There is a general presumption that opposition to the indigenous Voice to parliament and the executive government is a natural position for conservatives and classical liberals. 

But what about the Left? Is there a case against the Voice that people who see themselves as left-wing, or progressive, could find persuasive?

To most people nowadays that might seem inconceivable, especially given that every left-of-centre force in Australia, broadly defined to include “wet” Liberals as well as all factions of the Labor Party, the Greens, right out to the loopiest Trotskyist sects, all are for it.

Not to mention all the main cultural institutions, the NGO sector, the media, the arts. Good grief—even the big corporates are in favour! But hang on, doesn’t the Left aspire to disempower the wealthy, to redistribute their wealth and economic power? How come they are on our side of the barriers?

Well, that used to be the case. A funny sort of thing, this Left that is in bed, so to speak, with its traditional enemies. What is going on?

What has happened over the past few decades is that what passes for progressive ideology has undergone a transformation, the identarian revolution, that has replaced the old concern with class distinctions with a new set of distinctions based on inherited characteristics like race, gender, sexual orientation, and so on.

The big corporates find this new identarian Left much more congenial, posing no threat to their bottom line. Better, they can even enthusiastically join in the virtue signalling!

Marxism has been replaced by “Cultural Marxism”, an oxymoron that stands classical Marxism, that saw economic forces and relations of production as fundamental, with culture a mere epiphenomenon, on its head.

Cultural Marxism, as it is called, had its origins with the Frankfurt School in the 1920s, cooked up by a group of radical theorists disappointed with the failure of the European proletariat to rise up and overthrow the capitalist system in the wake of the first world war.

They formulated Critical Theory, which in recent decades has developed multiple variants, most relevantly Critical Race Theory (CRT), which now has a dominant position throughout Western academia.

And not just academia. As generations of graduates pass out into the labour force, into government jobs, media, politics, the arts, the corporate sector (with HR departments a key vector), its influence has become pervasive.

Even the military, with the US Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Mark Milley, talking about the need to understand white rage, a key CRT concept, in congressional testimony last year.

You wonder what Herbert Marcuse, one of the originators of Critical Theory, who discussed the idea of a “long march through the institutions” with the German radical Rudi Dutschke in the late 1960s, would make of all this if he was brought back to life.

Maybe he would have been elated, until he saw some of the postmodern Left’s current allies. Maybe the Long March hasn’t challenged the centres of capitalist power after all!

Nowhere has this transformation been more complete than on attitudes to race and racism. So much so that the modern identarian, or if you like woke, Left has effectively embraced views that earlier generations of leftists would have rejected as retrograde, atavistic, obnoxious, indeed reactionary—the worst epithet that an old leftist could level against a person or idea. You can still find that perspective, albeit in very small pockets, among far leftists who stick to the old tradition.

Having been around left-wing politics since the late 1960s, I never cease to be amazed by this transformation.

With the effect of the identarian revolution on left-wing thought front of mind, let’s consider the Voice, juxtaposing the views of the older, better, left with those who nowadays consider themselves progressive.

Firstly, the Left used to be implacably opposed to racial discrimination in all its manifestations. Now, it selectively favours it, if it is deemed necessary to achieve “social justice”, by which they mean the enforcement of group rights for oppressed identities.

The American race ideologue Ibram X. Kendi has expressed this view most emphatically in his book How to Be An Antiracist, in which he states that “the only remedy to negative racist discrimination that produces inequity is positive antiracist discrimination that produces equity.”

Got that? Antiracist racial discrimination. War is peace. Freedom is slavery.

The Voice, as proposed, is clearly racially discriminatory. It creates an additional instrument whereby a racially defined group is provided an additional means to exert influence on the parliament and government, on all matters that can affect aboriginal people, effectively just about anything. Given that it confers a constitutionally guaranteed right to make representations, there is an implied obligation on parliament and the government to consider them.

