Almost sixteen years after he lost office and his own parliamentary seat, former Australian Liberal prime minister John Howard is still an influential political figure. Idolised by the right and demonised by the left, when Howard speaks, Australians still take notice.
When Howard spoke to the Australian newspaper to mark his 84th birthday this week, he told home truths as he sees them, in his trademark plain language style. The focus of Howard’s interview was the Australian Labor government’s drive to change the nation’s constitution to give Aborigines a race-based ‘Voice to parliament’.
It is becoming clear that the Voice referendum will be lost or won only narrowly
This would be a representative body of Aborigines, elected by Aborigines, to ‘advise’ the parliament and executive government on legislative and policy matters that may affect their communities. Changing the Australian constitution requires a referendum carried by a majority of four of the six states, as well as a majority of voters.
This required double majority ensures there have been very few changes to the constitution in the 123 years of its existence. One of them, however, was a 1967 proposal to recognise Aborigines by empowering the federal government to legislate for their needs. It was carried overwhelmingly by all states and 91 per cent of the compulsory vote.
The Voice – as it’s universally called in Australia – was the product of a declaration known as the ‘Uluru (Ayers Rock) Statement from the Heart’, a reform manifesto created by a convention of Aboriginal leaders and activists. The noble aim of the declaration was to improve Australia’s ability as a nation to redress intractable and disgraceful social, health and economic disadvantages suffered by far too many of the three per cent of Australians claiming Aboriginal heritage. It is generally supported by mainstream Australians.
Committed to by current prime minister Anthony Albanese on the night of his 2022 election, the referendum on the Voice has, however, been a bitterly divisive issue ever since. Those in favour argue that it is an essential prerequisite to redressing Aboriginal disadvantage and disempowerment, is what Aboriginal leaders have been asking for, and simply is ‘the right thing to do’.
Those against assert that while it is well-intentioned, the Voice will favour one racial group above all others, will not guarantee practical outcomes benefiting Aboriginal communities. They argue that, in the absence of detail, it will give a very small proportion of Australians potential vetoes over wide swathes of legislation and public policy, and could leave government decisions tied up in the courts if the Voice’s advice isn’t followed.
As for the referendum itself, Albanese has been badly spooked by Australia’s 1999 republic referendum, which failed due to a split amongst republicans over the model of government presented. As such, he has campaigned hard for the Voice as constitutional ‘recognition’ of Aborigines (as if 1967 never happened) while avoiding, at all costs, questions about what the Voice will look like and how it will work.
For Albanese, and pro-Voice activists, this vacuum of detail is proving fatal. Opinion polls indicate that Voice support is sliding from overwhelming majorities a year ago to the point where the referendum would now be lost both in the public and state votes.
Voters are increasingly following what former Labor prime minister Paul Keating once said of a Liberal proposal for an Australian VAT: ‘If you don’t understand it, don’t vote for it’. But that reasonable position is scorned by many pro-Voice activists, who not only have poured invective and vitriol on prominent opponents, but haven’t hesitated to imply that anyone who votes against the Voice is racist.
Enter John Howard. Speaking to the Australian, Howard characterised the race-based Voice debate as divisive, bitter and, above all, avoidable. ‘Shouldn’t we just be sitting down talking to each other?’, he asked. ‘Not about the Voice, not about reparations, not about treaties, but just talking about how to lift up Aboriginal people, and put them in the mainstream of the community, finding out ways of doing it. It’s going to be hard. It’s going to take a long time. It’s going to be less successful than we would like. But why are we doing this to ourselves?’
Howard went still further and addressed an elephant in the post-Black Lives Matter room: Britain’s colonisation of Australia almost 250 years ago. In Australia, as in some other former British colonies, activists are urging reparations for past injustices against native peoples. While his comments were denounced by his critics, including the BBC in its negative reporting of them and of Howard’s prime ministerial record on Aboriginal issues, Howard simply stated historical reality.
‘I’m totally opposed to (reparations). You have to understand that in the 17th, 18th century, colonisation of the land mass of Australia was next to inevitable,’ Howard said.
‘And I do hold the view that the luckiest thing that happened to this country was being colonised by the British. Not that they were perfect by any means, but they were infinitely more successful and beneficent colonisers than other European countries.’
Howard is right in so much that Australia could never have avoided the expansionist sweep of the Age of Empires. Both royalist and Napoleonic France sent expeditions to Australia in the wake of James Cook’s discovery of its east coast in 1770. In Europe’s imperialist 19th century scramble for colonies, had Britain not settled Australia, France or another less liberal continental power would have.
There is, however, no denying the death, disease and dispossession experienced by the first Australians due to British colonisation. But there was never such systematic and government-sanctioned exploitation, enslavement and destruction of native peoples as, for example, Belgium’s Leopold II inflicted on the native peoples of the Congo.
As Howard and another former Liberal prime minister Tony Abbott have pointed out, Australia’s British inheritance – especially constitutional monarchy, parliamentary democracy, an independent judiciary, and the common law – has been a huge factor in modern Australia becoming the stable, prosperous, and successfully diverse society it is. It’s something the near-unanimous outcome of the 1967 Aboriginal recognition referendum highlighted powerfully.
Howard’s intervention in the referendum debate won’t necessarily change minds, but he said what needed saying. It is becoming clear that, unlike 1967, the Voice referendum will be lost or won only narrowly, missing out on the overwhelming majority for either side that is essential for national cohesion.
Whoever wins, the result will be an Australia deeply divided. The popular goodwill towards Aboriginal Australians risks being dangerously eroded, and so much positive work done over decades to alleviate and overcome Aboriginal disadvantage to ‘close the gap’ is in grave danger of being undone.
As Howard asks, if this is the price, is this Voice truly worth it?
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