 |
|
|
| View previous topic :: View next topic |
| Author |
Message |
pietillidie
Joined: 07 Jan 2005
|
| Post subject: |  |
|
^You and I have always had much the same view; the two questions were ridiculously combined.
But I also think the separate constiutional question would just have likely lost because the same reactionaries would've turned even that into a culture war. Their arguments simply would've shifted because, as is very clear, psychiatrically it's all about 'the win' and who said what, not the actual topic at hand.
Think about it: if they could get bipartisan support just for the constitutional tweak then a referendum is kind of beside the point as that's what parliament and high courts are for.
You just won't get a bipartisan, sensible referendum on anything. As I said, it could be CCs versus Doritos and people would froth at the mouth taking sides, inventing imaginary fears and hysterical arguments, ultimately choosing on the basis that someone they hate likes CCs or Doritos.
Referenda are a brain-dead process in the current brain-dead social media environment, probably for even the most mundane, technical, non-emotive subject.
_________________
In the end the rain comes down, washes clean the streets of a blue sky town.
Help Nick's: http://www.magpies.net/nick/bb/fundraising.htm |
|
|
|
 |
think positive 
Side By Side
Joined: 30 Jun 2005
Location: somewhere
|
| Post subject: | |
|
taking sides.
says it all,
this has had the complete opposite result than intended.
_________________
You cant fix stupid, turns out you cant quarantine it either! |
|
|
|
|
think positive
Side By Side
Joined: 30 Jun 2005
Location: somewhere
|
| Post subject: | |
|
| stui magpie wrote: | ^
Nice rant.
The First Nations Peoples who wrote the Uluru Statement asked for regognition and a voice to be put in the constitution. That requires a referendum.
Proposing to Hold the referendum wasn't the problem, it was everything else.
If for example it was 2 separate questions, one about recognition and one about the voice, there was a far better chance of getting Bi-partisan support, which ultimately was necessary. No referendum has succeeded without it.
If they had provided much more detail up front of exactly what the Voice was, how it would work, what it could do and more importantly what it couldn't, they could have headed off the misinformation campaign before it grew legs.
Once it was clear the direction is was going, rather than blunder ahead they should have taken the opportunity to do more consultation and communication and delayed holding the referendum until it had a clear chance of success and if that meant changing some things, then change them.
Geezuz you really could write a thesis on how they just stubbornly bumbled from one fuckup to the next. |
exactly this
_________________
You cant fix stupid, turns out you cant quarantine it either! |
|
|
|
|
pietillidie
Joined: 07 Jan 2005
|
| Post subject: | |
|
If even corrections to outright illegality can't be made without popular assent - in this case not acknowledging a treaty partner contrary British law, as already ruled by the High Court in Mabo - the constitution becomes a millstone around everyone's neck, as it is in America.
Australia can't correct an original sin, and the US can't stop putting weapons of death in the hands of nutcases.
Therein lies the advantage of the British system, which vests more authority in parliament, the courts and various other parliamentary mechanisms. There's no way knowing the Australian system could, say, devolve powers as was done here. Under Australia-like constitution, England would've simply scuppered the rest of the union's ambitions just to be wankers, lording it over Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.
Conversely, by dumbly using a referendum for Brexit when one wasn't neded, the damned thing can't easily be undone, although mercifully still more easily than would be the case in Australia, hence Sunak's Windsor Framework.
Very little in the absurdly fast-paced world in which we live can wait 30-50 years to be revisited. That's a fundamentalist trap if ever there was one, especially when the most complex things in life can only be grappled with through a process of trial and error.
_________________
In the end the rain comes down, washes clean the streets of a blue sky town.
Help Nick's: http://www.magpies.net/nick/bb/fundraising.htm |
|
|
|
|
stui magpie 
Prepare for the worst, hope for the best.
Joined: 03 May 2005
Location: In flagrante delicto
|
| Post subject: | |
|
Yeah, the people who wrote the constitution wanted it to be difficult to change it, but not impossible.
Albanese knew he'd be pushing shit uphill with a divided parliament, if you can't get the majority of politicians to agree on something you've got no chance of getting the majority of Australians on board.
