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RUBY:

From Schwartz Media, I’m Ruby Jones. This is 7am.

This year, Peter Dutton has begun to spread doubt about the Voice to Parliament. His question is: where’s the detail?

One woman has spent years putting detail to the proposal. Marcia Langton co-authored a report on the Voice, and briefed every party room in Canberra about what the model could look like.

Today, Professor Marcia Langton, on the details of the Voice to Parliament, and what’s at stake if Australia gets this moment wrong.

It’s Tuesday, January 17.

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RUBY:

So Marcia in recent weeks we’ve heard the Leader of the Opposition, Peter Dutton, as well as others, in the media, and in politics claim that there isn’t enough “detail” on the Voice to parliament, and that more information needs to be released.

Archival tape – Peter Dutton:

“We want the detail and I think millions of Australians want the detail. And it's not unreasonable to ask the Prime Minister for the detail…”

RUBY:

…and as that line has come into focus, it's become clear that that's the opposition's current strategy when it comes to the Voice.

Archival tape – Peter Dutton:

“It's all about, frankly, just being informed about what it is they're being asked to vote on…”

RUBY:

Can you tell me what you’ve thought as you’ve heard that?

MARCIA:

Well, yes. What the Opposition Leader Peter Dutton, is doing with this strategy is twofold. First of all, he's denying that there's any detail, which is absolutely not true, and I've outlined all of the detail across three major reports, and there's much more that I didn’t have space to talk about.

On top of denying that there is detail, he's putting the pressure on Anthony Albanese, the Prime Minister, to set out the detail.

Now the problem with Dutton's position, is that, once again Dutton is insisting that government dictate all policy and initiatives relating to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. Whereas Voice advocates are saying “No, the Voice would enable Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people to participate in decision making about us.” And so you see from the very outset, Dutton is ruling out any possibility that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people should have a say in these decisions. And he's insisting that only the government should outline Voice detail.

So there is detail, but you know who will present it? Well, the government’s position is that the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander advocates for the Voice should present it to the public, and there will be no government funding for either a yes position or a no position. So we're in this dilemma where Albanese wants Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people to present the information and the Opposition Leader insists that it should be the government that presents the information.
So, it's not true that Peter Dutton hasn't seen the detail that's proposed. He saw it in cabinet twice. He's trying to skewer Albanese into a nasty debate, and take away the Voice of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people once again.

RUBY:

And to stay on the detail for a moment, can you talk to me about some of your work and some of what's in your report, some of the answers that already exist to the questions that people like Peter Dutton are posing?

MARCIA:

So, there are a number of key points that we made that all Australians should be aware of. One is that we recommended up to 35 regions where regional or local Voice arrangements would be established.

And the way in which those local or regional voice arrangements are established would be based on the principle of self-determination. It's up to the local people to determine that.

But what we insisted on, in our recommendations, is that any such arrangements comply with nine principles. And they include, for instance, inclusivity, by which we mean, obviously, gender equity, including youth, including disabled people.

We recommended that all candidates for any representative position be fit and proper persons. We recommended cultural authority be part of the local arrangements. And of course, one of the important principles was transparency and accountability.

We went to over 60 communities, and we ended up consulting with over 10,000 people.

We ensured that also — and this is a very important point — there be extra positions allocated to remote Australians, so that because of their extreme disadvantage, they would be well represented on the national body.

So what we envisage would happen at this stage [is that] that legislation would be tabled after the referendum — should it be successful — and that it would go through the normal parliamentary process. That is, that the legislation would go to a committee, there'd be public hearings, there'd be an opportunity for debate where it's possible to make amendments to the bill.

RUBY:

And there have been other voices beyond Peter Dutton - other politicians and commentators who oppose the Voice. People like Jacinta Price who argue that: this won’t actually help those who live in remote parts of Australia. Some of that criticism has become quite personal - towards yourself and people like Linda Burney. Did you expect the debate to turn that way, and what do you make of the things that have been said recently?

MARCIA:

Well, it tells you a lot about the character of these people, that their first political play was to turn nasty and personal towards the Minister Linda Burney, towards myself and others, and to to make statements that are deliberately disingenuous.