Furthermore, it contravenes the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (ICERD), to which Australia is a signatory. Article 1.1 defines racial discrimination as follows:

…any distinction, exclusion, restriction or preference based on race, colour, descent, or national or ethnic origin which has the purpose or effect of nullifying or impairing the recognition, enjoyment or exercise, on an equal footing, of human rights and fundamental freedoms in the political, economic, social, cultural or any other field of public life.

The Sky News host Chris Kenny has claimed that the Voice discriminates based on aboriginal descent, not race. But that is a distinction without a difference. In normal parlance, race is all about descent, and notice that the convention brackets together “race, colour, descent”.

Some of the defenders of the Voice refer to Article 1.4 which allows for “special measures” to secure advancement and effective exercise of human rights for particularly disadvantaged racial or ethnic groups. However, the same article makes clear that such measures should not be seen as permanent but temporary and should expire once their objectives are achieved—a view upheld by the US Supreme Court in recent rulings on affirmative action.

In the case of the Voice, however, the whole point of inclusion in the Constitution, as stated repeatedly by its advocates, is to ensure that it is permanent. Moreover, the Statement of Compatibility with Human Rights that accompanied the Voice legislation states “the Voice would be an enduring institution”.

It is remarkable how little discussion there has been about this problem. The people, especially the legal experts, who advocate for the Voice are generally very preoccupied with Australia’s compliance with international law, including UN instruments to which Australia is signatory.

So far, the only people who have even mentioned the issue, as far as I have been able to determine, are Voice opponents Janet Albrechtsen and Chris Merritt, writing in these pages. As far as Voice advocates are concerned, there seems to be a cone of silence about Article 1 of this convention.

For example, in an article that appeared in The Conversation, Professor Gabrielle Appleby of the University of NSW law school, and two of her legal colleagues, purport to answer ten questions about the Voice, including whether it breaches international human rights standards. Incredibly, it makes no reference whatsoever to ICERD.

And this omission is not confined to opinion articles. The Statement of Compatibility with Human Rights, which accompanies the legislation that enables the Voice referendum to proceed, refers only to Article 5 of ICERD, not the one that defines and prohibits racial discrimination, as does the Australian Human Rights Commission in its article about the Voice’s compatibility with human rights.

This is all quite strange. It seems opposition to racial discrimination is not such a big deal nowadays, for human rights experts, legal authorities, and the Left. In fact, it is OK, provided of course it is “antiracist” racial discrimination.

The second dramatic change in the Left’s perspective on race concerns the attitude toward racial vilification.

The Left used to unqualifiedly condemn racial vilification, the deprecation or abuse of people based on skin colour, or some other racial characteristic. There were no inferior or superior races; there was no hierarchy of merit grounded in racial characteristics. The aspiration of Martin Luther King that everyone be judged by the content of their character, not the colour of their skin, was the guiding principle.

Now, we live in an age of racial guilt, where vilification is licensed—provided it is directed to the right targets, of which there are two. According to modern “progressive” orthodoxy, in academia and increasingly elsewhere, racial identity marks you as either one of the oppressed, or an oppressor—the possessor of unearned racial privilege.

The first racial category it is OK to vilify is, of course, the category of “white people”, who possess the property of “whiteness”, from which flow all manner of pathologies, including “white” ways of thinking that value objectivity, empirical verification, a strong work ethic, a characterization which genuine white supremacists would loudly cheer.

The remarkable thing about modern progressive racial vilification, which contrasts with earlier times where it came mainly from right-wing roughnecks, is that some of the worst expressions come with a scholarly veneer.

Consider the following, excerpted from an episode of the ABC Radio National program, The Minefield, in an episode with the interesting title Wrong to be White. The program featured two academic commentators on racial issues, and was moderated by the person who runs the ABC’s religion and ethics website, Scott Stephens.

The discussants made clear that, in their view, there was indeed something gravely wrong with being white. According to Stephens (41 minutes in):

The great moral debility about being white is that people have wilfully chosen the trinkets and accoutrements of the accretions of power and privilege over a much more fundamental bondedness with other human beings … I mean that is, if we were speaking in a theological register, we would call that a tremendous and even radical sin.

