Only one of these men has been elected to Parliament – so why might the other two also have a Voice in Parliament if the Uluru Statement is enshrined in our Constitution?
If the Uluru Statement is passed in a Referendum, then our Constitution will be changed so as to give anyone who claims to be Indigenous, the ability to vote in The Voice to Parliament. This in effect, may give those Australians identifying as Indigenous great power to modify legislation in our parliament. This power would not be available to non-Indigenous Australians.
But why should Australians agree to give special voting rights to people because of their race, ethnicity or indigeneity?
Why should Thomas Mayor, Torres Strait Islander, author of Finding the Heart of the Nation - The journey of the Uluru Statement towards Voice, Treaty and Truth, and union official for the Maritime Union of Australia, be able to effectively vote twice on parliamentary legislation? – once in a general election, like the rest of us, to elect his local member, but then again via The Voice, each time he, and other Australians identifying as an Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander, decide to review parliamentary legislation.
Thomas Mayor - An Australian with a very mixed and diverse ancestry.
As Mr Mayor relates:
“I am a Torres Strait Islander, have a Filipino great-great-grandfather and a Malaysian great-great-grandfather,…Borneo, Dyak man indigenous of that place…and a Jewish Polish post-war immigrant…he worked on the Snowy River project when he came over here…and he married a young English woman’. - Interviewed on ABC Late Night Live, June 1, 2020 : listen from 01:55 to 02:40
Because of his ancestry, Mr Mayor would be expected to be eligible to take part in the voting system for The Voice, as being proposed for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders as part of the Uluru Statement.
Prime Minister, Scott Morrison - An Australian with ancestry back to the First Fleet.
‘Prime Minister, Scott Morrison has spoken of his family's centuries-old ties to Australia… [via]…his fifth-great-grandparents [who] arrived in Australia as convicts…[in]…1788’. - SMH, January 26th, 2019.
Despite being Prime Minister and having a long ancestral association with Australia, Mr Morrison will not be able to vote along-side Mr Mayor in The Voice deliberations.
Thomas Mayor considers himself an Indigenous Australian by being of Torres Strait Islander descent, despite the fact that all the Torres Strait Islands did not join Queensland (and therefore Australia) until 1879, 91 years, or about three generations, after our Prime Minister’s ancestors had been living here and calling Australia home.
So we ask, why is Thomas Mayor considered more indigenous than our Prime Minister, who’s ancestors have been part of the Australian continent for more generations than Thomas Mayor’s?
And Noel Pearson seems to agree with us and invites a deeper conversation for all Australians, when he says that, over time, all Australians, born of this land can be considered Indigenous - see here from 03:56.
Bruce Pascoe, author, who is identified by his publisher as being ‘of Tasmanian, Bunurong and Yuin descent.’
And will Bruce Pascoe, author of the book Dark Emu, be entitled to a special place of recognition in our Constitution, which may provide him with a vote in The Voice to parliament?
It has been written that Mr Pascoe identifies as Indigenous because,
‘he once stated that his great-grandmother had an Aboriginal name..’.
This is despite the fact that,
‘In the book [his book Convincing Ground], and in interviews he admitted that his indigenous ancestry was distant, and he was “more Cornish than Koori’.
- RICHARD GUILLIATT, ‘Turning history on its head’ , The Australian Magazine, May 25, 2019
The Prime Minister’s convict ancestors were harshly treated by a British society run by aristocrats, who used breeding and lineage to maintain an exclusive class and power structure. The average Australian is not so stupid that they would amend our Constitution to re-introduce a new class of ethnic and racial aristocrat to lord over us here.
The proposal for a Constitutionally enshrined ‘Voice to Parliament’ sounds very much like some sort of ‘Bunyip Aristocracy’, with members selected on the basis of their descent. We predict it will just not get up at a referendum.
Better for us all to just ignore the Aboriginal Political Elites and their complicated legal schemes and just keep soldiering on, putting our resources into fixing the real, on-the-ground, problems for Aboriginal Australia.
