Aboriginal people in population counts in the Commonwealth or a State), it passed, by the biggest majority of any referendum (90 per cent in favour!).

Is timing everything?

Three of the 11 “referendum days” between 1944 and 1999 occurred on the same day as federal elections, with nine questions being asked, in total. Only one of them was passed. The other 17 questions were asked on eight referendum days which were held separately from federal elections: four of the 17 questions were approved.

What does all that tell us?

Bottom line:

1. Liberal governments have had more success getting their referendum questions passed (including when they ask the same or similar question to one defeated earlier, when it was put up by Labor).
2. Referendums held separately from an election day (as The Voice referendum will be) have a much greater chance of winning than those held on the same day as an election. At stand-alone referendums we clearly vote a little more generously for “Yes”, and seem to overcome our irritation at having to turn up to a polling booth, yet again.

We tend to agree, broadly, regardless of where we live – but not always!

Even though they needed only four out of the six states (along with a majority of all Australian voters), every one of the five successful referendums in the modern era has won a majority in every state. You need to go back to 1910 to find the only successful referendum which wasn’t supported by every state (NSW held out, voting NO, to no avail).

There has never been a referendum where a majority of states (four out of six) voted in favour but a majority of the national population voted “No”. However there have been five referendums lost despite a majority of Australians voting “Yes”, the most remarkable being in 1977, when we were asked to change the Constitution to ensure that Senate elections are held at the same time as House of Representatives elections. Despite more than 62 per cent of us approving, three states (Queensland, WA and Tasmania) said “No”, thus defeating the referendum.

Nonetheless, the House of Reps and Senate have been elected on the same day, ever since, demonstrating that in many instances, governments can adopt what they see as the will of the people, or their own interests, even if matter isn’t enshrined in the Constitution.

Losing, big time

The darkest day in referendum history was 31 May 1913, when six referendum questions were put, on the same day as a federal election. All six failed, despite three states (Queensland, WA and SA) voting in favour of every question. It needed (but didn’t get) four states in favour and, in any event, the national total in favour was stuck on 49 per cent, to all six questions. The 1913 Referendum was put up by the Labor Government of the time, which was defeated at the election on the same day!

Doing “OK”

The best day for referendums was in 1977, when Malcolm Fraser’s Coalition Government put up four questions, with three of them being passed – all of them with more than 70 per cent of the total, and every state, voting Yes. Even the question which “lost” was supported by 62 per cent of Australians – but three states had a majority “No”. Go figure.

Maybe we like “one thing at a time, please”

There have been five occasions on which we’ve been asked just one question at a referendum – for two “Yes’s” and three “No’s”. This is actually a pretty good stat for “Yes” hopefuls – a 40 per cent success rate, when just one question is asked. This compares to the 15 per cent success rate for Yes (only six out of 39), when more than one question is asked at a referendum. This year’s referendum involves just one question. Whether SportsBet or their equivalents know of these odds is another matter….

Here’s some more, for trivia buffs…

1. The eight successful referendums recorded national Yes votes of between 54.39% and 90.77%. Seven were supported by all six states; one was 5-1 (NSW said No). In case you’re wondering, the second highest “Yes” vote, ever (after the 1967 90 per cent, to recognise Aboriginals), was 80 per cent in favour of setting a retirement age for judges in the High Court. Slightly ironic, that we became nearly as excited about seeing off seven ageing white people, before they died on the job, as we did about teenage Aboriginal kids dying in police cells.
2. Five referendums failed, despite receiving national Yes votes of more than 50%: between 50.30% and 62.22%. Three of them had three states against; two of them had four states against. Only one of them ranked within the eight which passed, in terms of national support. That is, if sufficient states had voted in favour, four of these five would occupy the bottom of the Yes “league ladder” of successful referendums. Those four were only a tad over 50 per cent of the national vote so, maybe, it’s reasonable that they didn’t get up.
3. Nine referendums have attracted Yes votes of less than 40%. Seven of them had all states opposed; two of them were 1 Yes – 5 No.
4. The other 22 referendums had Yes votes between 40.25% and 49.78%. The majority of them had three states against, some had four against.

Bottom line:

• Nine of 44 referendums questions were rejected by more than 60 per cent of voters. Wow! Who drafted those questions?
• Thirteen of 44 referendums won more than 50 per cent of the national vote, but five of those failed because insufficient states said “Yes”.

NSW: the biggest state, but the most “disappointed”…

Among the 26 referendum questions asked, from 1944 to 1999, there are nine on which NSW has voted “Yes”, but the referendum was not carried (insufficient other states, or minority of the national population, supporting).

Indeed, in our modern era, every state has voted “Yes”, once or more, only to see the referendum defeated: NSW (nine times, as mentioned), Western Australia and Victoria (four each), South Australia (two), Queensland, and Tasmania, once each.

How many people are eligible to vote?

Here, in millions (round figures), are the latest number of enrolled voters in each state and territory (with their percentage of the total national enrolment, in brackets).

NSW: 5.6 (31.3)

Vic:     4.5 (25.1)

Qld:    3.7 (20.7)

WA:    1.9 (10.6)

SA:      1.3 (7.3)

Tas:     0.4 (2.2)

ACT:   0.3 (1.7)

NT:      0.2 (1.1)

Total:  17.9m (100%)

Can you figure the maths – all the possible combinations which could lead to success (or failure) for a referendum question? Remember, four of the six states, and a majority of the total (meaning nearly nine million people need to vote “Yes”, for a start).

Consider this: If just 51% of voters in each of Tasmania, SA, WA and Queensland say NO, the referendum fails, regardless of how it’s supported in NSW and Victoria (or the ACT and NT). It means that around 20 per cent of our total voting population (3.7m out of nearly 18m) can thwart the wishes of 30 per cent (or more). It protects smaller states, which is not necessarily a bad thing. But it’s the reality.

But while you’re figuring that out, don’t forget to enrol to vote at the referendum: Enrol to vote or update your details – Australian Electoral Commission (aec.gov.au)

Chapter Six: counting the Indigenous vote.

Brief account of the slow progress on Indigenous peoples’ entitlements.

For the first 60 years after Australia became a nation (1901), Indigenous Australians didn’t even have a guaranteed right to vote, and most didn’t.

It wasn’t until 1962 that the Commonwealth Electoral Act granted all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people the option to enrol and vote in federal elections. It took until 1965 for the last of our States to remove the barriers which prevented Indigenous Australians from enrolling!

After the Commonwealth kindly granted permission for Indigenous Australians to enrol, it took till 1984 for them to be required to do so, like everybody else. It’s less than 40 years since Indigenous Australians were “given” the same legal voting obligations as other Australians.

Between 1962 and 1984 there were 13 Federal elections (counting four separate elections for the Senate), and five referendums (with a total of 14 questions put).

We’ll never know how many Indigenous people – what percentage of them – exercised their right to enrol and vote after 1962 – especially ahead of the 1967 Referendum, which asked if Indigenous Australians could be counted in the population.

At the last Census (remember, we count Indigenous people, now) 3.2 per cent of people said they identified as Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander. In most elections, if 3.2 per cent of voters changed their allegiance from one side to the other – let’s say from the government to the opposition – the government would be defeated.

Small as it seems, the same percentage – 3.2 – could have a significant impact on the result of a referendum.

Chapter Seven: let’s recall what we’re dealing with here, and ask ourselves how this ever happened.

A confronting reminder of how little progress we’ve made.

Until Australians voted overwhelmingly in the 1967 referendum to amend it, our Constitution gave the Commonwealth the power to make laws with respect to “the people of any race other than the Aboriginal race in any State; for whom it is deemed necessary to make special laws.”

In plain English what that really meant was that, until 1967, only the States could make laws affecting aboriginal people. And it reminds us, meanwhile, that the Commonwealth had always had the power to make laws about people of any other race. And they did, “deeming it necessary”, for instance, with the White Australia Policy, prohibiting coloured people from anywhere – India, Asia, Africa, the Pacific Islands – from coming here and “stealing our jobs”. The Immigration Restriction Act 1901 lasted until 1966!

Perhaps the worst example of early racism, until it was removed from the Constitution in the 1967 referendum, was this: “In reckoning the numbers of people of the Commonwealth, or of a State or other part of the Commonwealth, aboriginal natives shall not be counted.”

Hopefully, voting Yes to The Voice will be seen by all Australians, particularly those of non-European heritage, as an opportunity – another step – to repair Australia’s somewhat extraordinary history of racial discrimination. Yes, it’s a history we share with many, many other countries. But we’ve now become one of the most multi-cultural, and multi-racial nations on earth. Another good reason to spread the joy.

Chapter Eight: how do other countries treat their indigenous minorities?

From Scandinavia to South America to New Zealand

There’s hardly a country on the planet that hasn’t been invaded and colonised by people of another race (or culture/nationality), with the original inhabitants becoming a small minority of the population. In Norway, Sweden and Finland, for instance, there are indigenous legislatures (parliaments) which acknowledge the tiny minority of those who were dispossessed. Interestingly, these countries are always in the top of the pop charts of the “happiest countries on earth”.

In New Zealand, there are seven seats in parliament which can be occupied only by Māori (providing way more power than anything proposed by The Voice). Again, in South America (in places like Columbia for instance), where the Spanish basically wiped out the native Indians, and imported black slaves from Africa, there are now seats allocated to those racial minorities. Canada is considering a similar approach, to provide its indigenous population with specific seats in parliament.

The Voice isn’t proposing any of these things. It just proposes a method, which will be permanent, for indigenous people to tap the Government on the shoulder and say “Hey, listen to us, on this”.

Chapter Nine: myths, misconceptions and malice.

Debunking the illogical and misleading objections to “Yes”

Here are just some of the arguments you’ll hear about The Voice:

“The Voice isn’t supported by all Indigenous people.”

Of course, it isn’t. Why should we expect it to be? Whatever their circumstances or background, people reach their own views and it’s unlikely 100 per cent of them will ever be in unanimous agreement. People of Indigenous descent can be just as radical or just as conservative as anyone else and, like some other Australians, will vote “No” because a Voice is too radical, or too conservative for their taste.

“Not my Voice”, you’ll hear some Indigenous Australians say. Fair enough.

But it is a nonsense to suggest that the Voice should be rejected by the rest of us because it isn’t supported by 100 per cent of Indigenous people.

“A “Yes” vote will introduce “race” to the Constitution”

Over the years, our Constitution has included several references to “race”. From the outset in 1901, the Constitution empowered the Parliament to make laws with respect to the people of any race. That provision is still there and is reflected notably in legislation like the Land Rights Act of 1976 and the Native Title Act of 1993, laws made specifically for Indigenous people.

“The Voice will be a “Canberra” voice.”

It is twisted logic to say, as some have said, that The Voice will be a “Canberra” voice. The opposite is true: unlike the armies of high paid lobbyists who currently populate the rarefied air of our national capital (around 2,000 of them!), the people elected to The Voice will be drawn from all regions across Australia, with specific provision for age and gender balance. The current model proposes two members from each state, the Northern Territory, ACT and Torres Strait. The organisational details and specific roles for The Voice will be determined by a vote of the parliament after the Referendum passes.

“The Voice singles out Indigenous Australians, but there are many other disadvantaged minorities. Why favour one minority over others?”

Because, for nearly 200 years after Europeans arrived here, and for nearly 70 years after we became a nation, we didn’t even recognise the existence of First Australians. Despite efforts in more recent times to understand and address the needs of Indigenous Australians – to “close the gap” – they continue to experience some of the worst outcomes in life expectancy (61 per cent of indigenous Australians don’t make it to age 65; only 17 per cent of other Australian die before they’re 65), incarceration rates (12 times more likely to be jailed), child imprisonment rates (26 times more likely to be jailed!), deaths in custody, domestic violence, child abuse, education levels, unemployment, housing and alcoholism.

No other “minority” – racial, gender, regional, country of origin, religious – has figures anywhere near so appalling.

Regardless of whether these statistical realities are a direct or indirect result of the trauma indigenous peoples suffered, as their “birth rights” were systematically eroded, the problems demand that we do something significant, something extra, something permanent.

The greatest diversion of all: “race”. It’s not about race, it’s simply about who was here first.

We’re being sucked into an argument over whether The Voice is about race – the aboriginal race – and whether The Voice somehow gives privileges to people of aboriginal descent which the rest of us don’t enjoy.

