Banyan is a nom de plume of the Economist’s senior Asia correspondent. His career has included postings in London, Beijing, Hong Kong, Washington, Tokyo and Singapore. Alas, not Sydney. So, who better to pen a thoughtful and balanced article to inform British readers about the most contentious public affairs issue in Australia today – the Indigenous Voice? Well, almost anyone, as it turns out, judging by his offering of 29 June in the Asian section of the print magazine entitled ‘Finding a Voice’. The UK website went for the slightly less catchy: ‘Aboriginal Australians may at last be given a say in their own affairs  – But the constitutional change needed is, shamefully, far from assured’. It’s the ‘shamefully’ that gives the game away.

Banyan gets off to an impressive start telling us that:

Beginning in 2016 thousands of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders from hundreds of communities across Australia came together in regional dialogues culminating in a constitutional convention. The consultations were impressively inclusive….

In fact, this ‘coming together’ involved a 16-member Referendum Council, comprising both Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal members, visiting 12 different locations around Australia, over a six-month period, and meeting with 1,200 Aboriginal representatives. These meetings were called ‘Dialogues’ and attendance was by invitation only. As a result of this exercise, the Uluru Statement from the Heart was drafted and discussed over a four-day period in May 2017 at what was termed the First Nations National Constitutional Convention. The Statement was duly endorsed by the 250 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander delegates.

How inclusive was that in a nation of a mere 26 million people?

Well Banyan tells us it was:

…far more so, for instance, than for white Australians when the country’s constitution was agreed on in 1901.

If the Australian constitution was agreed on in 1901, then the British parliament was a tad premature in passing the Commonwealth of Australia Constitution Act in July 1900. I guess we can overlook a minor piece of journalistic sloppiness such as this, but it is hard to forgive the monumental ignorance that dismisses the constitutional conventions of 1890 and 1891 in Sydney, 1893’s Corowa conference, and of 1897/98 in Sydney, Melbourne and Adelaide. The delegates to these last conventions from New South Wales, Victoria, South Australia and Tasmania were elected by popular vote. The delegates of Western Australia were chosen by its parliament. Incidentally, Aboriginal men in New South Wales, Victoria, Tasmania could vote for those delegates and vote in the subsequent referendums. In South Australia both Aboriginal men and women could do the same – long before, for instance, any women could vote in Great Britain.

But moving on:

Out of the convention came an ‘Uluru Statement from the Heart’. It identified structural failings ruining indigenous lives. It called for an advisory body, a ‘Voice to Parliament’ to be enshrined in the constitution. Its aim is to improve outcomes by giving indigenous Australians a greater say over laws and policies that are foisted on them.

Aboriginal people are citizens of Australia equal to the rest in all respects under our constitution. Laws are not ‘foisted’ upon them any more than they are the rest of us. Banyan is probably referring to laws made exclusively in respect of Aboriginal people under section 51(xxvi). This power was granted to the parliament as a result of the 1967 referendum, which was enthusiastically lobbied for and applauded by the vast majority of Aboriginal people. It was intended only to benefit Aboriginal people but certainly envisaged the idea that some legislation might need to be coercive. Since 1967, by my reckoning, there have been 65 pieces of legislation enacted under 51(xxvi). Of these only five could be considered coercive, and they all relate to the Northern Territory intervention of 2007. The remainder include those relating to native title (10), land rights (8), land grants (4), education supplementary assistance (5), ATSIC (12), heritage protection (4), land councils (3) and various laws relating to Aboriginal enterprises. I imagine none of these initiatives arose without significant Aboriginal input, from the myriad advisory bodies already in existence, in the first place.

And if this were just about legislation ‘foisted on’ Aborigines, i.e. legislation enacted under 51(xxvi), why does the referendum question not contain a caveat to that effect? Well, we all know the answer. The activists want the remit to be much broader than that.

Banyan continues:

At stake is not just how modern Australia reckons with a past blighted by the treatment of its indigenous people. Approving the Voice would represent a collective desire to bring the continent’s first inhabitants into the national fold and to redress the vast disparities that exist between them and everyone else.

