Sad for the Voice

At the beginning of December I saw a post on X (formerly Twitter) saying that Megan Davis, the university professor and prominent Voice advocate, had been given a position at Harvard University. I was struck by a feeling of jubilation that she’d been rendered silent by the lack of success for her favourite cause and then had disappeared from the public stage in Australia to take a position overseas. This is what “booted upstairs” looks like.

Davis was a take-no-prisoners kinda gal, the type who punches first and asks your name second. Better to put down a rival before they can take you out even if it might be the wrong person.

I’d had a run-in with Davis on Twitter (when it was still called that) precisely about the Voice. I started writing about the Voice in 2017 when the initial report was released and I was watching developments carefully since then up to the time when Davis and I crossed paths in the cybersphere.

The ground upon which we squared off was littered with corpses from her previous battles so it shouldn’t have been a surprise to me that she took me for an adversary as soon as I mentioned the word “detail”. But it was detail that I wanted and detail that had been woefully lacking in public debates up to that point in time.

You got two types of contestant in the main, the people who were unthinkingly “for” the Voice and those who wanted to see it crushed. Davis saw only two types of contestant so when I mentioned the “D” word she bridled and lashed out verbally, nicking me with her tweets. I retired but never forgot, so it was easy to work in the shadows monitoring progress of the Voice toward polling day. 

I saw many things. I saw Labor politicians lambasting people on the right with insults and belittling replies. I saw people like Ms Davis following the lead the politicians offered. I saw other Aboriginal luminaries follow suit, always using strong language when mild replies might at least have made their opponents look bad. I saw the people who were trying to progress the Voice to a successful conclusion sink their own ship. Within 40 minutes of the polls closing Anthony Green had declared the result and the game was, unceremoniously, over.

Then silence.

The vanquished went off to lick their wounds and friends of mine said how sad they were. I wonder how sad people were in the Yes camp at any point from August 2017 to 14 October 2023? I wonder how downcast they felt while they were bruising the dictionary with their fast use of epithets designed to cause pain. How sad were they then? Were they sad when they insulted people who disagreed with them? Were they downcast in anticipation of the drubbing they’d receive at the ballot box? I wonder what Megan David pans to do from her aerie in Cambridge, Massachusetts?

Will she remain sad for long?

Referendum is an indictment of organisations

The only reason we’re having this vote is because of the organisations charged with embodying the collective will with regard to First Nations people. If the institutions of government were working properly there wouldn’t be any reason to have a Voice because the wishes of the subject people would be referred to management naturally in the normal course of events. The problem is that the message from the ground isn’t making its way up the food chain, and senior managers are just doing what they want regardless of the needs and wants of the people for whom the programs are run.

Having worked in organisations from 1985 to 2009 I am not surprised. It’s the job of managers to implement top-level policy, not to listen to the people working on the front line. Usually the two things are at odds, and it’s no surprise to learn which wins out in the relevance stakes. Because these organisations work in a vacuum, and the only people who actually know what’s going on are people working in them, the decisions of the top brass are not questioned. 

What a Voice could do is hold the top leaders to account. Normally what happens is that occasionally a Senate enquiry opens up debate to the public, or if something major goes wrong we get a royal commission. These bodies have the power to coerce people to appear and answer questions put to them, and often parts or all of these proceedings are made public on television. A Voice could be a Senate enquiry or r royal commission on steroids, running 24/7 365 days a year, bringing to the public issues that are normally sequestered in the halls of power.

Out of sight out of mind.

A Voice would make the leaders accountable for a change. In the normal run of things their subalterns are the ones who are accountable, and who must reconcile the actual needs of FN communities with official policy. In general, these two things will be at loggerheads as top managers try to impose government policy on people who have no need for it. 

A Voice could potentially give front-line workers the ability to funnel their accumulated learnings into policy, by showing how the things they’re been asking their managers for for years are actually in the best interests of the FN communities and, by extension – because we all want to see those Close the Gap benchmarks improve – of the country as a whole.

A Voice is the only way to make this happen. It will act like a permanent TV channel directing important FN debates into the newspapers and onto the TV screens of millions of voters and taxpayers around the country. There is no better solution to Indigenous disadvantage than such a feed of worthwhile information.

Voice to Parliament starts to become clearer

I was talking with a friend about the Voice in the light of the prime minister’s speech at Garma during which she’d had tears in her eyes listening to the events unfold. I agreed with the ABC presenter that it was a momentous day, but when the two of us, my friend and I (and her rambunctious, friendly, intelligent dog), were crossing the park I said that the most important thing about the day wasn’t what Albanese said but the fact that the Opposition spokesperson was present.

