[Theme Music Starts]

ANGE:

From Schwartz Media, I’m Ange McCormack. This is 7am.

After the Voice to Parliament was rejected, attention has been on Canberra this week to ask, what’s next?

But for those who held out any hope our politicians had a plan to address Indigenous disadvantage, they were sorely mistaken.

Today, contributor to The Saturday Paper, Daniel James, on whether there’s a path to treaty, and what the debate will now look like in a new chapter of Indigenous Affairs.

It’s Friday, October 20th.

[Theme Music Ends]

ANGE:

So Daniel, Indigenous leaders called for a week of silence to mourn the Voice after it failed. But, you know, as scheduling had it, Parliament was back on Monday and there wasn't silence there. How has the fallout of the Voice been discussed in Canberra?

DANIEL:

Well, I think if the Albanese government had their time again, they probably wouldn't have had Parliament this week. We're saying all sorts of weird and wild machinations about, you know, why the Voice didn't work, why it went down as resoundingly as it did.

Malarndirri McCarthy has said that we could have done better - the “Yes” campaign that is.

Audio excerpt – Malarndirri McCarthy:

“I think we could have been greater if we'd enabled First Nations people to have their voices to the Australian Parliament. And so what we have to do now is regroup, reset…”

DANIEL:

Peter Dutton, as we always knew he would, has backed away from his calls for a second referendum into constitutional recognition only.

Audio excerpt – Peter Dutton:

“We've always said and right back to John Howard, all of my predecessors, we've all had the same view and that is that we should have constitutional recognition. But you can only do it when you're going to not be assured, but have, you know, pretty close to an assurance that you've got a bipartisan position and success at the constitutional referendum now.”

DANIEL:

There are calls now from the Greens for a Truth and Justice Commission.

Audio excerpt – Adam Bandt:

“It's clear that we need a process where First Nations people and everyone else are now able to come together to tell the stories about the history of this country and what it means for them.”

DANIEL:

And Deputy Prime Minister Richard Marles has come out and said that it was the right result.

Audio excerpt – David Speers (ABC):

“So did the Australian people get it right with this decision?”

Audio excerpt – Richard Marles:

“The Australian people always get it right.”

DANIEL:

But to say that that's the right result, I think is a gross misreading of the nature of the debate and the end result itself.

Audio excerpt – Richard Marles:

“The Australian people always get it right and we absolutely accept this result and...’

DANIEL:

If you look at the official map from the AEC that goes down to the granular level of polling booths, blue marking “No”, orange marking “Yes”, you will see it is tinged with blue around the edges. But then in the black heart of Australia, up through the north, you see all these orange spots at polling booths in remote and regional areas in the Northern Territory, Western Australia and Queensland, where there are a lot of First Nations dominated communities. The vote for “Yes” was resounding and so any sort of representations from the conservative “No” side in terms of whether they had their finger on the pulse of those communities while the electoral map shows that they absolutely did not.

But the biggest and most telling thing from this week is that neither side had a plan B. No one has any firm plans whatsoever in terms of moving forward from here.

ANGE:

Mm. And throughout our 7am series, you talked a lot about truth, and we know how important truth telling is when it comes to indigenous issues. But the referendum campaign was plagued by lies. How were truths and lies reflected on this week?

Audio excerpt – Speaker in Parliament:

“And I give a call to the honourable Member for Warringah.”

Audio excerpt – Zali Steggall:

“Thank you, Mr. Speaker, to the Prime Minister. Consumers are protected from commercial conduct and advertising that is misleading and deceptive.”

DANIEL:

Well, independent MP Zali Steggall has a “Stop the Lies” bill that she has been talking about for months. Really ever since she was re-elected to her seat at last year's election.

Audio excerpt – Zali Steggall:

“Will you support my bill or introduce legislation without delay to provide voter protections in political advertising consistent with existing consumer protections?”

DANIEL:

And in response to Zali Steggall's bill, if the Prime Minister expressed concern but failed to commit to any real action on this front.

Audio excerpt – Anthony Albanese:

“The challenge which we have of dealing with this, it's complex. You don't want to interfere with any freedom of expression…”

DANIEL:

And look, if we had that bill and there was some sort of semblance of truth in advertising, then the vast majority of the “No” ads would have to at least preface some of the material with, you know, the Aboriginal people you're hearing from in this advertisement don't represent the vast majority of Aboriginal people. It's something that we desperately….I personally think we desperately need in the lead up to the next election because what we've seen throughout the referendum is that the conservative side of politics has tried Trumpian politics, trying to establish a different dimension for truth and for political advertising and for campaigning. If we don't have a bill like that in the lead up to the next election, and it's got to be more than just radio and television spending, it's going to apply to social media as well, then we're well on the path to Trumpian type of politics and a post-truth democracy as we've seen in the US.