Archival tape – Jacinta Price:

“Minister Burney might be able to take a private jet out into a remote community, dripping with Gucci, and tell people in the dirt what's good for them. But they are in the dark.”

MARCIA:

So let's deal with the substance of their claims. Jacinta Price says that the Voice won't make any difference to the disadvantage that Indigenous people face…

Archival tape – Jacinta Price:

“We do have a hell of a lot of marginalised Australians, and those people are largely out of sight, out of mind. Those people, do not speak English as a first language, and those people still live very much along the lines of traditional culture. They are who we should be focussed on. Unfortunately this voice model is about empowering the elites.”

MARCIA:

Well the worldwide understanding based on health data, of the best way to improve the health of anybody, is to ensure that policy settings, service settings and so on, include local people in decision making about their health.

This is a long term policy issue that must be tackled, and I could name 50 others, but this is a very important one.

No one has ever dealt adequately with that policy. And you'll never hear the likes of Jacinta Price and Warren Mundine, rising issues of, you know, what foods are available to people living in rural and remote communities. I mean, they’re simply absent whenever, you know, these difficult policy questions come up.

So, of course, the Voice is going to tackle these issues. That's what it's designed to do, and yes, it will make a difference Because it will bring the local and regional input — such as the kind of detail I'm giving you now — into the national debate.

RUBY:

Right and so where do we end up then with the claim that more detail is needed? What do you think the real intent behind this is, not only for someone like Jacinta Price who is very open about not supporting the Voice, but for someone like Opposition Leader Peter Dutton who, at this moment, is more vague about where he stands?

MARCIA:

Well, the real intent is to run a no campaign to encourage Australians to vote no, based on the lie that there is no detail. That's the real intent, to put it very simply. So it's a sneaky way of running a no campaign.

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RUBY:

Marcia, this current debate over the Voice to Parliament - it's not the first time in Australian history Indigenous people have seen their right to representation, and to sovereignty, become fodder in a national debate. If we go back to the nineties, to John Howard’s time, the debate was around the idea of ‘reconciliation” – and that debate, it quickly calcified along some hard lines. Tell me about what happened. There is one particular convention, I think in 1997 - when things came to a head. So could you tell me about it?

MARCIA:

Oh that was a dreadful day in Australian history.

So I was present, at the 1997 Reconciliation Convention, here in Melbourne, and I was sitting down the front and I was actually reduced to tears by the the tragedy of it all. So I'll just tell you a little bit about what happened.

Archival tape – Reporter:

“Hailed as the crossroads for black and white relations, it was John Howard’s day to regain the trust of Aboriginal Australia.”

MARCIA:

Now remember The Stolen Generation’s report, the report entitled Bringing Them Home. This report was being tabled in Parliament the next day, and so the room was tense with anxiety about what the findings might be. Quite a few people from the Stolen Generations were present at the convention.

Archival tape – Reporter:

“The Prime Minister initially received a traditional warm welcome”

MARCIA:

So there were goings on on the stage, you know, people preparing, and one of the members of the Stolen Generation, walked up on stage and grabbed the microphone.

Archival tape – Member of The Stolen Generation:

"For the last 209 years we have had a foreign culture shoved down our throat.”

MARCIA:

She gave an impassioned speech about what had happened to her, and her family, and others, who had been victims of forcible removal from their families, under the policies of assimilation that John Howard so ferociously supported.

And all the Aboriginal people in the room understood perfectly well that this was not part of the formal proceedings. However, John Howard thought it was part of the formal proceedings.

Archival tape – Guest Speaker:

“Can I introduce to you the Prime Minister of Australia, The Honourable John Howard…”

MARCIA:

You could see John Howard was very tense and twitchy. And, you know, two paragraphs into his speech that he read out, he started slamming the lectern, and screaming at everybody in the audience.

Archival tape – John Howard:

“Reconciliation will not work if it puts a higher value on symbolic gestures and overblown promises. It will not work if it is premised solely on a sense of national guilt and shame.”

MARCIA:

And you know, this is where he made the famous statement that white Australians shouldn't be held to account for what had happened in the past to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders.