With eleven representatives in the national parliament, and many others in state parliaments, are they not already in the national fold? In fact, their representation in the Commonwealth parliament of 4.8 per cent far exceeds their 3 per cent representation in the population at large.

There are vast disparities, but they do not apply between white Australians and Aboriginal Australians. They apply between the 80 per cent of Aborigines who are educated, hold genuine jobs and live in urban environments, and the 20 per cent who do not. By the way, the vast majority of those clamouring for, and involved in the design of, this Voice are from the 80 per cent of urban Aboriginals. What special insight, denied the rest of us, might, for example, Marcus Stewart – original co-chair of the Victorian First Peoples Assembly and a prominent member of the Referendum Working Group – have into the problems of Aborigines in remote central Australia, notwithstanding his possum-skin cloak?

But don’t let me interrupt Banyan when he is hitting his stride:

Aboriginal Australians represent the longest continuous cultures on Earth – tens of thousands of years. Yet it is hard to understate the grim hand dealt them since white settlers first arrived. They brought disease and chased Aboriginal people into reserves or forced them into servitude. Frontier massacres – inoffensively called ‘dispersals’ – continued into the 20th century. The constitution of 1901 marked the start of Australian nationhood. Yet it decreed that Aboriginals not be counted. Up until the early 1970s, ‘stolen generations’ of mixed-race children were taken from their families and put in church-run missions…. Only in 1967 was the constitution amended to count indigenous Australians in the census and to make the federal government, for the first time, responsible for Aboriginal policy.

We hear a lot about this oldest continuous culture claim. Aboriginal culture, like any culture, has no intrinsic value. It is worthwhile preserving only to the extent that it enhances the lives of its practitioners. Or, to be more precise, when it acts against their interests, it should be discontinued or modified appropriately. Outside some benign spiritual beliefs, ceremonial and artistic practices, traditional Aboriginal culture has passed its use by date. Aborigines are perfectly free to practise the benign aspects of their culture to their heart’s content. Indeed, they are encouraged to and rewarded for doing so. And they are well supported by institutions, such as the ABC and sporting codes, and any number of corporations such as our major banks and airlines, who thrust certain ceremonial aspects of this culture down our throats at every opportunity.

The other standard myths listed above have all been effectively demolished by many eminent authorities such as Professor Geoffrey Blainey and Keith Windschuttle.  But let me summarise. In general, reserves were established not to keep Aborigines away from whites but the other way round. It was to protect them from white sexual predation and to help preserve their culture and racial identity. They were provided with food, shelter and education but were encouraged to leave the reserves to seek work. I have read accounts of Aboriginal women being press-ganged into diving for pearl-shell at Broome, but other than that very few, if any, were forced into servitude. Having said that, I do acknowledge that in various jurisdictions and at various times, Aboriginal youths on reserves were compulsorily indentured to learn a trade.

‘Massacres’ did happen, but they did not define the relationship between white and black. The University of Newcastle Massacre Map, developed after years of research by an extensive team of historians, has identified some 421 sites of frontier massacre, in which 11,257 were killed, between 1788 and 1930. The vast majority of these incidents were skirmishes resulting as reprisals for the killing of settlers or, for example, for stealing sheep. None the less reprehensible for that. Overall, the figure of 11,257 is highly speculative, with much of the evidence coming from secondary sources such as twentieth-century writers.

Keith Windschuttle, in his The Fabrication of Aboriginal History, has forensically demolished the myth of up to 50,000 stolen children. He shows the figure is closer to 8,000 and all were taken for perfectly valid reasons such as neglect or abuse. Or they were given up by their families to be educated or employed.

And finally, the census. As Professor Blainey pointed out in a recent article in the Australian, Aborigines were counted in every Commonwealth census since the first one in 1911. Under section 127, abolished in 1967, their numbers (that is full-blooded Aborigines) were not counted in reckoning the population for the purposes of redistributing surplus customs and excise revenue and/or for allocating parliamentary seats.