I disagree that we can't get a sensible bi-partisan referendum on anything. I get the example about CC's and Doritios and agree that you will always get people choosing sides and frothing, but you don't need to get everyone to agree, just the majority of people and states.
With sensible negotiation skills up front to get a bi-partisan approach from Parliament, even if it provides for a consience vote rather than tying people to the party line and good marketing and change management approaches it's very achieveable.
_________________
Every dead body on Mt Everest was once a highly motivated person, so maybe just calm the **** down. |
|
|
|
|
slangman
Joined: 11 Aug 2003
|
| Post subject: | |
|
| David wrote: | Guy Rundle’s analysis:
https://www.crikey.com.au/2023/10/16/voice-to-parliament-australia-vote-no/
| Quote: | The era of reconciliation has ended. Settler Australia refuses to be ‘the other’ to a redemption story
Well, in the end, the question occurs: what was that all about? As Israel moves remorselessly towards an annihilation of half of Gaza, as a mildly leftish government resoundingly falls in New Zealand, the referendum for recognition and a First Nations Voice to Parliament has failed absolutely.
The ABC called it at 7.20pm, before Western Australia had even finished voting. The only jurisdiction to vote Yes was the ACT, which feels like a booby prize. It was never even close. It was a night without succour or relief for those who had campaigned for years, and put their hopes into it. With early votes and postal votes to come in, the Poll Bludger projected a final result of Yes 40%, No 60%, and it may go lower.
Recriminations might now begin on how the Yes campaign was run, but this is largely irrelevant. The Yes campaign was indeed pretty terrible, but there seems very little likelihood that a first-rate campaign would have made a difference. Possibly Victoria, with its 46-54 result, could have been turned to Yes, but even NSW, with its 41-59, was beyond recovery, as were Tasmania and South Australia.
Queensland and WA were out of the question. This was a rejection of the Voice proposal at its core, and as such a rejection of the principle that underpinned it: that there was a significant division between First Nations people and other Australians, that should be recognised in the establishment of new institutions.
The rejection of the Voice proposal went pretty exactly as you’d expect. The Yes 40% will almost certainly be shown to be made up of majority votes among the inner- and middle-urban knowledge class of the major cities, those under 25, First Nations people, some non-European migrant groups and sections of the upper-middle-middle class in teal seats.
As Bob Birrell and Katherine Betts noted, tertiary education was an overwhelming predictor for a Yes vote. However the Voice came about, it quickly became a knowledge-class cause, a distinctive expression of how the world was and should be. Once it entered the referendum process, requiring double majorities, the Voice became a white, or non-Indigenous, object.
As a test of where national feeling about Indigenous/non-Indigenous relations and rights lay, the Voice was a terrible one. It proposed a complex and highly specific object, emerging out of the blue for most Australians, with fuzzy details at best, and a strange remit, of giving advice but having no power. It was part of reconciliation and recognition — whatever that was, many asked — but it was also practical, about Closing the Gap. No simple picture of what it was, was provided.
The Yes camp seemed to be pursuing a sort of “small target” strategy, trying to avoid the process getting bogged down in questions of detail of the proposed remedy to our nation’s plight. But that assumed that most Australians thought our nation had a plight, some unaddressed absence around which we were wrapped, defining us. Most Australians didn’t, and so the Voice seemed an answer to a question the world wasn’t asking.
Hence, the core of the electorate split along lines of knowledge and its absence, and universal morality, rather than specific group loyalties. That’s the tertiary educated in a nutshell, especially those on the humanities side. Non-European migrants have a basic solidarity around questions of colonialism, and the sham of colour-blind “equality”. And gen Z, tertiary-educated or not, has been formed in a radically networked world, in which position/identity itself is fluid. Such groups shared the same assumptions that the Voice proposal worked off: that oppression and disadvantage are structural, embedded in history, often invisible in action.
For the remainder of the voting public, this conception of a continuing process doesn’t operate nearly as strongly. Who Indigenous people are, where they live, how they live, are subject to all sorts of half-conceived notions. Few people are now unaware of dispossession and massacre. How accurately they calibrate that, or have some picture of how it occurred, is another question.
