NO VOICE
Corporate Australia takes Indigenous support into its own hands after poll defeat
FILE PHOTO: Voters walk past Vote Yes and Vote No signs at the Old Australian Parliament House during The Voice referendum, in Canberra, Australia, October 14, 2023. REUTERS/Tracey Nearmy/File Photo© Thomson Reuters
By Byron Kaye
SYDNEY (Reuters) - Top Australian companies that backed constitutional recognition of Indigenous people said they respected voters' rejection of the change but would now take their own steps to try to improve opportunities for the country's first inhabitants.
At an Oct. 14 referendum, Australians overwhelmingly voted down a proposal to create a constitutionally-protected Indigenous parliamentary advisory body, known as the Voice.
Financial support and publicity from big business for the referendum failed against a far less well-resourced "No" campaign, which branded corporate endorsement of the change as elitist and out of touch.
Without a political solution, it is now up to the companies themselves to pursue strategies to address entrenched disadvantage in Australia's 3.8% Indigenous population, corporate leaders and political researchers said.
"While the country resolved not to amend our constitution, there's never been more awareness of the significant challenges facing many Indigenous people," said Rob Scott, CEO of Wesfarmers, which owns the Australian Kmart and Target department store chains plus hardware chain Bunnings.
Shirley Miller and her partner sit on their front porch, ahead of a nationwide referendum on Indigenous issues, at a town camp on the outskirts of Alice Springs, Australia, September 17, 2023. REUTERS/Jaimi Joy/File Photo© Thomson Reuters
Wesfarmers, which counts about 3% of its 120,000 employees as Indigenous and gave money to the "Yes" campaign, already ran programmes to educate, recruit and promote Indigenous people and develop Indigenous businesses, and "we must seize on this momentum", added Scott.
Airline Qantas, which emblazoned "Yes23" on three of its aircraft to support the change, said it would focus on practical measures like using First Nations suppliers and offering employment and scholarships to Indigenous people.
Australia's biggest public company, miner BHP, which had campaigned for a Voice to parliament for four years before the referendum, would "continue to engage with traditional owners and Indigenous partners, employees and organisations to understand their priorities", said Geraldine Slattery, the company's Australia president.Indigenous reconciliation remains largely unresolved in Australia which, unlike New Zealand, Canada and the U.S., never signed a treaty with its first inhabitants after European arrival.
The Voice, which was to provide non-binding advice to parliament on Indigenous matters, was requested by elders in 2017 as a way to bridge the divide.
The country's biggest companies have since sought to boost their social credentials by showcasing Indigenous programmes as investors increasingly measure performance beyond traditional markers of profit and dividends.
"Our intent and position to support reconciliation through practical actions is unchanged by the outcome of the referendum," said Ross Piper, CEO of superannuation at Australian Ethical, which has A$9.2 billion under management.
"If there's any one good thing that has come from the referendum process, it's been the increased awareness."
Intifar Chowdhury, an associate lecturer in politics at Australian National University, said companies were accused of "virtue-signalling" - making empty statements to gain popularity - about the Voice, ultimately to the campaign's detriment.
The companies could now "take meaningful corporate actions to close the gap, such as by hiring and retaining Indigenous staff and systematically co-designing projects that impact Indigenous Australians," she added.
Estelle Parker, executive manager at the Responsible Investment Association Australasia, whose members manage A$9 trillion in assets globally, said the referendum defeat was a "setback (but) the business community knows it has a special and significant responsibility here, and investors know this too".
($1 = 1.5741 Australian dollars)
(Reporting by Byron Kaye; Additional reporting by Melanie Burton in Melbourne; Editing by Sonali Paul)
A Losing Voice: The Fall of an Indigenous Referendum Measure
Even before October 14, The Voice, or, to describe in full, the Referendum on the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice to Parliament, was in dire straits. Referenda proposals are rarely successful in Australia: prior to October 14, 44 referenda had been conducted since the creation of the Commonwealth in 1901. Only eight had passed.
On this occasion, the measure, which had been an article of faith for Labor Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, hinged on whether an advisory body purportedly expert and informed on the interests and affairs of the First Nations Peoples would be constitutionally enshrined. The body was always intended as a modest power: to advise Parliament on policies and legislative instruments directly of concern to them. But details on who would make up such a body, nor how it could actually achieve such Olympian aims as abolishing indigence in remote indigenous communities or reducing the horrendous incarceration rate among its citizenry, were deemed inconsequential. The near cocky assumption of the Yes case was that the measure should pass, leaving Parliament to sort out the rest.
In the early evening, it became clear that the Yes vote was failing in every state, including Victoria, where campaigners felt almost complacently confident. But it was bound to, with Yes campaigners failing to convince undecided voters even as they rejoiced in preaching to their own faithful. The loss occurred largely because of two marshalled forces ideologically opposite yet united in purpose. They exploited a fundamental, and fatal contradiction in the proposal: the measure was advertised as “substantive” in terms of constitutional reform while simultaneously being conservative in giving Parliament a free hand.