Let’s imagine, for a moment, that the people inhabiting our continent for 65,000 years before Europeans took it over, just 235 years ago, were blue-skinned, or orange, or green. Or, why not, “white”? Imagine that! But regardless of their colour – their race – they’d lived here happily enough, surviving, looking after the land, healthy, having kids, having fun, talking to each other in languages they could understand, respecting cultural traditions and geographic boundaries between their various territories.

In fact, anthropologists have even noted that by living sustainably on this continent, the Aboriginals had a very satisfactory standard of living!! Their version of “civilisation” might be different to ours, but who’s to say it was inferior? A lot of Australians are descendant from places overseas that haven’t had a perfect record in peaceful co-existence, equality, welfare or tolerance of differences.

Who knows if Captain James Cook was a political progressive, but he drew this comparison between Australian aboriginal society, and that of his homeland, in Europe:

“… the Natives of New Holland may appear to some to be the most wretched people upon earth, but in reality they are far more happier than we Europeans; being wholly unacquainted not only with the superfluous but the necessary conveniences so much sought after in Europe, they are happy in not knowing the use of them. They live in a tranquillity which is not disturbed by the inequality of the condition.”

The point we overlook is that they were here before us. It doesn’t matter what colour they are, or the quality/nature of their civilisation. “We” took the place off them, without a word of “sorry”, without a Treaty, without any compensation. Indeed, for a very long time, without much recognition that the people who lived here first even existed! To “justify” dispossessing them, the new-comers relied on the fiction of “terra nullius”: nobody’s land. This legal myth was not dispelled until 1992 when the High Court granted Aboriginals (some limited) land rights, in the Mabo case.

So, ultimately, this is nothing to do with race, colour or culture. It’s simply to do with who was here first – time, thousands of years versus hundreds – who occupied the place, who owned it?

The Voice is simply a very long overdue way to give the people who were here first the one thing they’ve asked for: to be heard on issues that affect them.

“The conditions experienced by indigenous communities are of their own making.”

This argument says that changing the Constitution won’t stop drunkenness, lawlessness, general indolence etc. amongst Aboriginal communities in Alice Springs, let alone places more remote. Changing the Constitution probably won’t fix those problems, where they occur, elsewhere in Australia, either, among non-indigenous people of many other cultural and racial backgrounds.

But the descendants of our First People aren’t the same as everyone else. Many of them are afflicted, maybe defined, by the extraordinary discrimination which was inflicted on their forebears (and, still, on many of them, now). The Voice is an easy way to oblige our lawmakers to begin to listen, and keep on listening, to ideas from First Nations people, on how to remedy, going forward, the consequences of what was done to them in the past, often through violence on the out-of-sight frontiers of early settlement.

“The referendum question lacks detail; we aren’t being told what we’re voting for.”

Yes we are! We’re just being asked if we want to enshrine something in the Constitution that allows and requires our elected Parliament to establish some kind of structure, a mechanism, which takes account of Indigenous views. From there, after the Referendum is passed, it’s up to the Parliament to approve the design of how views will be sought, processed and accepted, on what issues, and how to monitor the outcomes – how The Voice will be organised and operate.

The current Government has already foreshadowed some aspects of its approach – for instance, a body with a broad, elected, representative base. But whatever this Government’s ideas, they must be approved by the Parliament. Voting Yes in the Referendum doesn’t ask you to approve a design, nor does it give the Government approval to implement a specific model.

It simply says to the Government: “The Constitution now demands that you set up, and keep, a means for Indigenous voices to be heard.”

Our Constitution might look long and complicated, but it never contains the detail that is now being demanded by the opponents of the YES vote.

The proposed change to the Constitution simply gives the power to our Parliament, our elected representatives, by a majority, to design how The Voice will work.

More on “Where’s the detail? I don’t know what I’m being asked to vote for.”

Referendum questions rarely contain much detail. Long as it is, the Constitution doesn’t, either. The Constitution merely spells out the powers which we give to the Australian Government. It’s up to Parliament, the people we vote in, every three years or so, to design how it applies the powers given to it by the Constitution.

When our Parliament agrees to hold a Referendum (indeed, to give itself more powers, under the Constitution) it usually proposes two things:

1. The broad “Yes” or “No” question which will be on the ballot paper in the Referendum;
2. The actual words which will be used to alter the Constitution, if the Referendum succeeds.

The actual words to be added to the Constitution generally do not appear on the ballot paper on Referendum Day. Maybe they should! Rather, the Government embarks on a communications campaign, ahead of the Referendum, to make the words available to those interested. At the same time, they provide the arguments put forward by supporters of the Referendum, and those opposed to it.  These days, that communications campaign can include mail-outs, media advertisements, and social media posts.

But it remains true, that when you’re standing in a polling booth, with a pencil in your hand, deciding on writing YES or NO in the box, these are the only words you’ll see:

A Proposed Law: to alter the Constitution to recognise the First Peoples of Australia by establishing an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice. Do you approve this proposed alteration? Yes or No?

If you want to know the precise wording to be added to the Constitution, you’ll need to read up before you vote. Here it is:

Chapter IX Recognition of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples

129 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice

In recognition of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples as the First Peoples of Australia:

1. There shall be a body, to be called the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice;
2. The Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice may make representations to the Parliament and the Executive Government of the Commonwealth on matters relating to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples;
3. The Parliament shall, subject to this Constitution, have power to make laws with respect to matters relating to the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice, including its composition, functions, powers and procedures.

Read it a few times over. Is it really as remotely scary as some people make out? Read the very first line: it’s just asking us to do something we’ve never managed to do – recognise Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples as the First Peoples of Australia.

The addition to the wording of the Constitution merely creates The Voice. It doesn’t compel anyone to do what The Voice might ask for. It leaves our elected Parliament to decide what it will do with the advice it receives from The Voice.

“They might be our first nations people, but they are not one, united nation.”

Of course they’re not. Why should we expect them to be? What does it matter if they have different priorities, different concerns, depending on their circumstances, their experience, and where they come from? There’s no logic in arguing that The Voice won’t be legitimate unless it can prove it speaks with the unanimous support of every indigenous person or community, from every corner of the continent.

What organisation, what institution, what corporation – democratically elected, or otherwise – can claim to represent all its stakeholders, that they are all in complete agreement? It’s a nonsense to suggest such a standard be applied to The Voice before it can be taken seriously.

“We should have Truth and a Treaty before a Voice.”

Which should come first? And what do Truth and Treaty mean? More on the meaning of Truth and Treaty in a moment.

In simple terms, The Voice gives Indigenous Australians a guaranteed and permanent line of communication to the Australian Government. That’s what the upcoming Referendum is about.

Many Australians, Indigenous and others, perfectly reasonably, are seeking Truth, as well, and a Treaty. Or a Treaty, and Truth. Wait, which should come first, and should Truth and/or a Treaty come before a Voice? The simple reality is this: the way things have worked out, right now, we’re having a vote on whether there should be a Voice.

Some people say they’ll vote “No” to a Voice, because we should have had a Treaty and/or Truth first. If the Voice referendum is defeated, it is almost certain that Truth and a Treaty will never win, ever. Consider the irony of supporters of putting Truth and Treaty before Voice, contributing to the Voice failing and, thus, guaranteeing the certain failure of Truth and Treaty.

Of course, the chances of Truth and Treaty, in some form, becoming a reality will be hugely enhanced if the Voice is overwhelmingly approved, with a huge Yes vote.

If you want to consider whether Truth and Treaty should take precedence over Voice, consider the relative complications of actually bringing each of them to fruition.

Truth requires the Government to establish the equivalent of a judicial enquiry – a bit like a Royal Commission – where people can tell their stories of the injustices inflicted on them and their forebears, the lasting harm it caused; and others can confess to (or sometimes attempt to dispute) the culpability of their forebears. It’s a process which in other parts of the world has proven enormously beneficial in contributing to the national consciousness, healing, the understanding, especially of younger and future generations, of how and why things were and are.

The pursuit of Truth can be legislated by Parliament. It doesn’t require a referendum to change the Constitution. It can be the focus of a campaign ahead of the next federal election, to force one or other or both of the major parties to commit to setting up the process for Truth. Who knows? If this year’s referendum passes, the current government might commit to Truth in the immediate aftermath. If The Voice referendum doesn’t pass, the idea of Truth will be set back, perhaps forever.

The political problem any government must wrestle with is whether Truth will unleash claims for compensation and recompense – hard dollars – to be paid by taxpayers, among others; and maybe even criminal charges against people who were never charged at the time of their crimes.

Let’s go ahead and vote Yes to The Voice, while politicians figure out that one.

What about a Treaty?

In most respects, the same goes for a Treaty, or Makarrata, to use the Indigenous word. This involves Australians of today saying to Indigenous Australians: “Let’s make a deal where you allow us to take your land, as we’ve already done, over the last 235 years.” To be serious, it would be a powerful gesture. But it’s complicated. It might require another referendum, to change our constitution. It would also certainly involve the contentious matter of compensation: in a treaty, one side offers something (usually “surrender”), and the other side offers something in return (compensation/benefit/reward).

While the 97 per cent of us who aren’t Indigenous argue about what we should provide to the other three per cent, let’s at least say “Yes” to a Voice. Recognising Indigenous Australians in the Constitution, by voting “Yes” to The Voice, is, in any event, one small step towards a Treaty (you can’t make a treaty with people without first acknowledging their existence).

A “Yes” to The Voice will be no guarantee, at all, that we’ll have Truth and Treaty soon after. Just as voting “No” to a Voice, because you want Truth and Treaty first, is absolutely no guarantee that defeating the Voice will give us Truth or a Treaty.

“The Voice will divide Australians.”

Who among us will it divide? The 97 per cent of us who don’t identify as Indigenous? How? The 2017 Uluru Statement from the Heart came from a couple of hundred people, hoping to speak on behalf of a small minority of our population (3.2 per cent – less than a million people, out of our total population of more than 26 million), asking us to symbolically embrace each other. It wasn’t a demand; it was an invitation. Saying “No” would be more divisive than saying “Yes”.

“It won’t make a real difference to the lives of ordinary Indigenous Australians.”

How can anyone say that? How do they know? What harm can be done by giving it a try (nothing else seems to have worked very well)?

Seriously, everyone, on either side of this debate, agrees that the best decisions are made when local stakeholders – those affected by them – are consulted and have a significant input. The Voice will enable that, creating a special, permanent channel of dialogue where, right now, none exists.

“Indigenous people will be able to claim “constitutional rights” in disputes with junior public servants.”

This is emerging as the big reason for “NO” advocates to oppose The Voice. They are relying on the “Executive” provision in the proposed wording, which will be added to the Constitution if we vote “Yes” at the Referendum, to suggest that the administration of the public service will become clogged up by Indigenous people arguing their “special rights”.

Let’s not beat around the bush here: the people who want the “Executive” provision removed from the proposed Constitutional amendment are trying to suggest that if a person claiming aboriginal descent walks up to the counter at Centrelink and asks for an increase in their benefits, the Centrelink clerk will be obliged to apply a different set of rules to those which normally apply.

Anyone who’s had any dealing with any government agency (they form part of the Executive) knows nobody makes a call on anything without asking their boss (who usually asks theirs). The Voice won’t change what happens when anyone has a dispute with the public service. But it will guarantee that, in making policies and regulations, the people who make those laws and regulations, will be obliged to listen to what Indigenous people say about them.

Public servants are, well, pretty much just like employees of any other organisation. They have managers, above them, who make decisions; they have policies and regulations which guide their actions and decisions. And, yes, they sometimes get things wrong. When public servants do get things wrong, there are avenues to appeal.

Meanwhile, the most import reason for including the “Executive”:

Allowing The Voice to make representations to “the Executive” simply means The Voice has the right to put a case to Cabinet Ministers and, sure, very senior public servants, on policies and regulations which affect First Australians. In fact, being able to make representations to the Executive, like anyone else, is central to The Voice being effective, allowing it to get its views across early in the policy development process. As explained earlier, legislation to be debated in parliament has already been settled by the Executive Government (i.e. Ministers in Cabinet) before parliamentarians get to see it, and often isn’t then changed much, if at all.

“People who vote Liberal are racists and will vote “NO” in the referendum.” Don’t believe it.

