6 Years & $360M Later, Old Malcolm Turnbull was Right
Love him or loath him, there are moments in Malcolm Turnbull’s career where the sharp and quick brilliance of his legal mind allowed him to cut to the heart of a matter under question.
His initial response, as Prime Minister in 2017, to the Uluru Statement from the Heart was spot on in principle -
‘Turnbull said the voice to parliament body “would inevitably become seen as a third chamber of parliament”.
“The Referendum Council provided no guidance as to how this new representative assembly would be elected or how the diversity of Indigenous circumstance and experience could be fairly or democratically represented.”
“Moreover, the government does not believe such a radical change to our constitution’s representative institutions has any realistic prospect of being supported by a majority of Australians in a majority of states.”
- Statement by Malcom Turnbull’s government, The Guardian 27 October 2017
How far politics and ‘principles’ can change in 6 years is illustrated in the video clip below.
Thank God the Australian Working Peoples still have the principles that made our country so great and accordingly gave the Voice Referendum a resounding NO defeat.
ps: Interesting to see in the film clip above the Aboriginal activist, the young Teela Reid, pushing in a very self-indulgent way, the ideology in which she has been indoctrinated.
Fast forward six years and Teela’s open honesty on her intentions and her political ideology, actually greatly helped Australians in their decision to vote NO.
Thankyou Teela, for your great contribution to the 2023 No campaign!
Further Reading
1 - More recent Update and Summary by Malcolm Turnbull.
“… I [Turnbull] did not support entrenching a voice in the constitution in 2017 when it was formally proposed to us by the Referendum Council and neither did anyone else in my cabinet.
We said the proposal was not “desirable or capable of winning acceptance in a referendum”. Especially for those like me of an essentially republican, egalitarian mindset, having any institution in the constitution the qualification for which was other than Australian citizenship was hard to accept. After all, wasn’t that our case against the monarchy?
But the most fundamental objection was our very firm belief that it simply was not capable of being carried in a referendum. When I made this practical point to the Referendum Council in 2016 and 2017, I could tell that many of those listening were thinking “Poor old Malcolm, he’s still got PTSD from the republic referendum.”
Well, maybe I did, but I had a lot of experience too. I was concerned to note so many advocates of the voice amendment whose confidence in its success was uncluttered by the slightest practical experience of conducting a referendum or election campaign.
In the June 2017 Report of the Referendum Council, co-chairs Pat Anderson and Mark Leibler assured us that their consensus view was that the voice proposal was “modest, reasonable, unifying and capable of attracting the necessary support of the Australian people.”
Only one member of the council, the former senator Amanda Vanstone, wrote a clarifying report warning of the difficulty of achieving constitutional change, and the importance of building support for the design of the voice well in advance of going to a referendum, which to her horror, some members of the council argued could be held almost immediately in early 2018. As she sharply noted: “The reality of Australian politics is an unknown world to some people.”
- Excerpt from Malcolm Turnbull, The Guardian, 23 October 2023