ANGE:

And, you know, political advertising and lies and political advertising is one thing, but there were plenty of lies outside of the advertising context, right?

DANIEL:

Yeah, absolutely. One of the big lies was purporting to represent grassroots communities, saying that the vast majority of people in remote and regional communities in remote Australia through the Northern Territory up to the Top End, didn't support the Voice, and they of course wasn't enough curiosity from the press gallery as to check whether those claims were true. And as we've seen on Saturday night and as the week has rolled on those orange dots and the electoral map has grown broader and broader, showing that the remote communities of Northern Territory, Western Australia, Queensland resoundingly wanted the Voice. So that was one lie that was told.

But there were so many other lies told around things like the history of this place, around intergenerational trauma, around the spend on Aboriginal dollars, which all went into an overall narrative which gave people on set down an easy out. If paper were a soft “Yes”, there was enough there within the “No” campaign to make them a soft “No”. If people were soft "No”, they became a hard “No” and you know the result speaks for itself.

ANGE:

And on Jacinta Price, she really became the leader of the “No” side to an extent. But she did agree that there are Indigenous issues to address. So, you know, I guess the floor is hers. She got the result she wanted. What's her plan, if not the Voice?

DANIEL:

From the Conservative side of politics, having now voted down the Voice, she has herself become the “Voice”. She's clearly going to be the person that the Coalition listens to on matters like this.

Audio excerpt – Jacinta Price:

“I rise today to speak on the urgent need for Prime Minister Albanese and the Labor Government to support the Coalition's call for a Royal Commission into child sexual abuse in Indigenous communities.”

DANIEL:

This week she tabled a motion in the Senate to hold a commission into Indigenous child sexual abuse, but that was voted down.

Audio excerpt – Jacinta Price:

“I have never been so incredibly furious to have to sit through and listen to the speeches being made by members of this Parliament as to why they are denying the voices of vulnerable children to be heard.”

DANIEL:

We've had a plethora of Royal Commissions reports, coronial reports, coronial inquest. You can stack them as high as a skyscraper into things like child sexual abuse in remote communities. We don't need another one.

From my perspective, it was just a point that she raised to sort of build her credentials within the Parliament after the referendum. And of course she's used that to try and paint the Greens and some of the independent senators and of course the Government as not being serious about addressing issues like that.

And in the lead up to the next election will be interesting to see what happens to Jacinta Price's profile because we have an opposition that is clearly not interested in Indigenous affairs. And so what that means for the shadow Minister for Indigenous Australians remains to be seen.

ANGE:

After the break – is it possible to move towards a treaty now that the Voice has been defeated?

[Advertisement]

ANGE:

Daniel, on Sunday when you joined us, we talked about the Uluru Statement from the Heart being dead. And many people this week are trying to grapple with another way forward for reconciliation now and are looking to treaty. Can you tell me where that effort is now?

DANIEL:

Well, the idea of treaty was dangled in front of the Australian people throughout the course of the campaign by people on the conservative “No” side, and people on the progressive “No” side, as a way forward, as something that would be better and more meaningful than the Voice. Now, that's all fine and good. That's a very noble thing. And I'm personally someone who believes in treaty, but in terms of the work that needs to be done to get to a national treaty. There is a barren landscape when it comes to treaty.

Treaty is a very, very difficult outcome to achieve. Otherwise it would have happened by now. And so we're in a place where the leadership that took Australia and indigenous people to a referendum are spent. They're exhausted. They're undertaking a week silence. We don't know what their position will be after this, but at the moment there is no leadership from within the Indigenous community to be able to create a movement that will get us to treaty.

And so therefore again, that sort of highlights the shallowness of some people within the campaign, people like Warren Mundine, who said that a treaty would start to be negotiated the day after the referendum went down. Well, I haven't seen much of Warren on that front. I haven't seen any sort of big movement towards treaty.

We're seeing treaties in states like Victoria and Queensland. Let's just stick with Victoria, for instance, where members of the Opposition here are now calling for the treaty to be scrapped. We're seeing that the Opposition in Queensland already back-pedalling on their commitment to the treaty process.