Maybe it depends on your age, but let’s not forget that the most overwhelming “Yes” vote in history, in 1967, was in response to a referendum put up by a Liberal government (on counting indigenous people in our population, and allowing the Commonwealth to make laws for them). At the time, Labor hadn’t been in office for nearly 20 years, and had just suffered (at the 1966 election) the worst result in its history. A huge proportion of Australians voted Liberal in 1966, and an ever huger proportion voted “Yes” in 1967.

Even though the Labor Party is credited with abolishing the White Australia Policy (which they’d created!), it was a Liberal Government (yes, at Labor’s urging) which, in 1966, started the process of changing Australia’s racist immigration regulations (completed by Labor, later).

Liberal Prime Ministers Robert Menzies and Harold Holt share some of the credit, with Labor leader, Gough Whitlam, for the small steps we’ve made. Maybe your mum or dad voted for Menzies or Holt. Or for another Liberal Prime Minister, Malcolm Fraser, who continued Australia’s opposition to apartheid in South Africa, and implemented Whitlam’s Aboriginal Land Rights (Northern Territory) Act in 1976.

In the current parliamentary Liberal Party, there are a significant number of people who said, outright, that they do not go along with their Leader Peter Dutton’s opposition to The Voice – not least because his position is inconsistent with long-established Liberal values and support for uplifting Indigenous people.

“None of us were around when the crimes against Aboriginals were committed. Why should we feel guilty?”

We shouldn’t feel guilty. But we should feel we owe them something – this generation of Indigenous Australians – because we’re the beneficiaries of the crimes our forebears committed against their forebears. Our houses, our office blocks, our schools and universities, our factories, workshops, our farms, our mines, our roads, our sports grounds, our parks, our cities and towns, are all on land that we took from them, without asking and without compensation.

We’re rightly comfortable with the mostly prosperous economy we’ve created. But it’s on stolen land. All we gave to its original owners was a few trinkets, a lot of smallpox, or a bullet to the head. And, to finish it off, we imprisoned them on “reserves” where they were out of our sight and out of mind.

Don’t feel guilty. Just say “Yes” to one thing they’ve asked us for: a seat at the table.

As the Sydney Morning Herald said on 10 June 2023:

Some may question the need to apologise for history. We acknowledge that today’s generation is not responsible for the sins of earlier ones, yet we can help heal old harms nonetheless. We also respectfully argue that the capacity to recognise a past wrong is a sign of a strong future.

When a committee of Indigenous elders and non-Indigenous locals set about building a memorial at the Myall Creek massacre (see below) site in the late 1990s, they wrote a fitting statement that rings just as true today: “If we and our descendants are to live in peace in Australia then we have to tell and acknowledge that truth of our history. It is not that all of our history is bad, but the bad must be acknowledged along with the good, if we are to have any integrity.”

“The Voice would make Government unworkable.”

The Sydney Morning Herald reported on 6 June 2023 that at least six Liberal/National Coalition MPs had misrepresented evidence given to a parliamentary enquiry by former Chief Justice of the High Court, Robert French. The MPs claimed that French’s evidence was that if a duty to consult The Voice was built into the proposed laws, that would “make government unworkable”.

In fact, both French, and another former High Court judge, Kenneth Hayne, had dismissed concerns about whether The Voice would impede the functioning of government. French told the committee inquiry that the duty to consult would be constructed by parliament and if “for some reason or other, that became unworkable, the parliament could amend the law accordingly”.

Chapter Ten: dates worth remembering and events easily forgotten.

First Fleet, Myall Creek, some landmarks in progress, and many in shame.

13 May 1787

The 11 ships of the First Fleet leave Portsmouth, England, bound for Botany Bay. In January 1788 they took a brief look at Botany Bay, then left and sailed a few miles north to Sydney Cove, landing there on 26 January.

10 June 1838

The Myall Creek Massacre. 28 members of the Wirrayaraay clan of the Kamilaroi nation – mostly women and children – were rounded up and murdered by white settlers in northern NSW. It wasn’t the first, nor the last such atrocity but, 50 years after Europeans arrived here, it was the first to result in the white perpetrators being charged and convicted. Seven of them were hanged, six months later (18 December 1838).

The last known massacre of Indigenous people, in the so-called “Frontier Wars”, was in the Northern Territory, in 1928 (less than 100 years ago!). It was still going on, 90 years after Myall Creek.

9 May 1901

Australia’s first Parliament opens in Melbourne.

9 May 1927

Parliament opens in the new national capital, Canberra.

19 August 1944

A referendum asks Australians to alter the Constitution to give the Commonwealth Government power to legislate on 14 specific matters, including the rehabilitation of ex-servicemen, national health, family allowances and ‘the people of the Aboriginal race’. Only 46 per cent of voters (and a majority in only two states – WA and SA) supported it; meaning it failed. Eighty years later, we’d be forgiven for wondering why.

27 May 1967

We agreed in a referendum to count indigenous people when tallying our population, and to allow the Commonwealth to make laws affecting them. The biggest majority “Yes” vote, ever: 90 per cent, nationally; and every state supported it, overwhelmingly.

26 January 1972

Aboriginal Tent Embassy set up across the road from Old Parliament House (now the Museum of Australian Democracy) in Canberra. It’s still there: the longest continuous protest for Indigenous land rights in the world!

11 June 1975

The Racial Discrimination Act is passed by the Whitlam government. The Act makes racial discrimination in certain contexts unlawful in Australia, and also overrides state and territory legislation to the extent of any inconsistency.

16 December 1976

The Aboriginal Land Rights (Northern Territory) Act 1976 comes into effect. It was first proposed by the Whitlam Labor government and then implemented after the 1975 election by the Fraser Coalition Government. It provides the basis upon which Aboriginal Australian people in the Northern Territory can claim rights to land based on traditional occupation. It was the first law by any Australian government that legally recognised the Aboriginal system of land ownership, and legislated the concept of inalienable freehold title.

9 May 1988

Our new and current Parliament House opens in Canberra.

3 June 1992

The “Mabo” decision. The High Court of Australia ruled that a group of Torres Strait Islanders, led by Eddie Mabo, were the owners of Mer (Murray Island).

In acknowledging the traditional rights of the Meriam people to their land, the court also held that native title existed for all Indigenous people.

This landmark decision gave rise to native title legislation the following year and dispatched to legal fiction the idea of “terra nullius” (that nobody owned Australia before Europeans claimed it).

10 December 1992

Sixteen years before Kevin Rudd’s apology to the stolen generations, Prime Minister, Paul Keating, gives the most powerful, truth-telling apology in Australian history. He says, of non-indigenous Australians: “It was we who did the dispossessing. We took the traditional lands and smashed the traditional way of life. We committed the murders. We took the children from their mothers. We practised discrimination and exclusion. It was our ignorance and our prejudice, and our failure to imagine these things being done to us.”

19 December 1993

Following the High Court’s “Mabo” decision, the Native Title Act comes into effect, backdated to 1 July 1993. The interpretation and implementation of native title (Indigenous ownership of the land they never ceded) remains subject to legislative changes and judicial interpretations. Most notably, in the so-called Wik case in 1996, the High Court ruled that ownership can “co-exist”. The legal arguments continue. The Voice has nothing to do with these: it does not relate in any way to High Court decisions on land claims.

6 November 1999

Australia voted in a referendum on whether we wanted to remain attached to the British Monarchy, or become a Republic, with an Australian as Head of State (regardless of their religious affiliation). We decided to stay legally hitched Great Britain, where only a Protestant can be King.

Most forgotten of all is that the 1999 “Republic” referendum had a second question, about inserting a “preamble” in the constitution. Unlike the first question on the ballot paper, which specified a model of how a Republic might work, the “preamble” question provided no specifics, none whatever, on what the preamble would say.

This, despite our Liberal/National Coalition-dominated Parliament at the time, ahead of the referendum, approving a text for the proposed preamble, which included:

“We the Australian people commit ourselves to this Constitution…. proud that our national unity has been forged by Australians from many ancestries…. honouring Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders, the nation’s first people, for their deep kinship with their lands and for their ancient and continuing cultures which enrich the life of our country…”

But the Government, having accepted those words, chose not to share them with voters in the polling booth, at the time and place voters were making their choice. Provided with no detail or explanation, on the day, more than 60 percent of Australians said “No” to the “preamble” question.

Maybe, most people who voted “No” hadn’t read the words, in the letterbox drop pamphlet from the government, at the time.

28 May 2000

Some 250,000 people walk across the Sydney Harbour Bridge, in “The Bridge Walk for Reconciliation”. This, and similar events around Australia in the weeks following, have been described as the biggest demonstration of public support for a cause that has ever taken place in Australia.

16 March 2005

Having been established by the Hawke Government in 1990, the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission (ATSIC) was abolished 15 years later, in 2005, by the Howard Government, with the support of the Labor Party. The Bill to abolish ATSIC was introduced to Parliament the previous May (on 24 May 2004, in fact: the anniversary of Queen Victoria’s birthday, Empire Day as it used to be known).

ATSIC was last century’s equivalent of a Voice (flawed as its administration might have been). A review of ATSIC had been set up by the Howard government and recommended some changes, not its abolition.

ATSIC’s fate reminds us that Parliaments can change and tinker with anything they like. But if something is enshrined in the Constitution, the spirit of it is there, probably forever. If something is in the Constitution, any Government of the day can make all sorts of administrative and funding rearrangements, but they can’t obliterate it all together (or they’ll have the High Court to answer to!).

13 September 2007

114 nations in the United Nations General Assembly voted to adopt the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP). It was a monumental recognition of indigenous people in the post-colonial world, containing some 40 substantive rights with obligations of signatory states to protect and implement those rights.

On that day, a month and 11 days ahead of Liberal PM John Howard losing the federal election and his own seat (on 24 November 2007), Australia was one of only four nations which voted against the Declaration, quibbling with the detail, claiming it raised customary law above national law (whatever that means).

In 2009 the Rudd Labor Government changed Australia’s position and supported the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP).

13 February 2008

The Liberal Party’s current leader, Peter Dutton, walked out on Kevin Rudd’s apology to the stolen generations, saying an apology would fix nothing. He’s the only remaining member of parliament to have boycotted the apology. He now claims to regret his stance, saying, in effect, he misread the mood at the time. He’s now leading the argument for a “No” vote on the Voice. Once again, saying a Voice will fix nothing. Has he misread the mood, again?

7 December 2015

Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull and Leader of the opposition Bill Shorten jointly appoint a 16-member Referendum Council to advise the government on steps towards a referendum to recognise Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples in the Australian Constitution. The Council travelled around the country and met with over 1,200 people, culminating in the First Nations National Constitutional Convention, held over four days in May 2017, near Uluru in Central Australia.

26 May 2017

Delegates to the First Nations National Constitutional Convention issue the Uluru Statement from the Heart. It calls for a constitutionally entrenched First Nations Voice to Parliament. The Turnbull government, with little consideration, rejects the call for a Voice to Parliament.

23 March 2023

Having won the May 2022 election, the Albanese Government honours its commitment and introduces The Voice Referendum Bill to the House of Representatives. It passes the House of Reps on 31 May 2023, 121 votes to 25.

19 June 2023

The Senate passes the Referendum Bill, without amending it, 52-19. A date for Referendum Day will now be set. There’s no turning back!

Combining the votes in the House of Representatives and the Senate, going ahead with the Referendum was supported by 173 MPs, with 44 against the Bill. But it’s important to note that not all those who supported holding a Referendum will be campaigning for a “Yes” vote.

If you want to dive deeper…

Links to other sites & resources

For more on many of these issues, or if you want to get involved, please visit:

Yes 23

Voice to Parliament – Reconciliation Australia

Home – Uluru Statement from the Heart

Together, Yes – First Nations Voice to parliament (togetheryes.com.au)

The Voice

Or get hold of this great book by Thomas Mayo and Kerry O’Brien: “The Voice to Parliament Handbook”, published by Hardie Grant. On-line retailers:

https://www.dymocks.com.au/book/the-voice-to-parliament-handbook-by-thomas-mayo-and-kerry-obrien-9781741178869

https://www.abbeys.com.au/book/the-voice-to-parliament-handbook-the-detail-you-need-9781741178869.do

(Abbeys delivers anywhere in Australia for $9.90 ($7.90 NSW & ACT).