Protection acts, reserves, missions, the White Australia policy — how much do many know of it? Very little, apart from the Stolen Generations, one suspects. And how dominant a role do they believe such events play in current disadvantage?
The Yes case couldn’t convince any great slice of the “middle” 30% of voters that creating a Voice for Indigenous people was a necessary step in the nation’s journey, a completion as much for all “the others”, as for Indigenous people themselves.
But for this middle group, voting No was not about the passionate defence of a distinct set of values, or way of life, against an onslaught of change. It was for the most part, one suspects, because Yes hadn’t made the case that Indigenous people should be a special category of citizen, for reasons arising from our history, with special institutions, however anodyne they might be.
That is where the great divide between Yes and No lay — over the legitimacy of this complex manoeuvre whereby the path to full equality passed through the permanent recognition of specialness, and the creation of a rather unwieldy new institution to both express that and achieve it. The way the numbers look suggests a crucial asymmetry: No got almost all the undecideds and waverers. The Yes case was pretty much wholly composed of those committed to it, an end-point of what one watched across six months, the relentless grinding-down of the Yes response to polls.
With those numbers, Indigenous Australians have no partners in reconciliation on the other side — not because the narrative of arrival, dispossession and oppression is being actively denied by a pro-western story that has any great support, but simply because this group of the non-indigenous simply do not acknowledge that there is now, in this period, a significant difference at all.
They do not see themselves as on “the other side” of a struggle, and hence there is no defining struggle as such, no agon. Whatever racism and disadvantage people will acknowledge as currently existing, they do not see it as necessarily expressing the “colonialist” narrative that the Voice requires, in order to be legitimate.
If that’s the case, then this resounding No vote marks the end of the period known as “reconciliation”, one that began in the late ’80s, whose arc rose through the ’90s and 2000s and which began to fall in the 2010s. That curve upwards had some nasty stuff beneath, such as the intervention and its continuation. But however inadequately, “reconciliation” still seemed a real and living notion. If it no longer does, it is not because we have returned to conflict, but because the “other side” to the Indigenous demand — a surviving notion of Anglo destiny and invested meaning — has dissolved in the last decade or so.
What’s dissolved it? What hasn’t? What was once a bounded continent nation-state, with a few TV and radio channels and a dozen newspapers, is now a society connected to everything, everywhere, all at once, its conceptual borders thinning. What was once an Anglo society with a growing migrant supplement is now, in its major cities, a post-Anglo space with migrant notions of arrival, autonomy and self-creation at its dynamic centre. The No vote thus contained both a section of people who felt they were passionately defending something against an onslaught, and those who lived in a space where there was nothing to defend. But also nothing to change.
Thus, though many non-European migrants voted Yes, the historical fact of their steady, decades-long arrival has renewed the vitality of the notion, strong in Anglo culture for decades, that the meaning of this country is as a place where one can arrive and remake oneself, build a life. The stronger that gets, the more it must undermine the claims of Indigenous specialness, no matter how much migrants would not want it to.
Mass voluntary migration, to be possible at all, must not only achieve the recognition that it is possible to make your life over again from a suitcase, but it also pushes it to the centre of the Australian experience — the creation of something from nothing at all, the excitement of new existence. While the content of Indigenous culture has moved to the centre of Australian life over the past decade or so, the form it required — the cultural centrality of inherited place — has been, well, displaced in a way that has deprived Indigenous people of the heroic narrative it needed to win a referendum. That Australia is a country of newness, of no ground, of lightness, of largely individualised trajectories through time, and of such a love of novelty that many white Melburnians will say they live in “Naarm”. What could be more ungrounded than that?
Should one be correct about that deep shift in culture, really a shift in being, on this continent, then the struggle for First Nations recognition — as it has been conducted — is largely concluded. The continent is redefining itself. Having dethroned Anglo suprematism, it has now passed by Indigenous recognition, on the way to something else.
