The origins of the Voice, and manufacturing of Blak consent
Constitutional recognition has its roots in the Howard-era, long before the Voice came to be. John Howard and his Liberal government exhibited a craving for culture wars that could stoke a stronger white Australian identity. This would range from border-force patriotism with the war on terror and the ‘children overboard’ refugee panic, to a pro-colonial nationalism based on false allegations about Blak paedophile rings, a revival of Australia Day and ANZAC Day, and history wars insisting that Australia was not built upon genocide and that this should not be taught in schools. One of his final nation building proposals was a promise of a referendum for constitutional recognition, in the hope of uniting Australia behind one national identity and quashing debate over treaties.
The referendum proposal floundered somewhat after Howard’s loss to Kevin Rudd in 2007, but Labor would collaborate with the Liberals in passing constitutional recognition in each state government and commissioned an inquiry. The inquiry resolved that any referendum must include bans on discrimination against Blak people, which the government ignored in favour of setting up a front group called ‘Recognise’ with the support of several corporations. Recognise would come to be protested by Blak militants after allegations of falsifying support for constitutional recognition amongst Blak people, and eventually Recognise lost momentum during the subsequent years under Tony Abbott’s Liberal government.
Concerned by the collapse of Recognise, Reconciliation Australia would try to rescue the constitutional recognition proposal through a convention near Uluru in 2017. The process started with invite-only regional ‘dialogues’, which were in fact largely apathetic toward Voice and recognition, if not openly hostile towards the proposals. These unrepresentative regional dialogues elected 60% of the delegates to the Uluru convention. The remaining 40% of delegates were appointed by the government and NGOs funded by Recognise. The convention was protested by left-wing delegates who declared the process corrupt, and released their own statement calling for treaties and sovereignty as an alternative to the Statement from the Heart working group’s demand for a binding Voice.
The Statement from the Heart working group’s submission for a binding Voice has been comprehensively ignored by the Labor party and ‘progressive’ capitalists, who have aligned behind a front group called ‘From the Heart’ which includes such staunch Indigenous allies as the Minerals Council of Australia. This group has insisted on a powerless advisory Voice in order to appeal to white moderates, and to make declarations of unanimous Blak support for this proposal. The proposal as outlined gives the government of the day a say over how members of a Voice are elected (or not), ensures they have no further rights to communicate with the government than any citizen, and prohibits discussion by the Voice on issues that are deemed irrelevant like the fracking and mining of their land without their consent.
It is suggested by Labor politicians like Linda Burney that this Voice would be able to encourage the government to send more police into the Northern Territory to restrict Blak people from drinking, which invites concerns about how the Voice will be used by the government to justify racist decisions. The backing that the Voice has received from Labor’s corporate donors in the fossil fuel industry, who are currently in conflict with Blak people for access to their land, also raises alarm bells. And the degree to which this process has been manufactured by the ruling class does not bode well for how representative the Voice is intended to be in practice.
The only reasonable conclusion to be drawn from this sequence of events is that we should extend our solidarity to the left-wing critics of this process amongst the Blak community, and reject the idea that this referendum proposal is a genuine call for representation. We do not need to take political advice from Albanese, and instead we should seek our answers from those who fight for land rights embedded in treaties.
From the Barunga Statement to the Blak Greens and the Walkout Collective
Blak peoples have resisted colonisation since the violent invasion of 1788, and have been clear at every conflict and protest since in the demand for land rights and self-determination. In 1988, 200 years following invasion, the Hawke Labor government committed to treaty making following the receipt of the Barunga Statement and that it would be completed by 1990. It has been 35 years since Labor made that promise, and like the Liberals they’ve continued to oversee the violation of every demand in the Barunga Statement.
The Barunga Statement outlined a proposal for self-determination through an end to police violence and child theft in favour of community justice, land rights and reparations, the return of ancestral belongings, a respect for culture, and support for their right to democratic self-governance. There have been many statements and formulations since that time, and most recently that’s included the 2022 Yuendumu Statement calling for defunding and disarmament of police in favour of funding for services in the community. These statements and approaches by Blak activists have largely been resisted by the government which wishes to engage in treaty making on its own terms, or not at all.
After the Uluru Convention, from which the Statement from the Heart emerged, the left-wing delegates who walked out cohered around their own statement as the Walkout Collective. They have called for a truth telling process that reveals the trauma and injustices of Australian settlement followed by a treaty making process between different First Nations, and then the Australian government which may lead into a united republic. A number of these delegates and their supporters would end up entering the Blak Greens, who initiated their own campaign for Truth, Treaty, and Voice based on the ideas of the Walkout Collective, which was endorsed by the broader Greens membership and taken to the 2022 election as an alternative to Albanese’s proposal.