This morning a Sydney Morning Herald headline agreed with me, drawing me in to read a story in which he said that more detail is needed. But the thing I like the most about Labor’s proposal is that it contains two parts: one to establish the Voice in the nation’s founding document, and then Parliament deciding how it should be formed and what form it should take.

This open-ended strategy almost circumvents Leeser’s misgivings as any future government would also be able to change the formulation of the Voice. Doing things this way should give the Liberals confidence that nothing is set in stone forever in this term of government, and that alterations, improvements, adjustments and tweaks can be made at any time well into the future.

Given this new way of thinking about a Voice I think we’re in a better position to sit down and feel comfortable that there’s no need to panic – or to kill the idea. This would be my main worry, and having the Liberal Party along for the ride (and the Nationals as well) is central to the success of the Uluru Statement from the Heart. Let’s reflect on Albanese’s wise words: this is mere courtesy, and it’s also very practical since the way we’ve been managing things up to this point obviously aren’t working very well (though no doubt there have been success stories). 

Opening a new page can be liberating, and we’ve got an opportunity with the USftH to do just that. It’s time to lift the covers and find our future written within. 

Kelvin Brown interview for NSW Creators of Peace

Myall Creek National Committee member Kelvin Brown, a tribal elder of the Anaiwan People of the Gamilaraay Nation, on Saturday 3 July participated in a presentation for an international group of (mainly) women, Creators of Peace. The interview was conducted over Zoom and most of the participants were in Australia.

Kelvin talked about his upbringing in the area commonly referred to as New England. When he was very small his father had been abusive and his mother, after a particularly bad flogging the man inflicted on the child, took Kelvin 70km on foot to Tingha, a small town north of Armidale. Here there were places where Aboriginal people lived, and here Kelvin grew up before he moved to Inverell so he could go to high school.

Kelvin recounted experiences of a spiritual nature, once of which took place when he was walking through bush near the town. He’d gone in between two slender trees before, on the other side, sensing a voice telling him to turn around. When he did he saw an Aboriginal warrior with spears and nullanullas whose body was transparent. He looked at this apparition for about 30 seconds before turning back to continue on his way.

On another occasion, Kelvin had an out-of-body experience. He was in class and heard a voice telling him to get out, so he walked outside. Into the distance, between two prominent rises that marked the landscape, he went in spirit until he reached a place where a very old man was sitting by a fire. Kelvin asked the man why he had been called and the man said he was dying and wanted him to be there. At that moment thousands of images flew through the air into Kelvin’s mind, though at the time he had no recollection of what they depicted. When he woke up from his reverie a friend was near him and he asked his friend how long he’d been there. His friend said he’d been gone for 15 minutes and that even punches on his arm hadn’t woken him up.

Kelvin also talked about his family’s experience in war. One grandfather, an English migrant, had been involved in Gallipoli and had decided, after that event, to come to live in Australia. Kelvin’s father had been in WWI and was in Tobruk. Kelvin’s uncle was in Singapore when the English surrendered to the Japanese and was subsequently taken into captivity. The Japanese had trouble working out what to do with him and eventually gave him more freedom than other prisoners enjoyed. In this way he was able to save 60 of his comrades.

For his part, Kelvin was in the army and assigned to signals. One of his comrades hated Aboriginals and would abuse Kelvin verbally whenever they meet, or else pointedly ignore him. Kelvin didn’t react to this conduct but got on with his other comrades, and one day this man told Kelvin that he couldn’t hate Aboriginals any longer. His mother had taught him to think that way, and later he asked Kelvin to go back when they had leave to stay at his mother’s house. When they left at the end of the weekend, she asked Kelvin to look after her son and gave them lunch to take with them for the journey back to base.

Armajen Aboriginal Medical Service was a project Kelvin was asked to become involved with. He told us how he’d been in a pub having a beer one day when he heard a tapping on the glass. A woman outside called him over and told him that her group had been having trouble getting funding for Armajen and that they wanted Kelvin to help them out. He agreed to look at their paperwork and read through it over the period of a few days, eventually agreeing to be involved on account of a certificate from the state premier supporting the project.

Kelvin subsequently became involved with a Sydney health service and started to petition the government, always coming up against on particular man who he classified as his nemesis. One time, at a conference where over 300 professionals were attending, including the man from the department, the two of them found themselves sitting opposite each other at lunch. Before the man got up to leave he told Kelvin not to stop his work, and to keep on asking for support. Not long after this, his friends asked him to come back home so he quit the health service and travelled back to New England where they told him there was a meeting with the government and he’d been asked to attend. When they got there, they received the news that their request had been successful and that approval had been given on condition that Kelvin be involved as his example had shown the bureaucrats that the group was serious.

Kelvin was asked to be involved with Myall Creek by his nephew.