The Western Australian Aboriginal Cultural Heritage Act went into effect on July 1, 2023. On August 8, 39 days later, The Aboriginal Affairs Minister Tony Buti stood on the steps of the WA Parliament and announced that the Labor government would immediately write new legislation to repeal the Act.

‘Put simply, the laws went too far, were too prescriptive, too complicated, and placed unnecessary burdens on everyday Western Australian property owners,’ Premier Cook confessed.

This official announcement was made after about 2 months of intense pressure from the state’s farming, mining, and pastoralist industries over concerns the new laws were confusing and difficult to implement. Both the Premier, Roger Cook, and Tony Buti, apologised to the many farmers and business owners gathered there to protest the onerous laws. In reality, these laws would have effectively driven many farmers off the land.

The decision to repeal these laws will make it the fastest any parliamentary Act has ever been repealed in the history of state politics in Australia. This might sound like a victory for the people of Western Australia, and in the short term it is, but we suspect that that is not the whole story. Arguably, Labor found it impossible to manage the outcry caused by such an oppressive intervention on the property rights of landowners. The WA government has suffered a significant 22.5 per cent swing against them in the ‘safe’ Labor seat of the former premier Mark McGowan in the July 29 by-election.

A few days ago, one of us was speaking to an agricultural supply agent who said he had had 16 years dealing with farmers on the land. The farmers had expressed concerns that the backflip on the state laws is because of two reasons.

Firstly, the federal government has recognised that the WA Indigenous cultural heritage laws were the main cause of people waking up to the damage that will be inflicted on the nation if the soon-coming referendum on the Voice to Parliament is successful. The ‘No’ vote has been gaining momentum in every state and now eclipses the ‘Yes’ vote.

In other words, not only were these laws threatening the return of the Labor Party in the next state election, but also they were undermining the prospects of the Voice to Parliament referendum be successful. Many reasonably fear that these laws would be just a glimpse of what The Voice to Parliament might enshrine in the Australian Constitution.

Secondly, the federal Labor government led by Anthony Albanese has its own federal Indigenous laws that it wants to pass, but only after a successful vote on the Voice referendum. These new federal laws would replace the state Indigenous law anyway. Thus the repeal of the controversial legislation in WA is just political manoeuvring.

These Indigenous cultural laws essentially create an apartheid state with ‘rent’ paid to the Indigenous land owners, ostensibly. According to Tony Seabrook, President of the Pastoralists and Grazers Association in Western Australia, the WA Aboriginal Cultural Heritage Act ‘was really starting to stir up racial divisions. It should never have happened’.

Curiously, both the WA Liberals and the National Party failed their rural members by initially supporting Labor in this outrageous legislation. To make it worse, on April 5, the WA Liberal leader, Libby Mettam, challenged the federal Liberal position to the Voice to Parliament by saying she would vote ‘Yes’ to this. She now says she regrets to have supported the Voice but one has to wonder how incompetent a leader might be to support a proposal that would radically change the egalitarian nature of the Constitution.

Australians are led to believe that institutionalising inequality will promote equality and that constitutionally enshrining separateness will reinforce national unity. But let’s not be fooled here. As Senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price correctly points out, this is about entrenching racial separatism and ‘the idea that Aboriginal people are perpetual victims forever in the need of special measures’.

Don’t think our Indigenous peoples will benefit from a Voice to Parliament. They will be as much pawns in this manoeuvring as anyone else in Australia. The reality is that constitutionally enshrining ‘the Indigenous Voice’ reaffirms difference at the very moment when we should be trying to establish equality, and lead, in the name of alleged anti-racism, back to the old commitments connected with race or ethnicity.

To conclude, politicians who engineer these divisive laws are leading us down that dark corridor on the basis of race – thus prolonging the sorry history of racial difference. The ultimate goal is to divide our country into lines of culture, origin, and ethnicity, which obviously facilitates the attainment of more power and control by the ruling classes. We can only guess the level of hatred and division that the so-called ‘Voice to Parliament’ will generate, if passed.

Augusto Zimmermann is professor and Head of Law at Sheridan Institute of Higher Education, in Perth, Western Australia. He is also a former Commissioner with the Law Reform Commission of Western Australia (2012-2017), and President of the Western Australian Legal Theory Association (WALTA). Dr Zimmermann is the author/co-author of numerous academic articles and books, including ‘The Spirit Behind The Voice: The Religious Dimension of the Voice Proposal’ (Connor Court Publishing, 2023) 

John Gideon Hartnett is an Australian physicist and cosmologist, and a Christian with a biblical creationist worldview. He has a Ph.D. with distinction in Physics from The University of Western Australia (UWA). During his research career he worked at UWA and the University of Adelaide obtaining many research grants. He has published more than 200 papers in scientific leading journals, in book chapters and in conference proceedings. He was a foundering director of an Australian startup now commercialising his research on ultra-stable cryogenic ‘clocks’. He has lectured around the world in churches and conferences and written extensively on biblical creation mostly in terms of astrophysics and cosmology.