The Voice to Parliament Handbook eBook:

Non-Kindles eReaders (ePub):

https://www.dymocks.com.au/book/the-voice-to-parliament-handbook-by-thomas-mayo-and-kerry-obrien-and-cathy-wilcox-9781761440366

Kindle eReaders:

https://www.amazon.com.au/Voice-Parliament-Handbook-Detail-Need-ebook/dp/B0C1364F3Q/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=the+voice+to+parliament+handbook&qid=1686799052&s=digital-text&sr=1-1

Too much reading? You can watch this 13-minute video from the ABC, on YouTube:

Or this recent SBS (NITV) show covering the arguments for and against the Voice to Parliament proposal:

https://www.sbs.com.au/ondemand/news-series/the-point/the-point-2023

And if you want to practice casting your vote (remember, writing Yes or No): Completing a referendum ballot paper – Australian Electoral Commission (aec.gov.au)

There is an interesting thread that links the Indian Prime Minister, Narendra Modi, the owner of the gargantuan conglomerate that bears his name, Gautam Adani, and Australia. There is cricket; there is mining; there is remorseless extraction; and then there is steaming propaganda. On arriving in Australia, Modi was greeted by people who had left India decades ago. The Indian diaspora, energised, and vicariously delighted by his exploits, came out in numbers.

On the interview circuit, there was much fanfare and skimming over substance. On radio, Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese remarked that there had been much discussion about cricket. “There is always a discussion about cricket when Australians and Indians gather and I did get the experience of being day one of the fourth test for a brief time with Prime Minister Modi.” And who could forget the repurposed buggy in India, with Albanese co-opted in a grand drive around in a cricket stadium named after his host.

Modi, for his part, had gotten into the cringeworthy mode he knows so well, describing the relationship with Australia as a matter of the three Cs: commonwealth, cricket and curry. Not stopping at that, he suggested the three Ds: diaspora, democracy and dosti (friendship, a theme explored in Bollywood, not lacking a certain homoerotic quality). And in case anyone was not paying attention, he also suggested the 3Es: economy, energy and education.

Those exploits have been, to put it mildly, polished. A figure who has confected complexity, the Indian PM has tried to give the impression of being a near lovable soft-toy character, able to please all at a mere squeeze. But Modi is one of India’s most accomplished sectarians, one who has done more than any other leader since independence to repudiate the complex tapestry of Indian life. It was that very same tapestry famously acknowledged by India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, as one that accepted all religions rather than one. Now, forced conformism is the name of the game, and it is conformism with a generous, suffocating splash of Hinduism. Others of different religious and cultural ilk need not bother.

The others in this equation are many. Of India’s vast and growing population of 1.4 billion people, religious minorities account for about 20 percent – roughly 200 million Muslims and 28 million Christians. During Modi’s tenure, they have become the subject of various regulations targeting the garments they don, the food they consume, and their rites of worship.

Modi’s rule has also been accompanied by a rise of the perceived legitimacy of communal violence, much of it encouraged by the militant Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh. Given the Indian leader’s long association with the RSS, their influence in policy is assured.

His India is also a country that had become less than safe to be a protestor, activist or a critical scribbler. Journalists have been murdered in acts orchestrated by extreme offshoots of the Hindutva cult. Thousands of non-government groups, notably those with a human rights brief, have been deprived of funding. 

In June last year, Mohammed Zubair, co-founder of the fact-checking website Alt News, was arrested for apparently offending Hindu sensibilities in a tweet posted in 2018. It came soon after the arrest of activist Teesta Setalvad, who was charged with “criminal conspiracy, forgery and placing false evidence in court to frame innocent people” in connection with the 2002 Gujarat riots which left more than 1,000 people dead. 

Setalvad’s keenness in pursuing the cause of Muslims in the wake of that brutal affair had obviously caught the attention of the authorities. Modi had notably been the Chief Minister of the state at the time, though he was subsequently cleared of any responsibility for the deadly events.

The dossier against the platitudes of Indian democracy continues to bulk. In a broader, structural sense, cronyism in the Indian state has become commonplace, so much so as to become mandatory. Those such as the Adani family have ensconced themselves in the economic and political machinery. Questioning their standing is bound to land you in trouble, a point former Congress president Rahul Gandhi found in being sentenced and disqualified from the Lok Sabha.

With all that in mind, the spectacle of Albanese keeping company with Modi in Sydney’s Qudos bank Arena filled with adulating supporters was creepy, a wholly unnecessary wallowing before Hindutva’s most prominent advocate. In the biting words of the Sydney Morning Herald, “We might be on Australian soil, but Albo is once again a bit-player in Modi’s big narrative.” According to the Australian PM, Modi was “the boss”. 

No other leader visiting Australia has received such treatment, but it is clear that Albanese felt comfortable being excruciatingly accommodating, given his own stadium experience in India. He was content to let such organisers as Jay Shah and Rahul Jethi arrange the fireworks, both being directors of the Indian Australia Diaspora Foundation and members of a local BJP chapter. 

With all the fanfare, the stadium event was not all it seemed. One beady-eyed journalist noted that a venue with a seating capacity of 18,500 seemed less than packed. Vivek Astri, covering the visit for The Wire, noted “empty chairs scattered throughout the expansive venue.” It struck him as rather odd, given the fact the tickets had been gratis, with registration noisily promoted through such platforms as WhatsApp months before. “Curiously, there seemed to be a veil of secrecy surrounding the ticket distribution process, lending an air of privacy to the entire event.”

The empty seats did nothing to discourage the organisers of the event to lend a note of exaggeration, one claiming that there were as many as 25,000 people who had arrived. Indian journalists covering the event complied with the formula.

To their credit, the hosts of the usually light-hearted, cerebrally soft breakfast program on Channel Seven did press Albanese about the event. Modi, inquired Sunrise presenter David Koch, had reduced press freedoms, discriminated against minorities and was “accused of watering down democracy. He sort of, he seems a bit of a tyrant?”

This, suggested Albanese, was not of interest to Australia. It was “not up to me to pass a comment on some of the internal politics in India which, as a democracy, has a range of views, which is a good thing.” Modi was “popular with a majority of people.” If only such standards were to apply to the governments of other states.

By Denis Bright  

As an early federal election approaches later in 2021, the LNP will expect the usual assistance from the rear-guard sections of the old print, talkback shows and sensational television media to polarize public opinion in its favour.

As usual, the electorate will be wedged between a number of burning issues such as the need for a low tax economic recovery from the current COVID-19 challenges.

With headlines like these from the 2013 federal elections to frame the key issues, the most influential sections of the Old Media will be working overtime to torpedo alternative policies.

Most of the electorate now looks to the internet for its political cues and in most cities the print media only has a supporting role to the media dramas played out on eyewitness news programmes.

Getting the digital media offside through the LNP’s Media Bargaining Code offers a real departure from the entrenched electioneering model.

The harvesting of news content from the Old Media to the New Soft Media certainly degrades news reporting but this is essentially a commercial dispute which should be settled through negotiation between the parties.

The LNP’s Media Bargaining Code fails to address the wider issue of tax evasion. Both Old and New media networks are involved in the tax evasion game.

Although most of News Corporation’s operations are global and diversified well beyond the print media and television networks, the company shares with Google and Facebook a penchant for tax avoidance. News Corporation declared a loss on its entire operations in 2020 and 2018 (News Corporation Annual Report 2020):

Even more blatant than News Corporation, the tax evasion antics of the New Media Companies are legendary. Ben Butler of The Guardian (18 December 2019) reported on the recovery of $481.5 million from Google by the ATO. Such local irregularities are the tip of a global tax evasion epidemic as reported by BBC News (26 October 2020):

“Google, Facebook and Microsoft should be paying more corporation tax in developing nations, says ActionAid.

The aid charity estimates that poorer countries are missing out on up to $2.8bn (£2.2bn) in tax revenue that could be used to tackle the pandemic.

ActionAid is calling for big companies to pay a global minimum rate of tax.

Facebook and Microsoft declined to comment while Google did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Multinational corporations are currently not required by law to publicly disclose how much tax they pay in some developing countries.

According to ActionAid, “billions” might be at stake that could be used to transform underfunded health and education systems in some of the world’s poorest countries, especially since multiple tech giants have reported soaring revenues during the pandemic.”

Annual reports of the New Media giants are usually available and should be perused for investigation of just what they don’t say to readers.

Changes in cross-media ownership rules on the LNP’s watch have enabled sections of the Old Media to upgrade their national profiles. Peter Costello is listed in the latest Nine Network Annual Report as one of its directors (Image Annual Report of the Nine Network 2019):

With the capacity of Old Media to diversify its operations, there was no evidence of profit shortfalls in its latest annual report for 2019:

Nine Result in brief from the 2019 Annual Report

“In FY19, Nine reported Group EBITDA of $350 million, up 36% on FY18, driven by a 40% increase in Group Revenues to $1.8 billion, reflecting the impact of the merger with Fairfax from 7 December. On a continuing business basis, Statutory Net Profit after Tax and Specific Items, which were predominately accounting led non-cash items, was $217 million, up 3%.

On a Pro Forma basis, NEC reported Group EBITDA of $424 million, up 10% on FY18, on revenue of $2.3 billion. Net Profit after Tax and minority interests increased by 16% to $198 million compared to the FY18 result. Earnings per share was 11.6 cents, (+16%) and a full-year dividend of 10c per share, fully franked, was declared.”

As largely Australian based company, Nine Network is forced to pay more taxation than its internationally based Old and New Media rivals.

Selectively restricting the New Media will not address the wider problem of tax evasion and unethical practices by media networks as corporate and political players.

The tracks taken by the Morrison Government to protect the Old Media should have no support from either the Labor Party or progressive crossbench senators. However, this emergent folly can generate a newsworthy senate inquiry.

The Morrison Government has clearly underestimated the influence of the New Media with Australians of all age groups and particularly younger age groups who are not fiercely interested in formal politics.

The Challenge of Incorporating the New Media

Long before the current COVID-19 problems on the challenges from the New Media were evident in the growth of internet advertising with support from digital outdoor advertising (The Guardian, 22 July 2019). Platforms like Facebook, Twitter and Instagram have flourish during the pandemic with emails the essential mechanism for online retailing as shown by trendlines from the B and T Marketing Magazine (13 June 2018):

Accompanying the growth of the New media is a rapid growth of invasion of privacy from valued clients. A senate inquiry should be able to prove this issue while tackling the problem of tax evasion made possible by the global outreach of the New Media. In ethical hand however, the harvested data could contribute to a better understanding of social trends.

BBC News through its technology department has shown that the lapses of the New Media are not confined to the most obvious arts of tax evasion and sensational networking of vital events (BBC News 8 January 2021):

“And is it even clear that social media bears most of the responsibility for spreading the lies and hatred that led to the assault on the Capitol?

Remember, Fox News, talk radio stations and more recently TV channels such as OANN and NewsMax have fed their audiences a Trump-shaped view of the world for a long time.

Last year, Harvard University’s Berkman Klein Center published a study of how misinformation spread about the amount of fraud in postal voting.

The researchers found that social media activity around the subject surged when mainstream news reports carried speeches about it by President Trump, peaking last April when Fox News ran numerous segments about its dangers.

Ever since the Reagan administration abolished the Fairness Doctrine in the 1980s, television news channels have been free to offer a partisan view. The result today is that viewers of Fox News and MSNBC might as well occupy two very different countries.

It is hard to see how tighter regulation of social media will change that.”

In such difficult times, more resources are needed for public broadcasting to publish ethical findings from data harvesting possibly through a revitalized Australian Broadcasting Control Board with access to at least some of the data harvested for corporate gain and international distribution to familiar brand names.

Strengthening data protection is far more important than taking sides in the current disputes between New and Old Media which has extended into corporate interactive advertising practices.

Media landscapes of the future can survive without some of the familiar print masks which have operated as bastions for the retention of Australian conservatism and our continued colonial status in foreign policy.

Having raised the challenge from the New Media for political self-interest, the federal LNP can be faced with more in-depth public inquiries into the proposals. Progressive Australia should ensure that the challenges from corporate media power are addressed while issue is still topical.

Thanks to the federal LNP for giving life to the possibilities of this sleeping issue and generations of lack of financial support for public broadcasting which has generated all those advertisements on the SBS network.

