Noel Pearson

Last week, your correspondent asked a few questions about the “Uluru statement from the heart”, now a year old, and the proposed referendum question arising from it: one in which all Australians will be asked to authorise a particular quasi-parliamentary body, the Voice to Parliament, which, once embedded in the constitution, will have Indigenous representatives elected to it, and then negotiate a series of treaties between first peoples and settlers, to create a new Australian settlement. Your correspondent noted — as a potential voter on such — a number of questions about this: the tactical/strategic one of how such a baroquely complex political object would get past the fiendishly difficult process of a referendum, and what would happen if they achieved this wildly unlikely result?

My assessment was that the Voice to Parliament would almost certainly lose, and that if by some miracle it won, it would be an open target for the Coalition, who would paint it as a pointless talking-shop, and Labor, who would, judging by its record, condescend it relentlessly. These are questions that occurred not merely to me, as a seasoned political activist, but to many other “settlers” well disposed to a full treaty agreement: what was this Voice to Parliament? Where had it come from? For decades we had been lobbied to, and were willing to, support a treaty. One has just been agreed in Victoria, without an intermediary body being established. Now we were being asked to throw our weight behind a political Heath-Robinson machine, created in three days of discussion at Uluru, and presented as a fait accompli.

The article gained a boilerplate response from the national council, to which I replied. Business as usual, but little did your correspondent know that the very evening on which the article was published, Noel Pearson was speaking on this topic in Melbourne, to Melbourne white liberals, his last real fanbase, and explaining the plan in great detail. The Q and A, conducted with Megan Davis, included a five-minute personal rant about your correspondent, inaccurate in every detail, and bewildering to the audience, since Pearson failed to mention the article in question he was raving about.

That animus is largely irrelevant. What was significant was remarks about the post-Uluru process. “After Uluru, we got both our ducks in a row, and progressives should have got behind those ducks,” said Pearson, the Pericles of our time. He then grouched about the failure of major organisations to endorse the Uluru formula, moaning that groups like the Australian Medical Association had just come on board, and that the ACTU was yet to. The most likely reason was that organisations with large memberships felt it necessary to try and work out what the hell this thing was, before committing their scarce political capital to it.

What is striking about the response so far — to one article, which simply expressed one supporter’s basic bewilderment at the proposal — is the sheer arrogance with which such questions are greeted. This strikes me as bizarre. This writer will vote for pretty much whatever proposal is put on the ballot paper. But there are millions of others, well-disposed to notions of recognition, and (a lesser number) to a treaty, who will find the Voice to Parliament as bewildering as I have, in its arbitrariness, complexity, its direction away from the simple reciprocity of a treaty proposal, etc etc.

Surely, surely, answering the very basic questions I have about this proposal would be a useful exercise for the immense slog ahead, of selling the proposal to people like me? Is there some suspicion that even raising these questions is impertinent or bloody-minded? Is the proposition that a majority of votes and a majority of states will be won by a demand for unquestioning support for a proposal without much of a history or background? That is a big ask, even for a hardcore of non-Indigenous supporters. As a strategy for a double majority, it seems one of the most reckless gambles of all time.

There is much more to say about this, but for the moment one thing alone is worth mentioning. This is not offered, per se, as advice to Indigenous people, from that side of the debate. It is offered as raw response from the settler side, from which the vast majority of votes will have to come. It is offered within the basic framework that a treaty process creates: that it is not a historical award for effort by the conquerers to the conquered, as a way of writing off past sins. Nothing indicates a failure of the necessary reciprocity of treaty more than presenting a proposal that, to many, makes no damn sense. If Indigenous leaders want to spend the next few years shaking their heads in condescension at such, well then history to the defeated may say alas, but.