We need to unite as Australians not divide on racial grounds
Senator Ralph Babet – 28 January 2023
What will the Voice to parliament look like? How will it work? Amazingly, the Prime Minister, Mr Albanese, says he isn’t going to release the details until after the referendum.
How ridiculous is that? He just wants Australians to trust him with the very building blocks of our nation. The Prime Minister wants us to give him a blank cheque to alter our constitution forever, and he refuses to provide us with any detail whatsoever.
Luckily, we don’t need the details to know that the Voice is a bad idea. Any reasonable, sensible person understands that dividing our great multicultural nation by race is not only a bad idea, it is the very description of racism.
The words of a great man, many years ago, still ring true today. ‘I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the colour of their skin but by the content of their character.’
This is exactly what the Prime Minister and his unintentionally (or perhaps intentionally) racist cohorts seek to do today. They seek to divide our great nation by race. They seek to judge us based on the colour of our skin. They are essentially saying that people of one particular colour, of one particular ethnicity, are different to others in the nation, are better, are more important. That is wrong and we will not stand for it.
As far as I am concerned, we are all one people and must speak with one voice, not an Aboriginal voice, not an Asian voice, not an African voice, not a European voice but an Australian voice.
We are all Australian and from whatever land we come we must reject racism, and we must not embed race in our constitution. Our constitution must be colour blind, now and forever.
Mr Albanese says we need a Voice to break the ‘tyranny of powerlessness’ as he believes indigenous people have ‘no say in matters which affect them’. That is utterly absurd. There are 11 indigenous Australians in the 47th Parliament, just under five per cent of the total. That is a representation that is more than adequate when you consider that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders make up just 3.2 per cent of our population.
In the Senate, where I sit, eight out of 76 senators are indigenous. That’s more than ten per cent of the total.
Anybody who says Australians are inherently racist is simply not paying attention, or has bought into the lie perpetuated by those that would seek to create division in our country. After all, a divided society, with people busily fighting amongst each other, is easier to control.
Our nation is home to hundreds of different aboriginal groups, each with their own territory, their own individual language, their own culture and belief structure. But here’s the thing; how can ONE single Voice adequately represent all of these differing views?
The answer is that it won’t. Like so many of our national institutions from the ABC to the Human Rights Commission, it will be captured by a green, left, woke elite and will be more focused on virtue-signalling than on outcomes.
If Mr Albanese really wants advice from indigenous Australians, why doesn’t he ask our democratically elected indigenous parliamentarians for advice? Or does he only want to listen to a handpicked few who will tell him what he wants to hear and will do what he wants them to do.
The idea for the Voice comes from the Uluru Statement from the Heart written by just 250 indigenous people. That is hardly a democratic mandate.
In 2021, the indigenous Voice co-design process proposed that it would have 24 members and the Government would be ‘obliged’ to ask the Voice for advice on anything that affects indigenous Australians. When you think about it, this would be everything.
But here’s the catch. If indigenous Australians don’t like the members of the Voice, how do they get rid of them? They certainly can’t vote them out at the next election. We are potentially at risk of creating an unelected and unaccountable body which will have power over all Australians.
Most importantly, what Mr Albanese is glossing over is that the Voice is only the first of three demands in the Uluru statement.
The second demand is a commission to oversee a treaty with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders.
And the third is an Orwellian-sounding truth-telling commission. Doesn’t that just sound authoritarian and dystopian?
What does this all mean? Is part of Australia to be ceded to indigenous Australians? Will we pay reparations? How much and to whom? We do not know, there is no detail.
All we know for sure is that the constitution of our nation will be altered to favour one group of people based on the colour of their skin and at the end of the day that is all we really need to know in order to vote no in this proposed referendum.
One thing Australians can be certain of is that the United Australia party will never support anything that undermines the sovereignty of Australia or divides us by race. We will never support racism in our great nation. We must do all that we can to unite our people. That’s why I say to Australians, vote no to racism, vote no to the Voice.
Ralph Babet is a senator for the United Australia party in Victoria
Source – https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/01/voice-of-racism/