If Josh Frydenberg can temper the power of just one section of the New Media in negotiations with Facebook as noted on his interview on the Insiders Programme (31 January 2021), that’s less work for a future senate committee. The answers given in the interview offer more angles for addressing the wider problems of both tax evasion in Australia and unethical practices through invasion of privacy and data collection.

The Prime Minister’s sorrowful words over the deaths in aged care homes could hardly be described as those of a sincere man.

l’m sorry to say it but they lacked the necessary honesty to be taken seriously. In my view apologies should be full of sincerity, delivered with appropriate remorse and if possible with a commitment to right a wrong.

Scott Morrison – when he does apologise – usually precedes it with a cavalcade of indulgent words of self-praise intended to compliment he and his government. This he did again in his apology for the disastrous events in commonwealth-run aged care homes.

It is most unusual to hear the Prime Minister apologise for anything, but on the deaths at government-run aged care facilities he has issued one of sorrowful defiance. Not exactly an apology.

The Royal Commission into Aged Care insists that no plan existed and Morrison reckons there was. Simple, just produce it and it’s settled.

But that aside, would it not be better to decide just how much value we place on the lives of our elderly citizens who have so steadfastly served the nation, and act accordingly? Do we have to call them clients and measure their value by profit in some annual report? “I wouldn’t send my own mother there“ rings true as do all the stories we hear about these, before death, resting places.

Dennis Atkins in The New Daily reports that Morrison “copped a punch” from the Royal Commission. Counsel assisting Peter Rosen QC gave Morrison a decent foot up the Kyber Pass finding that:

“… the government had no real infection control plan for COVID-19 related problems, all of which were foreseeable.“

“He said there was complacency and hubris at a federal level stemming from a sense of self-congratulation.”

Which of course leaves me with the most puzzling of questions. That being, that at the end of their third term in office the government will have served close to nine years with three prime ministers. During that time they have committed numerous very serious misdemeanours, including the rejection of climate change. The current prime minister has a list as long as the Flemington straight. So how come his popularity sits at 68 per cent?

The Aged Care Minister, Tasmanian Senator Richard Colbeck, the minister whose name is as memorable as the deputy prime minister’s, even came out from hibernation, uttered a few words that nobody remembers, or understood, and quickly went back to sleep.

They then pushed forward Professor Brendan Murphy who had earned a reputation during the crisis and is now head of the Commonwealth Health Department.

He in turn had trouble with the authority of the Royal Commission and his evidence was lost in his amateurish attempts at defending the government’s actions and tried to outline just how “plan prepared” they were. It was a hoax of sorts.

The Royal Commissioner gave him a wrap over the knuckles with a sit still and shut up instruction.

Prime Minister Morrison himself had spent the week in Canberra rugged up against the Canberra weather and the upcoming reports. Besides the aged care pasting he was expecting another regarding the Ruby Princess. This time for not allowing evidence.

Andrew Probyn tweeted that on March 15 – four days before the Ruby Princess docked saying that all cruise ships would be “directly under the command of the Australian Border Force.”

Here's the PM on March 15, four days before Ruby Princess docked, saying cruise ships would be put "directly under the command of the Australian Border Force"… https://t.co/kIWNOlgt5V pic.twitter.com/t27mGgSr1h

— Andrew Probyn (@andrewprobyn) August 13, 2020

The fact that the government wouldn’t allow senior public servants to appear at the inquiry only serves to ignite flames of doubt. That they have something to hide. Without this evidence the report must be considered fundamentally flawed.

By this time bashing the Victorian Premier had become somewhat of a blood sport. The Melbourne Herald Sun even ran a popularity poll only to find they backed the wrong horse – and reported it on page 13 of a later edition.

Image from pedestrian.tv

It was to become a sport without a name played out each day as though there was no greater media occupation than to find out what Daniel Andrews had or hadn’t done the day before. They even overlooked the fact that his own side were feeding the “Blame Dan” frenzy.

Morrison, in the meantime, said everyone was doing their best and he was sorry. In the background his acolytes were doing as much damage as they could.

Morrison was, as animals do, marking clear lines of demarcation. If things went wrong with roles, responsibilities and outcomes then it was Andrews’ duty to explain, but being sympathetic and sorry was his.

Morrison is and has always been a man unable to search within when he is wrong. Instead he apportions blame to others. He juts his chin to display his arrogance and regret at having to display an ounce of honesty.

The wrongs of the Aged Care system have been known for many years. Twenty or more reports have been delivered to government with recommendations that could have been implemented at any time. Morrison has refused to do so and won’t tell us why.

It is wrong to say that he has ripped billions from the sector because people are rapidly becoming older, consequently government spends more. The real question is are we spending enough.

For a Christian thoroughly immersed  in the empathetic teachings of Jesus he allows none to filter into his politics.

In fact, l read last week that 2601 was the current number of days that  nearly 400 innocent humans in PNG, Nauru, and  200 people in onshore detention centres had spent in detention despite having never committed a crime.

If ever you needed an example of just how cruel our Prime Minister and his off-sider in inhumanity Peter Dutton can be then you only need to look at our treatment of refugees.

Watch out for the October budget.

Unless there are worldwide changes in leadership then we can hold out little hope for massive changes in the way democracy incorporates its politics.

It all relates to a gradual rise in narcissism and inequality together with a demise in compassion that illustrates the state of the world.

“Politics is not a reality television show,” scowls ScoMo, in a cameo piece to camera, Thursday, in the “most hysterical presser in our nation’s political history” according to Shadow Attorney-General, Mark Dreyfus.

Labor doesn’t help with its smart-arse stunt news conference late Thursday proposing to support the Coalition’s botched and dodgy encryption legislation unamended given that the government has packed up and gone home. Appearing on ABC, the duo repeat the observation that the government has simply walked off the job.

Walked off. They can’t help repeat it. It’s a political point-scoring stunt but most media report a Labor cave-in.

The Morrison government’s final parliamentary fortnight is its first taste of a hung parliament and by Thursday, it is clear to even ScoMo’s few remaining supporters that everywhere are signs of collapse if not ruinous defeat.

Almost. ScoMo’s big on coal. So, too, is his Chief of staff John Kundel, former deputy CEO of the Minerals Council of Australia. Hence the lacquered lump of coal supplied to former Treasurer. If Morrison could wave his pet rock around parliament last February, in the middle of a drought, who knows how he may reach out to Adani?

His ministers possibly do. Some, may themselves, find employment with Adani after the May Federal Election.

Yet not even the latest re-announcement, by Adani, that Adani’s mine construction, albeit in a convenient, user-friendly, shorter, cleaner shovel, Adani-lite format “is imminent” again and will go ahead as a self-funded enterprise (with Indian government subsidies in Gujarat, paid for by imposing higher tariffs on the ever-grateful, local poor; subsidies which may help get Adani an Indian bank loan) is enough to fire up the troops.

Even George Christensen is diplomatic; sublimating his own joy in the interest of unity and nation-building.

“I say to the reckless law-breaking extreme greens and your Labor mates – accept defeat because it’s all go as far as Adani is concerned.”

Non-Adani readers will note that Adani is not all go. Adani still has a number of hurdles to clear, including getting approval from local indigenous land owners, a land use agreement and a Queensland government water licence.

Green Career reports, moreover, that environmental group Coast and Country has high resolution satellite and drone imagery showing “illegal” dewatering bores at the site of Adani’s controversial Carmichael coal mine project in north Queensland near Doongmabulla Springs.

“A nationally significant wetland of ‘exceptional ecological value’ and home to 11 endangered or vulnerable species, the springs have cultural significance to local indigenous groups and have been described by ecologists as one of the world’s last remaining pristine oases.”

Environmental Defenders’ Office, QLD, reports that Adani’s environmental conditions require approval of a Groundwater Dependent Ecosystems Management Plan (GDEMP), which must include research to identify the source of water for the Doongmabulla Springs before the commencement of ‘Project Stage 2’. ‘Project Stage 2’ is defined to include ‘site clearance’, ‘new access roads’ and ‘commencing dewatering operations’.

All coal-fired up, nevertheless, is the euphoniously-named Melissa Price, our Federal Environment Minister, formerly of WA mining, who, bravely, insists that we will meet our carbon emissions targets at a “canter”.

Price will trot out her case at The UN climate conference in Katowice, Poland, a nation with a right wing government which, she can tell Craig Kelly, has been able to make a 180 degree turn to embrace renewables.

Yet 91 international leading reason-crazed, haplessly empirical scientists differ. As The Saturday Paper’s legal eagle, writer Richard Ackland reminds us, the UN’s Emissions Gap Report 2018 concludes:

“There has been no improvement in Australia’s climate policy since 2017 and emission levels for 2030 are projected to be well above the [Nationally Determined Contribution] target. The latest projection published by the government shows that emissions would remain at high levels rather than reducing in line with the 2030 target.”

The Coalition’s energy policy is also a dud, its “religious freedoms” (read further discrimination) nutters who rule its energy policy are aggrieved and the government is perilously close to a de facto vote of no confidence given some MPs’ determination to help kids off Nauru; a political crisis tailor-made for its tactical evasion and delay. The Australian embassy in Israel remains in Tel Aviv. But of course, there’s a committee looking into that.

Ever thinking outside the box, ScoMo’s proposes to deal with the protection of religious freedom, in schools by a conscience vote. He’s even got up his own private member’s bill.  Religious freedom, does not, however, appear at risk in Australia. Although he was quick to declare it as his number one issue, it seems little more than just a sop to the party’s right wing and others disappointed to be in a minority on marriage equality. Bugger.

A panel reported to Turnbull in May. Will the Ruddock Committee’s report be made public before Christmas?

No rush. As Bernard Keane notes, Morrison has already broken his promise to end the possibility of religious schools discriminating against LGBTQI students. It was, Keane, reminds us, to be done by October.

Yet can it ever be accomplished, given the mission is inherently flawed, as Keane kindly points out.

“Think about that for a moment — religious organisations say they’re perfectly happy not to expel a gay or transgender student, but want the freedom to teach those students that homosexuality is evil, or that transgender people are somehow unnatural.”

Happily for investors, power prices are set to rise, carried upward by a surge in the price of gas, as much as 40 per cent higher by January next year than the 2018 average, The Australian reports, while despite all the bluster about forced divestiture, the “big stick” is now being whittled down in the face of industry (and Labor) opposition.  A toothpick? The Guardian’s Katharine Murphy says it’s now so small as to be invisible. Just how business likes it.

Or is Trevor St Baker, Liberal patron, no longer keenly interested in buying up plant Frydenberg forces off Alinta?

Also shrinking is our GDP. Wednesday’s Bureau of Statistics release shows only 2.77% annual growth in gross domestic product (GDP) to 30 September 2018. That puts us 106th among the world’s 183 economies; our lowest ever ranking. Our real household disposable incomes are lower than in 2010. Australia is lagging the world on almost all economic indicators, reports Alan Austin.

Happily, mainstream media will uncritically accept anything the government tells them, including the whopper that we will be in surplus in 2019 and the mantra of economic management, now coalition canon law.

‘Because of the Coalition’s strong economic management we will deliver next April the first budget surplus in more than a decade,’ Frydenberg fibs. You do a bit of that when you are the work experience boy. And make the tea.

In fact, Austin calculates the budget deficit to be around $14.5 billion, 30 June 2019. Josh Frydenberg can, of course predict a surplus in May, as he promises, but in April, he will say it may arrive in 2020. It may not. Who can fathom the effect of Trump’s trade and tariff wars? Certainly no surplus will be delivered in April.

Prudently, Morrison’s government ignores a mouthy Malcolm Turnbull’s advice to call an election at once, (the former PM is more famous for his wearing a leather jacket on Q&A than any other act of political judgement). Instead it will meet for nine days in 2019. It can’t evade the inevitable. As Kerryn Phelps tells Sky,

“I am sad that we didn’t get this through today … because I believe it would have gone through on the numbers … But you know if we have to wait until February, at least I believe that there is a light at the end of the tunnel.”

Facing defeat on the floor of the house, ScoMo pulls out all the stops. “I will do everything in my power to ensure that these suggested changes, that would undermine our border protection laws, never see the light of day.”

Or as they say on Big Brother, Australia’s Next Top Model or even My Kitchen Rules, it’s “game on moll”.