From one side, the conservative “Australia as egalitarian” view took the position that creating a forum or chamber based on race would be repugnant to a country blissfully steeped in tolerance and colour-blindness. Much of that is nonsense, ignoring the British Empire’s thick historical links with race, eugenics and policies that, certainly in the Australian context, would have to be judged as genocidal. Even the current Australian Constitution retains what can only be called a race power: section 51(xxvi) which stipulates that Parliament may make laws regarding “the people of any race for whom it is deemed necessary to make special laws.”
Beneath the epidermis of such a view is also an assumption held by such Indigenous conservatives as Warren Mundine that there have been more than a fair share of “voices” and channels to scream through over several decades, be it through committees or such bodies as the disbanded Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island Commission. The plethora of these measures did not address inequality, did not improve health and educational outcomes directly, and merely served to create a managerial class of lobbyists and activists. To merely enshrine an advisory body in the Constitution would only serve to make such an entity harder to abolish in the event it failed to achieve its set purposes.
Campaigners for the Voice will shake their heads and chide those who voted against the measure as backward reprobates who fell for a gross disinformation campaign waged by No campaigners. They were the ones who, like worshippers having filled the church till, could go about morally soothed proclaiming they had done their duty for the indigenous and downtrodden. Given that the No vote was overwhelming (59%), the dis- and mis-information angle is a feeble one.
It is true to say that the No campaign was beset by a range of concerns, some of them ingenuous, some distinctly not. There was the concern that, while the advice from Voice members on government legislation and policy would be non-binding on Parliamentarians, this would still lead to court challenges that would tie up legislation. Or that this was merely the prelude to a broader tarnishing of the Australian brand of exceptionalism: first, comes the Voice, then the Treaty process, then the “truth telling” to be divulged over national reconciliation processes.
The first of these was always unlikely to carry much weight. Even if any parliamentary decision to ignore advice from the Voice would ever go to court, it would never survive the holy supremacy of Parliament in the Westminster model of government. What Parliament says in the Anglo-Australian orbit of constitutional doctrine tends to be near unquestionable writ. No court would ever say otherwise.
The second concern was probably more on point, insofar as the Voice would act as a spur in the constitutional system, one to build upon in the broader journey of reconciliation. But the No casers here, with former Australian foreign minister Alexander Downer being fairly typical of this, regard matters such as treaty and truth-telling commissions as divisive and best scotched. “The most destructive feature of failed societies is that they are divided on the basis of ethnicity, race or religion,” he wrote this month. For Downer and his ilk, Australia remains a pleasant land – not exactly verdant, but pleasant nonetheless – where Jerusalem was built; don’t let any uppity First Nations advocate tell you otherwise.
The procedurally minded and pragmatic sort – which count themselves amongst the majority of Australian voters, were always concerned about how the advisory body would be constituted. Any new creature born from political initiative will always risk falling into the clutches of political intriguers in the government of the day, vulnerable to the puppeteering of the establishment. In Australian elections, where pragmatism is elevated to the level of a questioning, punishing God, the question of the “how” soon leads to the question of “how much”. The Voice would ultimately have to face the invoice.
Another, equally persuasive criticism of the Voice came from what might be loosely described as the Black Sovereignty movement, led by such representatives as independent Senator Lidia Thorpe. From that perspective, the Voice is only a ceremonial sham, a bauble, tinsel cover that, while finding form in the Constitution, would have meant little. “This referendum, portrayed by the government as the solution to bringing justice to First Peoples in this country,” she opines, “has instead divided and hurt us.”
Precisely because it would not bind elected members, it had no powers to compel the members of parliament to necessarily follow their guidance. “The supremacy of the colonial parliament over ‘our Voice’,” Thorpe goes on to stress, “is a continuation of the oppression of our people, and the writing of our people into the colonial Constitution is another step in their ongoing attempt to assimilate us.” This would make the body a pantomime of policy making, with its membership respectfully listened to even if they could be ultimately ignored. Impotence, and the effective extinguishment of indigenous sovereignty, would be affirmed.
Among some undecided voters lay an agonising prospect, notably for those who felt that this was yet another measure that, while well-meant in spirit, was yet another on the potted road of failures. The indigenous activist Celeste Liddle represents an aspect of such a view, one of dissatisfaction, stung by broken promises. Her view is one of morose, inconsolable scepticism. “I’m at a time in my life,” she writes in Arena, “where I have seen a lot of promises, a lot of lies, a lot of attacks on Indigenous communities, and not a lot of change. I therefore lack faith in the current political system and its ability to ever be that agent of change.” That’s an almost dead certifiable “No”, then.
The sinking of the Yes measure need not kill off the program for improving and ameliorating the condition of First Nations people in Australia. But for those seeking a triumphant Yes vote, the lesson was always threatening: no measure will ever pass the hurdle of the double majority in a majority of states if it does not have near uniform approval from the outset. It never has.
Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He lectures at RMIT University, Melbourne. Email: bkampmark@gmail.com. Read other articles by Binoy.
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