So, according to Scott Stephens, “being white” is a “tremendous or even radical sin”. It inverts the old racist notion, used to justify slavery, that black skin was the Mark of Cain. Instead of aiming for a world where there are no moral hierarchies based on race, the CRT brigade want an inverted hierarchy. And they call this antiracism?

One particularly pernicious development is the introduction of this stuff into schools, including primary schools. After all, the cultivation of racial awareness is too important a priority to be left to later stages of the education/indoctrination process.

In the US, Britain, and Australia, we see programs to cultivate heightened racial awareness being brought in at the primary school level, a development celebrated in a two-part documentary by (who else?) our ABC. The program is almost identical to a program of the same name in the UK.

Here is the British original:

And here is the Aussie carbon-copy (not very original, our ABC):

This mentality, the concept of racial guilt, and liability to provide redress for past wrongs, pervades the larger agenda that stands behind the Voice proposal, and is expected to follow from it, if the referendum is successful: the process of treaty making, “truth telling”, and of course reparations.

So, the first category of people it is OK to vilify are “white people”, most of which vilification is done by other white people, often academic types able to express their vilification in scholarly language.

The other category it is legitimate to vilify—in even more egregious terms—are certain “people of colour”, members of racial categories deemed oppressed, who decline to stick to the script the identarians deem appropriate to their racial identity.

As the superlatively woke American Congress member Ayanna Pressley put it, “we don’t need more brown faces that don’t want to be a brown voice, or black faces that don’t want to be a black voice”.

You see, oppressed people are expected to speak collectively, to represent faithfully the approved narrative for their group. They should know that deprecating your own culture is strictly a whites-only privilege!

In Australia, we see people like Jacinta Nampijinpa Price, her mother Bess, Warren Mundine and Anthony Dillon being subjected to this form of abuse, denounced as Uncle Toms, especially on social media, up to and including death threats. In America, a sinister new term has come into use in academia to describe such deviants: Native Informant, redolent with insinuations of treachery and treason.

Jacinta Price has been most prominent—indeed, she has emerged as the outstanding figure in the Voice debate on either side. She has been a real change agent, whose influence has been crucial in getting the initially prevaricating Peter Dutton to take a clear-cut stand against the Voice.

It is a position grounded in what she experienced growing up in Central Australia. Her mother Bess is a full-blooded aboriginal whose father had his first encounter with a white person as an adolescent. To use a favourite term of postmodern academia, she has the “lived experience” to refute the claim that the problems of indigenous communities are mainly a legacy of colonialism, a claim she peremptorily dismissed when it was put to her by a Guardian journalist at her National Press Club speech, to the shocked astonishment of the latter.

Here is the biggest problem that progressive orthodoxy has with Price: she is an actual truth teller, not the kind of “truth teller” who insists that everything about indigenous culture is benign, that things like dominance, oppression of women, hierarchies, and violence were unknown in Australia before British colonisation. You can actually find this sort of absurd claim in academic literature.

She has been prepared to state the truth, as experienced by her, that violence, and the concealment of violence, are a feature of indigenous culture, and that any policies to address the problem that fail to take account of that are likely to fail, and to leave vulnerable people living in remote communities at risk.

In an important speech titled Homeland Truths, made in 2016, Price expressed extreme frustration with the utter disinterest of human rights activists, lawyers and feminists in helping to address these problems in a realistic way. As she found, the need to protect severely at-risk people was trumped by a concept of “cultural respect” that rules out acknowledgement of negative features.

In the same speech, Price spoke eloquently against the culture-as-prison mentality favoured by the identarian race ideologues:

Why is it that we should remain stifled and live by 40,000-year-old laws when the rest of the world has had the privilege of evolution within their cultures, so that they may survive in a modern world?

Price and her indigenous allies desperately want to see realistic policies that will allow their people to advance. No more symbolic gestures, or new bureaucracies, no more buckets of money thrown at ineffective policies.

As Price said in her National Press Club speech, what is needed is to drop the ideological blinkers and conduct the most exacting scrutiny of the huge sums being devoted to aboriginal programs to ensure they are achieving their objectives.

That is the genuinely progressive view, if the word means anything at all.