Undermine? It’s a wicked, wilful misrepresentation of a proposed act of humanity. How can this PM call himself a Christian? Where is his compassion? Why must children suffer? Following his mentor, Trump, Morrison effortlessly, crosses from florid embellishment through delusion to grotesque and wilful disinformation.

“They’ll hear the people smuggler who sails up to them and says, ‘Guess what, the Australians have changed the legislation, you won’t have to stay on Nauru or Manus, all you have to do is get some doctor in Australia to sign it off and it’s all good mate, it’s all good’,” Morrison mimics a mythical demon people-smuggler who speaks Strine .

In the senate, Labor, the cross-bench and The Greens amend the Home Affairs Legislation Amendment (Miscellaneous Measures) Bill 2018  to allow medical evacuation of refugees stranded on Manus and Nauru.

How can this encourage people smugglers? The government’s already removing kids from Nauru, it boasts, only skipping how it’s squandered over half a million dollars in the last two years contesting medical decisions in court.

But Morrison has a lot on his plate. Now he must stall the medical evacuation bill – at all costs. He calls a presser.

Not a reality TV show. Show-Mo’s ironic spoiler alert frames this week’s episode of the Coalition’s long running low-rating hyper-reality politics show. Stage right, in “the other place”, lunatic right odd couple Hanson and Bernardi, who bask in their government attention in the senate, team up in a slow bicycle race which sees a wobbly Morrison minority government delay Labor’s attack on not only border but national security.

Morrison’s border security takes us back to the future. In 2001 the Liberals’ St John Howard won a fabulous victory with his babies overboard episode. The following year, Howard went on to deceive parliament and the Australian people over whether we were fit and ready to join the US’ illegal invasion of Iraq in 2003, a war crime which over eight years claimed the lives of half a million Iraqis. He falsely claimed he had legal advice.

His “legal advice”, based on the opinions of two junior public servants, Bill Campbell and Chris Moraitis appears to have been obtained by silk shopping; avoiding other more prominent senior authorities, such as Professor James Crawford SC, Professor of International Law at Cambridge University who had on previous occasions advised the Australian government and appeared for it in international law proceedings.

Crawford was one of sixteen distinguished international experts who held that any invasion of Iraq was illegal.

Lord Goldsmith, UK Attorney General held that any military action required the explicit authorisation of the security council, yet lying rodent, Howard claimed his experts’ advice was consistent with Goldsmith.

More lies emerge. A secret study surfaces which proves that the former PM misled the nation over when the invasion was planned. University of New South Wales Professor Clinton Fernandes, who first secured the study, says it details how ADF personnel were quietly dispatched to US CENTCOM headquarters in Florida in 2002 to begin planning the Iraq war, a year before John Howard announced Australia’s involvement.

Central to our politics for over a hundred years is the convention that foreign policy is the prerogative of the PM alone and a PM confident of cabinet and house of reps support can act without the need to consult parliament.

The history of our border folly cannot be so easily evaded. As megalomaniac Morrison took the helm – and at times commandeered part of the navy – the Abbott government militarised “border control”; creating Operation Sovereign Borders, throwing all fiscal constraint overboard, to create a paramount, paramilitary Border Force.

Precise figures are few, given the vast tentacles of Warlord Morrison’s private armed force but Save the Children’s Lisa Button and Shane Evans, estimate the cost between 2013-16 alone at nearly ten billion dollars.

Decoration is not cheap. ABF staff medals have for the last few years cost more than for the entire Defence Force.

And the ABF has its fingers in many pies. Operation Sovereign Borders and Australia’s immigration-related functions span many different departments, from fisheries and foreign affairs to the department of prime minister and cabinet, the Australian Crime Commission and the Australian Maritime Safety Authority.

“A lack of transparency in reporting and aggregated budget allocations make it difficult to accurately describe the cost of Australia’s asylum framework,” Button and Evans caution.

Does it work? Barely a year later, Border Force takes over the Australian Immigration and Border Protection Department, the Australian Customs and Border Protection Service, the Australian Quarantine Service, and Operation Sovereign Borders – despite none of these agencies having worked together before.

Leaked reports of chaos, corruption and disaster, are managed by a cloak of secrecy and the evasion if not erasure of accountability given these were “on water matters” or matters of “national security”.

Also ignored are reports this week of poor morale and a “rampant” culture of bullying and harassment in the ABF which can only be enhanced by the announcement of staff cut-backs over Christmas, the ABF’s busiest period.

We will never control our borders. Off-shore detention is double-speak for the torture of hapless boat people to whom we are legally and morally obliged to offer refuge if not compassion. But the show must go on.

Morrison’s shtick is pure reality TV for all his faux denial. So much of our politics is. ScoMo knows it full well, tsk-tsks Guardian Australia’s Political Editor, Katharine Murphy, who suggests “their hothouse intrigues … petty sagas, and self-indulgences” as “some ways our current cast of MPs have helped morph our politics into reality TV”.

But not all on their own. For Murpharoo, who along with most of our media is inextricably part of the transformation, politics is “the grimmest reality television in the franchise, full of attention-seekers and desperados, looking for a plot twist to propel the battered enterprise into the next season”.

The Australian helps stir the plot by eagerly denouncing Labor’s heinous duplicity, especially their class treason. Labor MPs are shape-stealing, social-climbers parking their Blundstones under Pratt family tables.

Amazingly, they are simultaneously union-catspaws whose moral turpitude seals an all-round unfitness for office.

This includes having evil factions, something alien to the virtuous broad church of the Liberals. The Oz Saturday “reveals” “Labor’s Left faction will push to fast-track refugee medical transfers to Australia through a change to the party platform at next weekend’s ALP national conference as Scott Morrison sets up an election showdown on border security.”

Australian’s great and powerful fiend, the US, also shapes our politics with its postmodern, post-truth universe, currently featuring none other than the “useful idiot” Donald John Trump. Trump inspires many a local politician.

Rusted on is the small, rapidly self-extinguishing Federal One Nation micro-party, united under President for Life Pauline but an even bigger fan, a fully paid up Trumpista in thought, deed and wardrobe is Scott John Morrison.

Yes. Our colossus even shares the same middle name. Of course there are the baseball caps, lapel pins but note also his unctuous toadying to The Donald, whom he praises as a “very practical” leader … “who’s not going to waste a day” in office. ScoMo even boasts to The New York Times’ Maureen Dowd that he and the US president have a special bond. They both share an instinct to help those forgotten by the forces of globalisation.

And on bushfires. Trump berates Californians for not raking up leaves while Morrison castigates the Queensland government for its recent belated attempt to put the brakes on land clearing. An inquiry will be held. Bugger the environment. Leaving trees in the ground is just inviting wildfires.

Hamming it up shamelessly, former child TV actor and Vicks’ Love Rub commercial kid, former Boat-Stopper Morrison is once again the nation’s fearless protector of the week in his performance Thursday,

“I will do whatever I can, whatever I can. I’ll fight them using whatever tool or tactic I have available to me.”

ScoMo’s full of fighting talk. After nearly six years, does his government really thinks it can finally wedge Labor as soft on borders, or make voters fear being swamped by refugees? It last worked seventeen years ago.

Yet what he opts for is a slow bicycle race in the senate, a series of filibusters and delaying tactics with the support of the pliant Pauline Hanson and the awful Corey Bernardi who remain perpetually bewildered by modernity. Or anything beyond expedience, xenophobia and self-promotion.

Meanwhile, the Morrison government’s dangerously ill-conceived and poorly written data encryption laws, its latest in at least a dozen “national security” laws which propel the nation ever closer to becoming a police state are rushed through parliament, yet again, on the pretext of a dire, top-secret national emergency.

Will we notice as we slumber deep in re-runs of Bad Santa and National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation?

But credit where it’s due. In the credits to this week’s show, “I just get on with the job” Scottie has his nose to the grindstone, his back to the wall and his finger in the dyke. It’s a fair-dinkum show-stopper.

A tsunami of compassion looms as Labor’s anti-Christ, Bill Shorten, “a clear and present threat to Australia’s safety” perfidiously proposes a bill to Medi-vac sick children off Nauru, a move which would see us overrun with boat people by Christmas. Not only that but he dickers with the government’s fatally flawed anti-encryption law before abandoning all attempt at amendment. Perhaps he’s read the member for Sturt’s tweets.

Labor has chosen to allow terrorists and paedophiles to continue their evil work in order to engage in point scoring. – mouth that roars, Defence Minister, Christopher Pyne tweets during 2018’s last Parliament’s valedictories.

In reality, Labor is just as keen on turning Australia into a police state, a process it aids and abets, Thursday in a theatrical news conference stunt held, it points out, in best political point-score, after the government has given up and gone home by agreeing to support The Coalition’s flawed data encryption law which does nothing to make the nation safe from criminals, terrorists and paedophiles but which does vastly extend state surveillance.

A nation is inspired by Scott Morrison’s conscience vote to allow MPs to discriminate against school-children on the basis of gender or sexual orientation. Surely this is peak practicality with its sleeves rolled up; the pinnacle of “getting on and doing”, a phrase the shouty, Quiet Achiever, ScoMo has lifted from an old BHP commercial.

All of which the multi-tasking PM manages to fit around his leaks and manic, midnight, media drops to Murdoch newspapers and his regular visits to 2GB radio in which he talks himself up and the opposition down.

By Friday, ScoMo’s won a huge victory. Huge. He’s had to drag Bill Shorten kicking and screaming into line on data encryption. Labor’s attempt to destabilise the government over refugees has “failed”. He tells Channel 9’s Today programme the “cocky” Labor party claimed “all sorts of bills and all sorts of motions … were going to pass but none of it happened”.

“So all the doomsday scenarios that were put about by the Labor party to undermine confidence, they were all proven to be false and Labor failed on every occasion and the government prevailed.”

Yes, yes, we know, you’re an inspiration to the nation, ScoMo and our politics is not a reality TV show.

“Our efforts to deal with climate change have been betrayed by a lack of leadership, a political cowardice, the like of which I have never seen”  (Malcolm Turnbull 2010).

Country folk up and down our fly-blown land give thanks this week for a federal government whose devotion to the plight of stock on drought-stricken New South Wales and Queensland to Tasmania is everywhere on display. Or not as in the case of rural spots still with poor TV or NBN coverage.

Since Will Hodgman upped the supply of pump action shotties and automatic rifles so vital to a good day’s work in the Tassie paddock, an election eve promise, Apple Isle farmers are doing so well they can now truck feed to Tamworth, where the PM comforts cockies battling a baffling absence of rain.

Clearly, in times of continuous national crisis, everyone has to get behind their national or their state government and to that end, Tassie’s Hodgman government has a plan to deal with workers who want to vent online about their stupid boss, low pay or government job. It’s just not on.

Hodgman and his crew hand-craft a beaut “new social media policy” to keep its servants civil.  Government employees will be forbidden to whinge or carp online. Ideally there should be no criticism of politicians over the internet at all, just an applause button or an emoji for job well done!

As rigorous as it is vigilant, the Tasmanian government also plans to ban staffers associating online with “groups or individuals”. No likes or shares. To like or share a post is the same as creating it.

By Wednesday, Will walks it back. “The draft social media policy has a number of unintended consequences that are clearly out of step with community expectations,” he says. Tasmanians are overjoyed to hear the policy is to be reviewed to “ensure a common-sense approach prevails”.

Common-sense flies out the window… 

Further north, common-sense flies out the window as Malcolm Turnbull pulls on his RM Williams. Faced with crisis and catastrophe over energy and a Great Barrier Reef debacle, the PM hits the road on a mission to win hearts and minds in places where he’s not going to be asked about coral reefs.

“Stay strong.  We’ve got your back,” our PM consoles teary central NSW farmers, in his role as tribal leader, as he selflessly helps media and agricultural lobby groups establish the dominant narrative that our farmers are merely hapless victims of the worst drought in history.

Not a word is spoken of climate change. And the farmers? They must get as much government support as possible in learning to rely not on welfare but on charity. Take it from the PM.

Moleskin Mal knows all about farming and hardship. He hunkers down. Scoops up a bit of dry, sandy topsoil, lets it trickle through his fingers, in his role as Agronomist-in-chief. Squints into the distance.