Banyan now invites Australians to see the problems for themselves:

For a sense of the hardships, drive out of Alice Springs to one of the indigenous ‘camps’ around its fringes. The rest of Australia is a world away. Broken cars and torn mattresses litter the streets. Overcrowded homes go without electricity when owners cannot pay. Unemployment, alcoholism, domestic violence and broken homes are legion. As Banyan visited, a posse of police burst into one house.

Well, it seems he has ventured out of London and Hong Kong and actually visited the Outback. We are then given some examples of the ‘gap’ referred to earlier:

Aboriginal Australians die, on average, eight years younger than others. Just over 3 per cent of Australia’s 26 million people, they fill more than a quarter of its prison cells. A higher proportion of their population is incarcerated than any other in the world. Two-fifths of children in care are Aboriginal, taken from troubled parents. Aboriginal people are more than twice as likely as other Australians to kill themselves.

These statistics are undeniable. Aborigines die younger because they succumb to the effects of alcohol, drugs and sugar in a higher ratio than mainstream Australians. Their children die disproportionately in childbirth, or shortly thereafter, because of neglect of their health and that of their mothers. Their mothers die disproportionately because they are killed by abusive husbands. Aboriginal men are incarcerated disproportionately because they commit violent and sexual crimes disproportionately to the general population. But the Economist and Banyan offer no insights, other than feel-good rhetoric, as to how this Voice will overcome these, apparently, intractable problems.

Banyan now waxes lyrical:

This is the torment of our powerlessness, the convention declared at Uluru, the sacred rock that rears up outside Alice Springs.

Wait a minute! Has this bloke actually been to Alice Springs after all, or was I taken in by that convincing ‘posse of police’? Uluru is big but it hardly ‘rears up outside Alice Springs’. It’s 340 kilometres away.

At least Banyan has some sense as to the scale of the problem:

Billions of dollars go each year on well-intentioned policies to improve indigenous welfare. They have failed, as Thomas Mayo and Kerry O’Brien argue in a booklet about the Voice, because decisions made in far-away Canberra with too little indigenous input always face the risk of lurches in government direction.

Setting aside the fact that decisions affecting all Australians, e.g., miners or cane farmers in North Queensland, are made in faraway Canberra and that there are hundreds of Aboriginal organisations, corporations, lobby groups already providing indigenous input, one wonders how Banyan imagines that yet another Canberra-based bureaucracy, the Voice, will improve things.

Banyan also fails to note that the eleven Aboriginal MPs mentioned earlier, who are represented across the political spectrum from left to right are themselves deeply and passionately divided on whether or not to support the Voice. No mention from Banyan of the views of the far-left independent Aboriginal Senator Lidia Thorpe, who opposes the Voice for being a white man’s patronising construction and not going nearly far enough towards the creation of ‘Blak sovereignty’ of Australia, nor of the Northern Territory Senator and former Alice Springs deputy mayor Jacinta Nampijinpa Price who believes the Voice will entrench racial division within Australian society and further disadvantage her Aboriginal constituency.

Let’s wrap this up:

Some arguments against the Voice, says Hannah McGlade, an academic at Curtin University, smack of racism, even when it is being decried. Peter Dutton, leader of the right-wing opposition, claims the Voice ‘will permanently divide us by race’, having an ‘Orwellian effect where… some Australians are more equal than others’.

Yet the Voice would give Aboriginal people a say where they still have little. A leg up for them does not mean a leg down for others. What better way, indeed, for a nation to come together than to deal with its greatest unfinished business. And what a blunder it would be to deny indigenous Australians a fair go.

We had to wait a bit longer than usual, but the inevitable charge of racism finally makes an appearance. As to the ‘greatest unfinished business’, I can assure Banyan that entrenchment of the Voice in the constitution will not deal with that. He should delve a little more into Thomas Mayo, who has made it quite clear that the ‘unfinished business’ is treaty, reparations and some form of Aboriginal sovereignty. The Voice is just the enabling mechanism.