'cos Aussies love racism
Specific groups and races have no place in Australia’s constitution. Find another way.
You say this as someone who has at least skimmed the constitution, right? I ask because here’s the first couple of paragraphs of our constitution - the bolding is mine…
Whereas the people of New South Wales, Victoria, South Australia, Queensland, and Tasmania, humbly relying on the blessing of Almighty God, have agreed to unite in one indissoluble Federal Commonwealth under the Crown of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, and under the Constitution hereby established:
And whereas it is expedient to provide for the admission into the Commonwealth of other Australasian Colonies and possessions of the Queen:
Be it therefore enacted by the Queen’s most Excellent Majesty, by and with the advice and consent of the Lords Spiritual and Temporal, and Commons, in this present Parliament assembled, and by the authority of the same, as follows:
But yeah - if you put aside the huge chunk of the text calling out specific individuals and groups throughout the entire document, you’re right.
Referendums are always such a spineless way out of doing the right thing.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Australians look set to reject a referendum proposal to recognise Indigenous people in the constitution by creating a body to advise parliament, with polls showing a clear majority for no in almost all states before Saturday’s vote.
The yes campaign has also been battered by the Blak sovereignty movement, which has led the progressive no case, arguing the voice would be powerless while pushing for truth and treaty to come ahead of constitutional recognition.
The no campaign has leaned heavily on the slogan “If you don’t know, vote no”, which former high court justice Robert French described as an invitation to “resentful, uninquiring passivity”.
The Australian prime minister, Anthony Albanese, spent part of the final campaigning week in the nation’s centre, Uluru, where the proposal for the voice was first formally presented in 2017.
Sitting with senior traditional owners in central Australia, Albanese said Australians had an opportunity to “lift the burden of history” and move forward with a positive vote on Saturday.
“Many Indigenous Australians who are on the frontlines of dealing with these problems in towns and cities and communities and outstations and home lands are very worried about the prospect of losing the voice because they already have little say, and a loss will mean that they have even less.”
The original article contains 827 words, the summary contains 213 words. Saved 74%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
Removed by mod
Can you not use hate-speech in your post please?
Ummm, nah.
Australian Government: “Should we finally grant the victims of our historic genocide a symbolic advisory role on matters that impact those victims”
Australians: “Git Farked”
Edit: That last viz “by age group” is really about how society progresses one death at a time.
If you’re using a racist slur to satirize racists, you gotta know Poe’s Law applies to you here.
Just curious, is it a slur or a contraction? Like calling Finnish as “Finn” or Aboriginals as “Abo”? I mean, I’m Finnish and I don’t find the Finn as insulting. Not that I actually have a horse in this race but to me it sounded like a contraction of a word rather than a slur.
@NoMoreCocaine - it’s definitely a slur. I think what makes something a slur is the way it has historically been used, not the technicalities of its construction/how the word was derived.
The other factor is how the people it is being applied to feel about being called that, which of course is related to the first point.
In the case of the word above, it has been used to demean and denigrate people for a long time, and is widely considered to be an offensive and racist slur.
To give a comparison, it’s “just” a contraction in the same way the N word is “just” derived from the Latin word for black.
It sounds the same as how here in the UK, referring to someone as ‘Pakistani’ is fine, but referring to someone as a ‘paki’ is NOT. I know plenty of Pakistani-origin people who refer to each other as paki but generally the use is in a demeaning way when it’s used by someone outside that group.
Finn isn’t a contraction in English. Finnish is always an adjective and Finn is always a noun. By the looks of it, the original word was Finn. It’s the same situation as Scot/Scottish or Kurd/Kurdish.
It’s a slur by historic usage
They’re not telling the indigenous people to get fucked, they’re merely saying, “I’m too ignorant of the many many crimes committed against you for me to possibly vote in your favor. Perhaps if we were more educated, but alas… That would require voting for someone like you and I’m simply too ignorant…” See the difference? It’s a far more diplomatic way of telling someone that you really couldn’t give a shit whether they get fucked or just go off and die somewhere.
Thefartographer’s going to be prime minister and get a Nobel peace prize one day
Literally nothing stops the government making “the voice” without changing the constitution. The only reason they want it in the constitution is so future governments can’t change the function of the body.
The whole thing is an organised circus for political gain and dividing the population.
In the past, the government had a “voice” for the indigenous for like 10 years. Just bring it back, no constitutional change needed.
If you’re going to try put an aboriginal rights group in the constitution, just make it basic human rights group with representation for everyone. Basic human rights that are severely lacking in Australia. Freedom of speech? We don’t even have that.
Who is preventing your speech?
Let me guess, ‘woke green loonies who use cancel culture’.
Isn’t the fact that it was taken away before a justification for enshrining it in the constitution?
Like every other advisory body, it’s the role of the elected government to manage (as it would continue to be if added to the constitution, they could just reduce it to one underfunded person instead of disbandening it, or create a new group).
Just vote for the party you want to represent you. The current government doesn’t have a “voice” for the indigenous despite proposing this constitutional change.
It’s like complaining about others possibly hampering your climate change efforts so you instead make none at all
Looks like NSW and Tasmania are already no. One more state to vote no and it’s over
I’m voting ‘no’.
If you want a job in politics with a $200K salary, earn it. I don’t care what colour your skin is.
Surely this is more like adding a couple extra constituencies that are a bit geographically splintered? I know the powers and structure aren’t identical to MPs, but it’s not like you’re voting to just give three specific guys jobs for life
It’s likely 100s of jobs for life, with government pension added at retirement. Math that out over 25 years and it’s somewhere around $500 million dollars.