“Luce and I are in the sheep and cattle business in the Upper Hunter,” he declares. The Pitt Street farmer instantly wins over local cockies who are “doing it tough” with his self-reliance, his hard graft with fencing and fly-strike; fire, flood and drought. And his reckless generosity.

Taxpayers’ are still agog at Mal’s gift of their money to his pals at the Great Barrier Reef Foundation, (GBRF). The Foundation didn’t even have to ask. Malco always has his mates’ backs; anticipates their every need.  It’s a matter of principle, whatever his principles may be at the time.

He gives to all sorts of worthy causes; looks after the top end of town;

No government handouts for him – just tireless, selfless, self-help, trusts and tax breaks. He gives to all sorts of worthy causes; looks after the top end of town; The Sydney Biennale, The Australian Chamber Orchestra, Rhodes Scholarships and The Scots College. Above all, he looks after the odd needy family – especially his own.

Mal donates all of his $587,852 parliamentary salary to his own charity The Turnbull Foundation, or so he says. Like his pal, Donald Trump, he’s never made his tax returns public.  Unlike his giving. “I’ve always been a philanthropic person. We’ve always been very generous.”

The Turnbull Foundation, appears in the Australian Business Register as a “private ancillary fund”, (PAF) a scam invented by the Howard government, in 2001, with all the tax perks of a charity. Only 5% of the value of such funds need be donated annually to other non-profit organisations, who, themselves, hold deductible gift recipient (DGR) and tax concession charity (TCC) status.

What happens to the rest of the money? Historically, such funds average 8% in donations to such non-profit outfits, a trend which would leave Turnbull a handy 92% tax-free nest-egg. But there’s more. As directors, he and Luce are also entitled to draw tax-free directors’ fees.

Along with modelling altruism and advocating charity over government handout, Turnbull’s out to hose down alarmist speculation that climate change has something to with droughts and that governments have something to do with climate change. Or that the Coalition has no climate policy.

Mal tweaks this part of the official Big Dry story. He channels Abbott’s tin-foil hatter Maurice Newman as he continues to court the Liberal Party dries who don’t get climate change.

“The reality we face is rainfall has always been variable in Australia. It appears to be getting more variable, certainly in this part of the world and back where Lucy and I are in the Hunter,” he says modelling precisely the lack of leadership and political gutlessness he deplored eight years ago.

The coal-lobby sponsored, climate change denying, Coalition lacks the will to do anything but ignore expert consensus… 

Worse, he and his government are adding to the problem. The coal-lobby sponsored, climate change denying, Coalition lacks the will to do anything but ignore expert consensus, be it in the parched paddocks of central NSW and QLD or on the Great Barrier Reef where governments have allowed record levels of bush-clearing for farming to create run-off which is helping to kill the reef.

Enter stage right The Great Barrier Reef Foundation (GBRF) whose foundation chairman’s panel comprises big polluters; CEOs of BHP, Commonwealth Bank, Deloitte Australia, Lendlease and Deutsche Bank as well as representatives from Rio Tinto, Shell, AGL and Peabody Energy.

Australian Conservation Foundation’s Matt Rose nails it. “The links to companies such as Peabody Energy, which has funded climate denial groups in the past, doesn’t sit comfortably with us.”

The GBRF is a captain’s call by a PM desperate to greenwash a problem he knows he can’t fix.

Will greenwashing help? Despite Josh Frydenberg’s unbelievable performance on ABC Insiders Sunday, where he claims “extensive due diligence” (like extra virgin snake oil?) led, incredibly, to the selection of a group which just happens to represent the nation’s major polluters, few are bluffed.

Even Barrie Cassidy asks why the Great Barrier Reef Foundation (that word again) got the gig.

“Maximum leverage” Frydenberg blusters. Whatever it means, he hopes to silence the howls of outrage which erupt across the nation. Jargon’s good that way. And he could use a few levers.

Frydenberg … is totally unable to explain to Barrie Cassidy why $444 million was given in a lump sum …

Frydenberg, whose lack of accomplishment has not yet impeded his career, is totally unable to explain to Barrie Cassidy why $444 million was given in a lump sum to be used over six years to an obscure group of six mining and finance industry CEOs whose backgrounds create a palpable conflict of interest, without any tender, invitation, application or any other form of due process.

It doesn’t matter how much Frydenberg may claim that the foundation has delivered excellent results, its aims speak for themselves. There is nothing in the Foundation’s brief which mentions climate change. Immediate aims are to enhance water quality, cull outbreaks of invasive crown of thorns starfish and boost scientific research funds that might aid the reef’s “resilience”.

The reef is dying. It’s lost half its coral in the last two years. Global warming and the strongest El Nino effect ever recorded in 2016 caused the water temperature to rise, killing one third of the coral in a nine-month span between summer and autumn 2016. It would take decades for the coral to regenerate even if rising sea temperatures were brought under control.

A desperate government is wedged between the need to appease its coal-huggers who expect Adani to open and for Abbott Point to expand and an electorate which will not respond well to further bad news about the reef’s decline. It has gone for a spin solution, out of sheer political expediency.

Did Adani collude with Queensland’s state government to break the law? The Guardian reports that as Cyclone Debbie approached, 27 March, Adani leapt into damage control – by changing the rules – obtaining a temporary licence to pollute wetlands near Abbott Point. It’s a worrying sign. Doubtless there’ll be a move to recruit Adani to the GBRF in the light of its environmental concern.

“Shocking and almost mind-blowing” Michael Myer, a former founder of The Great Barrier Reef Foundation (GBRF) terms the growing scandal surrounding Mal’s gift of $444 million to a group which is clearly still stunned at the PM’s unexpected, unbidden largesse; reefer madness.

“It was like winning lotto” says MD Anna Marsden. Truly. When you didn’t buy a ticket?

He quit in part over concerns about its “corporate” direction and the growing involvement of figures from the fossil fuels industry.

Myer, a member of the Myer family dynasty, was a financial supporter and board member of the GBRF for two years until 2002. He says he quit in part over concerns about its “corporate” direction and the growing involvement of figures from the fossil fuels industry. Now they run the outfit.

He tells the ABC Thursday that it is “unthinkable” for the Government to award the largest ever non-profit grant to an organisation with six staff members “without due diligence, without a proper tender process, without a request”. The GBRF albatross will rot around the Coalition’s neck.

Luckily, in the week’s good news, conflicted Energy and Environment Minister Josh Frydenberg fails to bully the states into accepting the National Energy Guarantee (NEG), Friday, thus avoiding locking in Tony Abbott’s inadequate emissions reduction target of 26% of 2005 levels by 2030.

Frydenberg will now have to battle Abbott’s faction to get Liberal Party Room agreement next Tuesday. Not that you would know from his spin. “We had the victory. The national energy guarantee goes through the gate to the next stage,” he lies.

Expect Josh to talk long; keep questions short – especially from “The Monash Group”, a mutant Monkey Pod, a cabal of anti-Turnbull plotters comprising Tony Abbott, Eric Abetz, Kevin Andrews, Craig Kelly and the resourceful George Christensen whom Matt Canavan sent to Tokyo to badger baffled Japanese bankers with his pitch to put their money in the rebels’ plan to build hugely expensive, new, loss-making, toxic coal-fired power plants.

The COAG rout is touted as a win in principle, a spin repeated by a fawning mainstream media who keep us distracted meanwhile with shocking images of parched paddocks and starving stock. It’s the Lynton Crosby distraction strategy of throwing a dead cat (or dying sheep or cow) on the table.

It’s an artful dodge. A conga-line of camera-men whose shadows appear clearly in-shot; a post-modern chiaroscuro, create a Brechtian alienation effect as Super Mal blitzes our screens last Sunday night, live from Trangie, a quiet, rural service town on the Mitchell Highway between Narromine and Nyngan, 493 km NW of NSW capital, Sydney.

Super Mal is paying a flying visit to Trangie whose name is an indigenous word meaning “quick”.

Sadly, Trangie relies on the Murray Darling Basin for water …

But not so fast, Super Mal. Sadly, Trangie relies on the Murray Darling Basin for water and as Karen Middleton notes in The Saturday Paper, its suffering in Australia’s last severe drought in the early 2000s, a “devastating dry spell, the worst on record, prompted calls for a management plan of the basin and the water it holds”.  The basin’s mismanagement cannot be so easily shrugged off.

Given the Coalition government’s record of Murray Darling mismanagement under former Minister for Water and irrigators’ pal, Barnaby Joyce, Turnbull quickly finds himself not waving but drowning. Naturally it doesn’t stop him talking up the ways his government is listening.

Flash Mal’s all care and no responsibility. Keen to escape the GBRF stench, his whirlwind “listening tour” of drought-stricken NSW and QLD allows him to plug an insultingly inadequate “drought relief package” of $12,000 and an easing of Centrelink rules so farmers qualify for a paltry $16,000 PA.

Some locals find his visit offensive. They’re fit to kill over the PM’s do-nothing, self-promoting political photo-opportunity tour, yet there’s more to his caring than exploitation.

Riding shotgun with his PM, Minister for Agriculture, David Littleproud, surely a world’s best case of nominative determinism is jeered on Q&A Monday when he says that it’s “a big call” to own responsibility for climate change and that he doesn’t “give a rats if it’s man-made or not”.

Littleproud then quickly ducks for cover: “There’s no silver bullet to this apart from rain. We can’t make it rain,” he says opting for the bleeding obvious in a dismissive non-sequitur.

No-one expects any mea culpa; acknowledgement that the Coalition’s lack of any real energy policy is boosting global warming nor that anthropogenic climate change is helping to cause the drought. 2017 was NSW’s hottest year ever. Autumn 2017 in southern Australia was the driest for 116 years.

the PM is not about to blind the locals with climate science,

This is all the more remarkable given there was no El Nino effect in 2017.  Yet the PM is not about to blind the locals with climate science, as he would have eight years ago. Now he’s warm and fuzzy.

“We’re here with love and practical help …” Practical help? Or another vacuous platitude? The Coalition has spent years evading any form of practicality when it comes to energy or climate. And meanwhile, its social welfare practices have morphed into an automated Robo call extortion racket.

Thank heaven for the photo-opportunities. Super Mal is all heart and hat as he clutches One Bucket’s Edwina Robertson in a stiff embrace, a medium close-up shot. The Toowoomba wedding photographer, turned drought awareness campaigner, tears up as she confronts the PM.

Ms Robertson, who is on week five of her own drought awareness campaign tour, tells the PM the federal government’s last Sunday morning assistance announcement is “underwhelming.”

Worse. She tells reporters, his package is “short sighted”. “He needs to acknowledge the long term effects of this.” PM and campaigner concur it’s a big bastard; the biggest drought in history.

Yet she’s on song with the Coalition’s creed of small government and in tune with Turnbull’s own crusade for private philanthropy. Robertson calls on people to donate to charities around Australia.

“We all need to be consistent in our message of how bad the drought is,” she said.

“Our money is going to come from charitable help, we need Aussies to get together. [It] is not going to come from the government.” 

Mal bravely takes aim at the rabid black dog of despair down on the drought-stricken farm…

A modern Atticus Finch, Mal bravely takes aim at the rabid black dog of despair down on the drought-stricken farm as he reveals his African gang-busting, welfare-cheat-exposing, Emma Husar slut-shaming, Murray Darling Basin Authority bullying, COAG coercing, anti-immigrant racist dog-whistling, Bill-killing, witch-hunting government’s tender, nurturing side.

Mal pats her back in a touching, fatherly, gesture just perfect for TV replay. Nothing too patronising.

For Fiona Simson National Farmers’ Federation head, the show is no substitute for policy.

“We are certainly concerned that as a Commonwealth we don’t have a Federal drought policy in place. The Intergovernmental Agreement on Drought expired in July,” Simson snipes.

Perhaps the former, former Minister for Agriculture, (Malcolm Turnbull held the fort for 57 days) Barnaby Joyce was pre-occupied. Weatherboard and Iron, Joyce’s book launch comes with lurid details of his dissolute behaviour, inspired perhaps, distantly, by the confessions of St Augustine.

When it’s not over-sharing his own battle with booze, suicidal depression and philandering, Weatherboard and iron perpetuates the myth that Joyce and the Nationals somehow represent the interest of the rural worker, or the poor rather than the mining lobby or Big Agriculture. Nothing in Joyce’s voting record suggests he’s interested in preserving penalty rates or increasing Newstart.