This politics was also expressed in the 2023 Invasion Day mass protests, which in Sydney called for a No vote in the referendum in alignment with the case for Truth and Treaty before Voice. The federal Greens leadership has since made an effort to quash and silence this with moderate MPs making efforts to leak to the media and undermine campaigning for treaties, suppressing documentation from the Blak Greens, and ultimately breach their own policy by shifting to an uncritical Yes to Albanese’s Voice proposal. Their Indigenous Affairs spokesperson, Lidia Thorpe, shortly left the party and it’s unclear what the next step is by advocates in the campaign as the date of the referendum slowly approaches.
While there are limits to the effectiveness of treaty making between an oppressed people and the nation state which oppresses them, the argument for Truth and Treaty before Voice constitutes a left-wing break from liberal approaches towards First Nations justice. It should not be dismissed. It is something we see as not just a principled rejection of a corrupt political project, but a staunch insistence that land rights and an end to police brutality and child theft are urgent demands that should not be delayed. It is an insistence that demands such as kicking Santos out of the Pilliga must be met immediately. There can be nothing more principled than standing alongside Blak comrades in these struggles, and refusing to concede.
Fighting bigotry at the ballot box, and lessons from the marriage equality postal survey
The liberal commentariat has been near orgiastic in their comparisons between the marriage equality postal survey and the Voice referendum, and have been desperately throwing themselves into the conversation with advice on why the campaign should be as small a target in messaging as possible. It seems Albanese is on the same page as he desperately assures the right of how useless the Voice will be at every turn, while the right itself is split between the delusional bigots who are convinced the Voice is a Blak dictatorship, and those who are entranced by the wonders of new ‘inclusive’ nationalism.
Many people are concerned that challenging the Voice in any way will bolster the confidence of those bigots convinced that a new Blak empire is arising through the referendum, and that they should not speak up. There is also the very real concern that the true face for a No campaign in Australia is Peter Dutton, Jacinta Price, and Pauline Hanson, and so any momentum for No will be a validation of their hard-right politics and will give an extra boost of confidence to every closet white supremacist with a gun. This is the shit sandwich that Albanese has given Blak people.
The real lesson from the marriage equality postal survey is that a victory for Yes at the ballot does not itself undermine the sense of confidence that bigots gain from being confirmed by their peers. The result of the postal survey was a victory, but the local win for No in western Sydney laid the basis for a confidently bigoted layer of hard-right activists that most recently performed a gay bashing outside of a One Nation event. This was able to happen as the mainstream wing of the marriage equality campaign, sponsored as it was by big business, refused to engage with the scare mongering about trans rights and schools. They made being a small target into a virtue, just as Albanese is attempting to do.
A small layer of revolutionaries quietly voting Yes in urban centres will not make a dent in the confidence of right-wing No voters who work in a prison in western Sydney or regional NSW; even if the referendum succeeds, these pockets of racism will thrive, emboldened by the bigots who use the national debate as an opportunity to spread fear and misinformation unchallenged by weak, small-target Yes campaigners. Fighting this will require us to actually stand with Blak militants in the streets who are raising the real questions of land rights and sovereignty – such as the Gomeroi people who have voted against fracking of their land. We must help to build the big targets that actually cut against these racist ideas, and to win them through united protest and struggle.
Common enemies, common struggle: queer and Blak resistance to corporate control
The other clear lesson that should be drawn out of comparing struggles is that we have a common enemy – the ruling class – who use similar strategies to keep us divided. Much like the labour movement, the social movements of the 60s and 70s represented a challenge that needed to be smothered, and ‘progressive’ capital has made a concerted effort to co-opt, divide, and disempower resistance.
The Business Council of Australia (BCA) was founded in 1983 to politically intervene in the new terrain of neoliberalism under Labor. The BCA represents the political will of the wealthiest companies in the country who control billions in assets, control the wages and conditions of countless workers, and are responsible for the bulk of corporate donations to the Labor, Liberal, and National parties in this country. BCA affiliates also populate the boards of many lobby groups and cultural events in the LGBTI and Aboriginal sectors with their CEOs, collectively inject millions into these projects while promoting their brands, and often claim these organisations as policy advocates to the political parties they also fund.
The most obvious of these for the queer community is the Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras (SGLMG), which has its origins as a grassroots protest against police violence, but now receives millions in corporate donations with branding everywhere. The police take a role of prominence in each festival while companies like Qantas are celebrated, despite making use of slavery in the prison system and having cracked down on union campaigns for gender neutral staff uniforms. The various Pride parades across the country are estimated to receive over $6 million in corporate donations each year which makes them the subject of both protest and mockery by the queer community.
But this is simply the tip of the iceberg. Corporate scholarships for impoverished LGBTI youth are being run by the Pinnacle Foundation – which has BCA CEO Jennifer Westacott as lead patron – offering corporate mentors for recipients willing to sign gag clauses on criticising businesses. WearItPurple, a youth support network, works closely with the police and is funded by the Commonwealth Bank and Telstra. Minus18 is funded by Goldman Sachs and lululemon, an apparel company with near sweatshop labour practices. Rainbow Babies is funded by Commonwealth Bank and American Express. BlaQ is funded by Apple and Calvin Klein. Inspired by Reconciliation Action Plans, ACON’s ‘Pride in Diversity’ program has been founded by the Australian Federal Police, the Department of Defence, KPMG, Lendlease, ING, IBM, and Goldman Sachs; though it is meant to advocate for good conditions for queer workers, it has union-busting legal firm Clayton Utz as its best-rated ‘inclusive’ workplace.