Archival tape – John Howard:

“Australians of this generation should not be required to accept guilt and blame for past actions and policies over which they had no control.”

MARCIA:

He said it very brutally, and it was a very cruel and nasty thing to say. And you could tell that clearly he saw us as troublesome left-wingers, even though many people in the room were, you know, from governments around the world involved in major aboriginal organisations. He never could see us as ordinary Australian citizens building this nation. He always saw us as the enemy.

RUBY:

But do you see similarities between Howard's response back then and what we're hearing now from some conservative politicians and commentators?

MARCIA:

It's the same language. John Howard had a speechwriter invent the phrase for him “practical reconciliation, not symbolic reconciliation.” And for him, that was that, you know, that old conservative white Australia view, that Anglican view that, you know, the poor and disadvantaged have brought their position on themselves because they don't work hard enough, the government's role is to give them a bit of charity, but, you know, it's really up to them to pull their shoelaces up and get themselves out of their situation. Ignoring the fact that, you know, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people had been totally excluded from the economy, used as indentured and slave labour, deprived of housing, deprived of education. He maintained the fantasy of the charitable white Australians helping the disadvantaged race.

He thought of us as incapable of being a part of Australian society. And hence, you know, he and Mal Brough developed the Northern Territory Emergency Intervention. You know if you look under the sheets, what you find is 19th century racism.

Archival tape – John Howard:

“What I’ve said is that symbolic gestures alone don’t solve the problem, and I have placed an emphasis on practical measures, and that was what the Northern Territory Intervention was all about.”

MARCIA:

You hear the same language now.

Aboriginal people are not allowed to have symbols. We can only have practical reconciliation.

Archival tape – Peter Dutton:

“I understand the importance of symbolism to many people within the Indigenous community, but what’s most important to me is the practical actions, the way in which we can reduce the incidence of sexual violence within Indigenous communities.”

MARCIA:

It’s exactly the same language.

RUBY:

Over the coming months, people are going to be weighing up where they want their vote to go. And it seems like as that happens, as we get closer, the debates are only going to intensify. So I just kind of wanted to ask you, what is at stake here? What happens if this does, as it seems like we're in danger of happening… What if this becomes just another culture war battle? What opportunity are we going to lose if we get bogged down in these debates?

MARCIA:

The progress in the last 25 years towards giving Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people a place in the political fabric of Australia has been too slow, and governments have been too… well I’ll say it out loud, racist, to accommodate Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people as part of the political fabric. And almost nothing has worked to overcome the terrible disadvantages. And the conservatives have been in power for the majority of the time, and they have been abysmal failures at closing the gap. They have in fact made the situation much much worse.

So here we have an opportunity for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, through the Voice, to participate in decision making to overcome these problems, and basically give us full citizenship rights, as participants in the Australian democracy rather than as, you know, mendicants on the edges.

If Australians vote no to the Voice, they will be rejecting the only remedy to that situation, and we will forever be a racist country and doom us, the first peoples of this country, to a never ending disadvantage, and an inability to have a say in our own affairs and fix the problem. Nobody else can fix it, only we can fix it. We have to do so in collaboration, and in co-design with others. But imposed policy has caused this problem. Policy imposed from the top to the bottom is the major problem.

RUBY:

Marcia, thank you so much for your time.

MARCIA:

Thank you.

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RUBY:

Also in the news today,

Australia’s richest 1 percent actually increased their wealth during the pandemic by 61 percent.

According to the latest Oxfam report into wealth disparity, Australia has 11 more billionaires today than in 2020.

The report also showed a wealth tax in Australia could raise nearly $30 billion per year. It called on governments around the world to scrap tax cuts for the wealthy.

and

There’s little hope for any survivors from Nepal’s deadliest plane crash in three decades.

Authorities say the plane was traveling from the capital, Kathmandu, to the city of Pokhara on Sunday morning when it crashed into a gorge. Rescuers have retrieved 68 bodies, but efforts have been hampered by the steep terrain.

The plane had 72 people on board, including one Australian.

I’m Ruby Jones, this is 7am, see you tomorrow.

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