So it's hard to see where a treaty process will come from. You need a number of things. For a treaty process to happen, you need a goodwill. In the light of Saturday's result, I would suggest that there's not a lot of goodwill going around at the moment. You need political will, but the Albanese Government's not going to want to touch this with a bargepole, certainly during this term of government. They are now in the fight of their lives to make sure that they get a second term with cost of living pressures and a whole range of other issues that people love that are affecting people.

ANGE:

They can't afford to go off to something and lose it again.

DANIEL:

Exactly. This spent a tremendous amount of political capital here. Thankfully for them, it's not actually showing in the polls, but they can't afford to spend any more political capital on issues like these, issues that don't resonate with the vast majority of Australians, because the result on Saturday shows that the vast majority of Australians don't care about these issues.

Hmm. so there's no political will, there's no goodwill within the Australian community. And for it to happen there will need to be a grassroots movement from First Nations people, tribal groups, language groups and clan groups to come together and sit together and come up with a path towards treaty. Now that's what the Voice possibly could have been.

ANGE:

It could have certainly given a sort of structure to how that negotiation would happen, right? Because you would have this body of elected officials who could do exactly that.

DANIEL:

Exactly. A body of elected officials, those outlined in the Calma-Langton report, which could have sat around at the table and, you know, basically put the meat on the bones of what a treaty process would actually look like. But we're now five steps behind that point.

ANGE:

And Daniel, as we head into the next chapter of Indigenous affairs, I wonder what you think the nature of the debate and discussion and action will be. You know, I was listening to Isabella Higgins this week on the ABC talk about this idea that the Voice is a line in the sand for how Indigenous leaders might negotiate in future that, you know, the debate and language from them might not be so kind and friendly anymore. How do you see it?

DANIEL:

Well, I think the Uluru Statement from the Heart was a generous offering. It was a peaceful offering. It was an offering that was there to strengthen Australia's democracy and strengthen Australia's understanding of the plight of First Nations people, but also the true history of this place.

Audio excerpt – Isabella Higgins:

“This failing, this being rejected so categorically by all Australians. It will change the way Indigenous Australians want to interact with the rest of the country. It will change whether kindness is the best approach.”

DANIEL:

I think there's a lot of anger in what Isabella said. I think there's a lot of anger floating about the place both through Indigenous communities but also the communities of allies around the country as well.

Audio excerpt – Isabella Higgins:

“Often in the community it is well understood that Blak anger is not tolerated. And so we see leaders pull in their rage, pull in their sadness, and constantly use language of generosity, use graciousness to try and appeal to the Australian people. And after this, I think there will be a generation of leaders who have been burnt by this.”

DANIEL:

I think it's going to take a lot of time for the dust settle on this, but I think the scars will run deep and run deep for a long time. People now walking the streets of Australia and particularly regional Australia, will no longer see friendly faces in their mind. They won't see people that could potentially be an ally with some of these issues affecting Indigenous communities. Some of the highest populations in Victoria, for instance, some of those townships where there are large populations of First Nations people resoundingly voted against the Voice. So you've just got to wonder what it means for not only reconciliation but for the social cohesion of some of these remote communities and regional communities.

ANGE:

Daniel, thanks so much for your time today.

DANIEL:

Pleasure.

[Advertisement]

[Theme Music Starts]

ANGE:

Also in the news today…

More than 30 Australian Aid groups have signed an open letter to Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, urging the Australian government to use its influence to seek an urgent ceasefire between Hamas and Israel.

It comes as the Australian Government has updated its travel guidance for Lebanon, telling Australians not to travel to the country as tensions escalate in the Middle East.

And…

The Federal Liberal Party has failed in a last-ditch attempt at preventing the ACT from decriminalising small amounts of illegal drugs for personal use.

WA Senator Michaelia Cash alleged that the change, which would see fines replace criminal charges in some instances, would lead to people from Sydney travelling to the ACT to do as many as ‘fifteen lines’ during trips to Canberra.

7am is a daily show from The Monthly and The Saturday Paper.

It’s produced by Kara Jensen-Mackinnon, Zoltan Fecso, Cheyne Anderson, Yeo Choong, and Sam Loy.

Our senior producer is Chris Dengate. Our technical producer is Atticus Bastow.

Our editor is Scott Mitchell. Sarah McVeigh is our head of audio.

Erik Jensen is our editor-in-chief.

Mixing by Andy Elston, Travis Evans, and Atticus Bastow.

Our theme music is by Ned Beckley and Josh Hogan of Envelope Audio.

I’m Ange McCormack, this is 7am. We’ll be back next week.

[Theme Music Ends]