Most significantly, though, is the example of Equality Australia – an NGO sponsored by the ruling class intended to speak for a marginalised community. Equality Australia is the main consultant to the political class on what queer people think, yet it is run directly by CEOs, taking in over a million dollars of donations every year. Its board has been populated by the heads of WestPac, directors of Woolworths and the National party, owners of airports and property management companies, and even representatives from the Department of Corrections, and the controversial colleges at Sydney University. One of their next big ideas to offer Labor is a gay version of the Voice, an unelected ‘representative’ council, to reassure the government that our oppressive legal system is inclusive.
This trend is near universal. Of all the organisations purporting to represent queer people in Australia, only peer-run sex worker organisations as a rule seem to not be reliant on corporate funding. This landscape has created a circuit of inaction: unelected leaders of the movement, guided by corporate KPIs rather than grassroots community support, go begging to disinterested politicians who are funded by the same corporations, while big business manically promotes itself in queer cultural spaces despite undermining queer rights in the workplace.
Describing this process of corporate capture can seem almost conspiratorial until a quick look at management of the Blak community reveals how this was tested upon them first. These same corporations invented Reconciliation Action Plans (RAPs) as a substitute for genuine union demands like Blak jobs. Corporate CEOs sit on the boards of organisations like Reconciliation Australia, which was chaired by the CEO of Woodside while the corporation imposed a gas hub on the land of the Jabirr Jabirr and Goolarabooloo peoples. ‘Jawun’, founded by Noel Pearson in collaboration with Westpac to build links between Blak peoples and corporations, has a board mostly sourced from BCA-aligned corporations and has taken a prominent role in smothering dissent to fossil fuel extraction, land sales, the cultural appropriation of artefacts, and other issues. Jawun has lobbied against environmental protections so as to free up land to be sold off by Land Councils, and associated law firms like Allens played a key role in authoring the idea of constitutional recognition.
Pearson’s Jawun in particular has made an effort to present Native Title as an economic opportunity rather than a step toward sovereignty, encouraging the sale of land to big business as a way for local communities to empower themselves, while businesses supposedly create jobs for all in construction, coal, and gas. Jawun happily enables this process by offering corporate advisers from BCA-aligned companies to advise Land Councils on the best means by which to sell off and develop land. In 2004 Jawun helped to provide the Darkinjung Land Council with ‘assistance’ from Westpac, KPMG, CBA, NAB, Telstra, Woolworths Liquor Group and more during a sell off process. This is a process being rolled out across the country to change Blak people from sovereigns into aspiring capitalists, or hyper-exploited workers.
It is in this context that we need to understand the corporate strategy around Recognition and the Voice, and any comparisons with the marriage equality campaign. Marriage equality was a grassroots demand that gained traction through protests that corporations never supported. These corporations finally gave way, offering tepid support in the form of a Yes campaign that was so small a target that it helped transphobia fester in No voting electorates. Recognition, on the other hand, is an example of a corporate proposal that is being manufactured by the corporations themselves, and is being made a priority despite being consistently opposed by Blak militants and disregarded by Aboriginal communities seeking real material change to life in the colony. Recognition is not a step towards liberation, it is a move against Blak sovereignty by the corporations who try to silence, co-opt and exploit Blak people and queer people alike, and by a Labor party seeking to sell-out communities for political capital.
Where to from here?
Our perspective is that as militants our focus should not be on door knocking to get out the vote alongside either the white supremacists or the corporations, but on building struggle within the framework of Truth and Treaty before Voice as the only existing left-wing alternative. While we believe this is most logically expressed in a No vote in the referendum – a point which should not be veiled or ignored – this is perhaps the least important aspect of the campaign which should be focused squarely on struggles like the fight of the Gomeroi people against Santos. A major mobilisation around the core struggles of the Blak liberation movement is critical after the results of the referendum are confirmed, whether Yes or No. We will be organising with our Indigenous comrades to ensure such an action gets off the ground in as strong and as militant a manner as possible, to put a pin in the racist referendum discourse and build a real fight towards sovereignty.
An important element of the demands by left critics of the Voice is that truth telling is crucial, and that this involves accepting uncomfortable realities that we may not always enjoy hearing. Our belief is that there are many leftists who are critical of the Voice and accept that land rights should not be put on hold, but are terrified of being marginalised by white liberals. We cannot as a movement proceed forward in dealing with the uncomfortable truth of genocide if we are unwilling to deal with the discomfort of liberal confusion and disapproval.