If my tax dollars are contributing to $500M in my lifetime, I want it going to people with degrees and a fuckton of experience.
The last time we let someone into politics with no experience and no degree, we got Pauline Hanson. I’m not voting yes to 100 more Pauline Hansons.
You dig up 200 billion dollars of minerals out of their back yard EACH YEAR and you don’t feel like kicking back literally a couple of quid ?
Nice
So why do you believe non-white people couldn’t possibly have “degrees and a fuckton of experience?”
Because the people put into these Voice positions will be Elders of Indigenous communities.
And since I personally worked on the 2013-16, $10M Indigenous communities research project for utilities connection and communication strategy, I know that 11% of the people in those communities are literate and the data point for tertiary-level education was so low it was rounded to 0.
To communicate the process of utilities connection, it was determined to best use pictures, which is still the strategy today.
Any more questions, hero?
Ah, so it’s not that you’re racist because you believe indigenous people are inherently less capable, but instead that you’re racist because you see nothing wrong with perpetuating institutional racism. “Disadvantage must be maintained!” is your credo.
You got me.
Now don’t forget to downvote me (you can keep your upvote).
Good to know. I’ve tagged you as “Racist Aussie” so I don’t forget in the future
you can keep your upvote
Just FYI those of us on kbin can see if you actually upvoted someone or not.
About a quarter of the MPs in parliament haven’t got degrees. Plenty of their staff won’t have either.
$500,000,000 over 25 years is less than a dollar per person per year. Let’s not pretend that the number you’ve come up with there is some bank-breaking extravagance for a large economy over the course of decades.
Why is the assumption that the individuals who will receive these jobs won’t be qualified for them?
He’s just repackaging the usual “hiring quotas” idiocy where they pretend that there’s people in board rooms saying “well this man has every degree that Harvard offers but unfortunately we need to hire a woman so we’re giving the job to this high school drop out that was visibly drunk in the interview”.
The reality is that any job opening ends up with a pool of candidates, all of which are qualified for the job and it won’t be any different here.
But they can’t say the truth, so they say shit like this instead.
I don’t care what colour your skin is.
A very popular saying among racists.
Methinks somehow they do care what colour their skin is…
fucking national disgrace…
What a bunch of cunts
What’s even the point of having a democracy if the majority of the voter base is uninformed
Not just uninformed - deliberately misinformed.
Voting on yes or no was made very easy when I saw that neo nazis, flat earthers, anti vaxxers and a multitude of other whack jobs are voting no. You are the company you keep in my book.
I’m voting yes, and i have tried to help people see why it’s a good thing, but when people call me racist for saying I’m in the yes camo, i know that far too many are just morons who have no critical thinking, or ability to tell what is a good source of information.
I’ve voted Yes, albeit with a bit of hesitancy.
As far as I am concerned, the role and functioning of the Voice is clearly defined in the proposal so this was never an issue for me. Where I feel people are generally stuck on is whether or not having an advisory body for just one demographic of people is naturally divisive. The argument becomes almost a bit of a slippery slope; if we have one body for indigenous people, why don’t we have one for other ethnic groups?
At face value, I understand why this can be perceived as racist and divisive, however, I think we have to also agree there is a slight nuance to this issue. The fact of the matter is that our government has been creating laws surrounding indigenous people for ages and it is because they are unfortunately the most disadvantaged group within Australia. This has been long going now before even having a Voice and we haven’t been calling the government racist or divisive up until now (well most of us at least). Clearly what is in place now doesn’t work and we have a history of failed Voice to parliament’s because we have change hands so frequently that no one bothers to continue with taking those issues with the seriousness it deserves.
Establishing a Voice does 2 things in my book. It provides the indigenous community with a level of autonomy to fix their own issues. Secondly, changing hands down the line cannot remove them. The proposal here also means that their level of influence will change as their needs are met. If at one point in time a Voice is no longer needed, it can be pulled back as needed.
I hope people don’t buy into the catch phrases and simple minded thinking. Please make an informed decision and vote with how you feel best. Being open minded is all I really hope people can be when deciding how to vote.
At face value, I understand why this can be perceived as racist and divisive
I appreciate that you’re not working to promote the talking point where if a profoundly disadvantaged racial group is given representation it’s “racist against white people”, but I live in a country where white people routinely argue that any amount of civil rights protections is “racist against white people” and it gives me a headache processing that level of stupid.
Yep, in my country it’s regular fare to hear GOP politicians bleat “you’re being divisive!” (as if our failure to submit to their rule is a fault)- it takes two to be on opposing sides of a divide, and it’s morally dishonest to pretend that only the other side of a disagreement is at fault for honest disagreement. Don’t let them work the ‘you’re being divisive’ angle, you’ll never hear the end of it.
’ The argument becomes almost a bit of a slippery slope; if we have one body for indigenous people, why don’t we have one for other ethnic groups?’
idk I’ll take a wild stab and guess maybe becuse all other ethical groups in Australia didn’t live here for 60 000 plus years, have their land forcably removed, experienced mass genocide and an ongoing attempt to breed their ethnicity out of existence?
that said, I’m glad you voted yes.
but this is a dumb thing to say.
Huh, TIL that humans showed up in Australia 60,000 years ago. I thought for sure it would be less than 20,000 years until I looked it up.
As for the slippery slope, nah, it’s a natural thing to ask. That being said, I think you have a good answer to it.
I’ll add that most ethnic groups don’t/shouldn’t need a Voice (ombudsman?) type function in a functioning democracy. However, we frequently see that the rules as written don’t actually apply equally. We see this a lot in the U.S. (where I’m from). It sounds like you have a similar effect in Australia.
Not a good look. Very disappointed.
