Australians vote No in referendum that promised change for First Nations people but couldn’t deliver

MicroWave@lemmy.world to World News@lemmy.world – 323 points – Australians vote No in referendum that promised change for First Nations people but couldn't deliver | CNN
cnn.com

With a two-letter word, Australians have struck down the first attempt at constitutional change in 24 years, major media outlets reported, a move experts say will inflict lasting damage on First Nations people and suspend any hopes of modernizing the nation’s founding document.

Early results from the Australian Electoral Commission (AEC) suggested that most of the country’s 17.6 million registered voters had written No on their ballots, and CNN affiliates 9 News, Sky News and SBS all projected no path forward for the Yes campaign.

The proposal, to recognize Indigenous people in the constitution and create an Indigenous body to advise government on policies that affect them, needed a majority nationally and in four of six states to pass.

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It's a toothless advisory body that could make (ignorable) representations to parliament about matters relating to the indigenous community. What else do you need to know?

There were 2 main issues for me.

  1. The wording did not specify how they would be selected.
  2. The voice did not require that the members needed to be Aboriginal. So it would have been a bunch of non Aboriginal mates of politicians in the voice. Just like how Tony Abbott got to be the minister for women.

The yes campaign just said trust us it will do nothing so you don't need to worry. What was the point then?

https://voice.gov.au/about-voice/voice-principles

The Voice will be chosen by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people based on the wishes of local communities

Members of the Voice would be selected by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities, not appointed by the Executive Government.

Members would serve on the Voice for a fixed period of time, to ensure regular accountability to their communities.

To ensure cultural legitimacy, the way that members of the Voice are chosen would suit the wishes of local communities and would be determined through the post-referendum process.

I think it would be bad to specify that the members be indigenous - it needlessly restricts options, which seems unproductive if the indigenous community are doing the selection. If they choose the likes of Tony Abbott (not likely), that's their perogative.

The Voice establishes a constitutionally enshrined body, so beyond recognition, it facilities better input from the community into affairs relevant to them, and makes it optically bad for the government if they choose to ignore that input while forcing nothing. The point is to close the gap in outcomes between the indigenous and broader communities.

This is about ensuring it can't be abused. They could have specified how the members would be selected in the wording of the referendum.
They wanted to leave the door open for them to abuse it down the track.