Proposals which might benefit the poor he’s voted against. These include increasing housing affordability, the age pension, trade union powers in the workplace, funding for university education, public transport.

He’s opposed the right to protest and the use of natural resource wealth for the benefit of all.

Joyce was happily spruiking on the radio for Santos to develop its coal seam gas project at Narrabri…

Last September, Joyce was happily spruiking on the radio for Santos to develop its coal seam gas project at Narrabri, maybe thirty- maybe fifty kilometres from his own land holdings, he says although he says he won’t make any financial windfall.

Nor will Weatherboard and Iron. Australian readers are not so easily duped. Joyce’s exploiting the rural poor for his own political advancement just as Turnbull is exploiting the drought crisis for photo opportunities and as a distraction to his reef, energy and Royal Commission disasters.

Joyce flogs his book on every channel. He tells Charlie Pickering he needs the money. Charlie is too polite to demur. Barnaby has a wealthy family; whose main property is Rutherglen, in Woolbrook, which sprawls across more than 1780ha north of Tamworth. True, there are other siblings, but The Joyce Family trust fund administered by his parents Beryl and James, has Barnaby as a beneficiary.

Monday, it rains. Trangie receives five millimetres according to the new, sleek, efficiency dividend beneficiaries, The Bureau of Meteorology (BOM), currently on the fifth year of a wage-freeze.

Turnbull’s team compassion is all over the airwaves, Monday, with its tough love. “Not everyone is going to survive,” federal Agriculture Minister David Littleproud tells ABC’s RN, Monday morning. “You can’t enjoy the fruits of the market economy without fear of failure.” Toughen up buttercup.

Meanwhile, full of fear of failure, Josh Frydenberg must do without the support of the states. – now he’s going into the party room Tuesday with no “leverage”; even less hope of forging consensus.

The Turnbull government spins another failure as a success – with a switch into vaudeville as Frydenberg “singles out hydrogen as a point of discussion” – about as practical as Greg Hunt’s Direct Action and just as outrageously expensive.

federal and Victorian state government are spending $500 million to build a pilot…

Yet our federal and Victorian state government are spending $500 million to build a pilot plant that will operate for only one year and produce “up to” three tonnes of hydrogen over the whole year.

We are beyond Carbon lock-in” – the self-perpetuating inertia created by large fossil fuel-based energy systems that inhibits public and private efforts to introduce alternative energy technologies.

What we’ve seen instead this week is a PM prepared to seek any distraction from his GBRF scandal and his party divided on the fundamentals of an energy policy which would meet our Paris commitments.

Instead his Energy Minister is peddling a NEG which is so complex and so rushed that no-one fully understands it but one thing is clear, it will lock in Abbott’s inadequate targets for ten years; a NEG which is worse than no NEG at all which is being presented as our only way to move forward and a framework which can be modified into something workable later.

It is neither of these but a shameful attempt to forge Coalition consensus and coerce the states.

Turnbull’s need to seek distraction and his natural evasiveness has led him on a lightning tour of drought-afflicted country towns where the focus is emotive with countless images of suffering animals and distressed farmers but which obscures the link between the big dry and climate change.

It will not be long before his GBRF scandal catches up with him and party disunity erupts over emission targets, and the NEG, like his tour of compassion is exposed as a transparent sham.

By 2353NM 

Well, look at that. 2016 is finished and 2017 has arrived to present us with more challenges. To be brutally honest, 2016 wasn’t the best of years for those who prefer progressive policy, equality, and fairness for all. Later this month, Donald Trump becomes president of the USA; at the time of writing Malcolm Turnbull still survives as prime minister of Australia; and the likes of Cory Bernardi and George Christensen seem to be in charge of the LNP’s policy settings, probably in spite of what Turnbull would like to think. In the past, articles at this time of the year have suggested that no one really cares about politics because the beach, tennis, and cricket are too appealing. While the beach hasn’t lost its charms (depending on the weather and the crowds), the tennis has the same identities as 2016 and the test cricket is a matter of concern as 2016 concludes.

If it makes us feel any better, it seems that as 2016 ended, Turnbull was under the pump with the state premiers openly critical of Turnbull’s back-down on looking at pricing schemes to limit carbon emissions. Probably even more surprising was the Business Council of Australia slamming the government for ruling out such a scheme. It’s not often that ALP premiers and the Business Council agree on something so fundamental. On top of that, there are outbreaks of logic about the emptiness of Turnbull’s ‘Jobson Grothe’ (sorry, that should read ‘Jobs and Growth’) slogan that nearly lost him the election held mid-year. While there have been 25 years of economic growth, the September 2016 quarter resulted in a 0.5% contraction, the first for 5 years. As the ‘leftie elites‘ at the ABC reported:

The only way for millennials to save, for households to pay down their debts, for all of us to have good job prospects and more security and to avoid that credit crunch, is for the Government to go back on everything they have been saying for years, and to increase its spending.

An increasing number of experts are now going against the mainstream, and making the point that for the rest of us to save, the Government has to borrow.

“Voters have been force-fed this neoliberal line that is without foundation in theory, history, experience or practice,” said Professor Mitchell.

Australia’s treatment of refugees is now an international talking point. The New York Times recently published a feature article on the issue noting that:

In Peter Dutton, the immigration minister, the country has its own little Trump. Last May he portrayed the asylum seekers as illiterates bent on stealing Australian jobs, and he has suggested “mistakes” were made in letting in too many Lebanese Muslim immigrants. His soft bigotry resonates with enough voters to sway elections.

At the same time, Manus and Nauru are a growing embarrassment to Australia, a party to all major human rights treaties. “There is an increasing realization that this is unsustainable,” Madeline Gleeson, an Australian human rights lawyer, told me.

Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull knows this and needs a way out. After Omid Masoumali, a young Iranian, burned himself to death on Nauru this year, a cartoon by Cathy Wilcox captured Australia’s shame. Above a man in flames was the caption “Not drowning.”

Before we all decide to give up amongst the doom and gloom, there are a few things we should try. According to Jay Rayner’s article in The Guardian, a tub of Haagen Dazs salted caramel ice cream may help. While I can’t offer any personal experience, it might be worth a try.

Or we can take the example of some notable Australians who have suffered greatly at a personal level and turned the suffering into a positive message for the greater good.

Daniel Morcombe was waiting for a bus on Queensland’s Sunshine Coast in December 2003. He was going to a shopping centre to buy Christmas presents. He never made it to the shopping centre or home afterwards. Daniel was 13. For eight years, his whereabouts were unknown. In August 2011, a person who used to live on the Sunshine Coast was charged with Daniel’s abduction and murder and he was convicted in March 2014.

Bruce and Denise Morcombe are Daniel’s parents. They had every right in the world to retreat into their remaining family and mourn Daniel’s disappearance but they didn’t. In 2005, they set up the Daniel Morcombe Foundation, and pledged:

The Foundation’s key role in the community is the education of all children about their personal safety. By directly assisting educators and parents through the funding and development of child safety educational resources as well as assisting young victims of crime, the Foundation continues to empower all Australians to make their local communities safer places for all children.

The Foundation is strongly committed to the development and education of Respectful Relationships for children and teenagers in our schools and communities and also assisting in reducing the over-representation of Indigenous Australians in the Child Protection sector.

The Foundation has developed and made freely available a number of resources and phone apps that target school children across Australia. Most of the material is free. The Daniel Morcombe Foundation also raises awareness through activities such as the ‘Day for Daniel’ where schools are encouraged to discuss ‘stranger danger’ and similar issues with students. Bruce and Denise Morcombe’s list of achievements is extensive and ongoing, with seemingly no chance of slowing down in the near future:.

The Daniel Morcombe Foundation remains committed to Child Safety Education and developing Harm Prevention resources that help educate children, teachers, parents, carers and their families to ‘Keep Kids Safe’.

In addition, the Foundation now has a strong focus on building Respectful Relationships within our schools and communities through proactive education. Coupled with our core messages of Recognise, React, Report, this will enable children and young adults to act positively and appropriately while staying safe.

The Foundation continues to develop new cutting-edge resources that are required in our ever-changing cyber and physical world. We are committed to fund new projects and initiatives in partnership with Universities, Police, community and educational organisations to ensure an on-going commitment to child safety and respectful relationships. These resources will continue to be made available and accessible to all communities (free of charge) throughout Australia.

Clearly, the Morcombe family made the decision to tell Daniel’s story rather than bottle it up. They had the good sense to gather people around them who knew how to get a story out and publicise the story relentlessly. Like a lot of public good programs, no one can really say how many kids’ lives have been saved by the work of the Morcombes in the past 11 years and how many will be saved in the future, but the real point is this: instead of asking why it happened and blaming the bus company (the bus Daniel was going to catch broke down and a replacement one was full prior to getting to Daniel’s location, so it didn’t stop); the police for not finding Daniel immediately; themselves or any one of the other thousand or so coincidences that could have saved Daniel, they resolved to do something to ‘fix it’. The Daniel Morcombe Foundation is successful and rightly so. I know my kids have been exposed to the ‘Day for Daniel’ message and are well aware of some protocols that may help them to escape a similar fate to Daniel’s — as are thousands of other school-aged kids around Australia. Rather than being consumed by it, the Morcombes turned their grief and agony into a movement that clearly makes the society we live in a better place to be.

Rosie Batty was the, 2015 Australian of the Year due to her work in countering domestic violence in Australia. Unfortunately, Batty has personal experience of domestic violence as well as witnessing her son being murdered by an ex-partner at Tyabb, Victoria, during 2014. As the website for the Luke Batty Foundation states:

Everyone in Australia was hugely affected by the manner in which Luke was killed and communities from far and wide responded generously by sending to Luke’s mum Rosie, hundreds of cards, an abundance of beautiful flowers, and donations, both large and small

The Luke Batty Foundation website and Batty’s telling of her story has certainly brought awareness of issues around domestic violence against both women and men in this country. Once there is awareness, there is the opportunity to take action to hopefully eliminate the problem from our society. Batty’s ongoing work will continue to promote solutions to the issue of domestic violence.

Like the Morcombes, no one would have blamed Batty if she had withdrawn into an environment where she had caring people around her and questioned how and why the events surrounding the murder of her son occurred. She hasn’t — obviously deciding that her suffering can be better used in creating a public good.

The Morcombes, Rosie Batty and others who have turned adversity into good can teach us all a lesson in relation what looks like the rebirth of the ultra-conservative/alt-right/delcons or whatever terminology you want to use.

There is a version of an old saying that suggests that if at first, you don’t succeed — don’t try skydiving. While flippant, the answer to the excesses of those like Bernardi, Christensen, and Dutton in pushing Australia into being a mean and dispirited collection of minions is to keep pushing the case for the alternative. You, too are perfectly capable of writing an email or letter to a politician that is party to something that offends you. You too can write a post on a blog. There is no magical formula that is shared by ‘the elite’. Should you choose The Political Sword as your media of choice we’ll even help you (just click on the this ‘Contact’ link and give us an idea of what you want to write about). You too can ‘like’, ‘share’ or post something on your social media account. A groundswell of support can work miracles.

Marketing experts tell us that personal recommendation has far more influence than advertising or statements by those who are not trusted as highly (such as politicians). The same people will also suggest that emails and correspondence critical of the actions of public figures and companies are read and if there is a sufficient volume, action will be taken to address the concerns. Some will tell you that you have no idea: ensure that you have some facts to back up your argument and be prepared to lay the facts out calmly and logically.

Bloggers and social media posters do get noticed. Greg Jericho enjoyed a quiet life blogging as ‘Grogs Gamut‘ until Mark Scott, then managing director of the ABC read something Jericho wrote on his blog about the quality of journalism during the 2010 election. Scott used the comment in a missive to his staff about the quality of the election news coverage. Jericho now writes for The Guardian and the ABC websites after The Australian outed him claiming ‘the public interest’.

So, in 2017 don’t just sit there and yell at the TV when Turnbull or his minders put yet another nail in the coffin of the society where people are supposed to be equal, where we care about each other and those who are not as well off as we are, and we care about the quality of life of those that follow us — do something about it.

Apart from being part of the change you want to see, you’ll feel much better if you do try to change the world.

What do you think?

If issues discussed in this article have affected you or those close to you, please call Lifeline on 13 11 44 or Kids Helpline on 1800 55 1800.