Labor state governments may continue treaty processes with multiple groups. Big capital-T treaty appears out of the question. There seems a sudden, general feeling, that the need to do this, the old “fierce urgency of now” has departed. The same goes for any truth and reconciliation commission — unless Labor still has some perverse courage. But one presumes that the Albanese government will now back away from Indigenous causes very, very rapidly, and become a government of the suburban masses (some of whom are Indigenous, of course), aligning itself with the many, not the few.
What Indigenous leaderships will do remains to be seen. But they may have time out of the spotlight to think about it, as the country and the world moves on, and the bombs rain on another Indigenous people half a world away. |
|
This is so far the best analysis of why the Voice to Parliament was resoundingly rejected.
It doesn’t get emotive or blame one group over another which is refreshing and it provides an interesting observation about the culture shift in Australia.
_________________
- Side By Side - |
|
|
|
|
pietillidie
Joined: 07 Jan 2005
|
| Post subject: | |
|
| stui magpie wrote: | | Yeah, the people who wrote the constitution wanted it to be difficult to change it, but not impossible. |
Therein lies the problem. Who cares what they wanted or thought? They're long dead and were clueless and outright wrong about all kinds of things.
Good judgement by definition requires the best contemporary knowledge finely tuned to context. It also requires an acceptance of the need to constantly reassess. Imagine if science, business, finance, medicine or engineering arbitrarily constrained their scope of judgement that way. We'd be extinct already.
One can of course understand why generations past got so many things so badly wrong. But why a society would legally and psychologically nail itself to their mast is beyond me.
Of course I'm being rhetorical because I know exactly why: to maintain privilege and reduce competition.
_________________
In the end the rain comes down, washes clean the streets of a blue sky town.
Help Nick's: http://www.magpies.net/nick/bb/fundraising.htm
Last edited by pietillidie on Tue Oct 17, 2023 8:55 pm; edited 1 time in total |
|
|
|
|
Magpietothemax 
magpietothemax
Joined: 27 Apr 2013
|
| Post subject: | |
|
| slangman wrote: | | Magpietothemax wrote: | | slangman wrote: | Who is saying it’s not significant??
I? |
You are saying it is insignificant, because in one breath you claim that the Aboriginal people have not been persecuted, and in the other you accept that their children have been stolen/ What kind of insanity is that?
As for the third world conditions imposed on the Aboriginal people in remote communitieshtml |
1. “You are saying it is insignificant”….at NO STAGE did I ever say it was insignificant.
Stop denying your deliberate false claim.
2. It is common knowledge that there are aboriginal people who live in poor conditions but to say that is IMPOSED on them is ludicrous. Do you actually think that Australians (including the government) want aboriginal people to live in such terrible conditions?
Just another hysterical claim by you.
3. Shrapnel compensation? How did you come to this conclusion and what do you mean by compensation? Is it only about money? |
ANSWERS to THE POINTS ABOVE
1) You were saying this by implication. On the one hand you said that it was true that the children of many Aboriginal people were stolen by the Australian government, but on the other hand you deny that the Aboriginal population was persecuted by the Australian government. The only way this can be interpreted is that you think that stealing the children of a population does not amount to persecution. Such a position is both absurd and indefensible.
2) Extreme poverty has been imposed on the Aboriginal population historically. It started when the British arrived in Australia, and over the ensuing years massacred, killed by disease and drove off the land the Aboriginal population to make way for private ownership of land (which did not exist in Aboriginal society). Ever since then, under all Australian governments since Federation, the Aboriginal people have been persecuted, and used as slave labour by passtoralist interests and no doubt mining interests as well. Their children were born into immense poverty. Was that their fault, or was it imposed as a result of government policies? What chance do Aboriginal children born into squalor, inflicted with third World diseases, life expectancy far lower than the rest of the population, have to "climb to the top of hte heap".
3) It is obvious to anyone that the miserable compensation payments that have been made by the Australian government for the past historic injustices are nothing but token shrapnel.
_________________
Free Julian Assange!!
Ice in the veins |
|
|
|
|
slangman
Joined: 11 Aug 2003
|
| Post subject: | |
|
^
With all due respect, I think that we are just going around in circles here and continuing will just add another 10 pages to this topic.
I believe that we both want to see better outcomes for aboriginal people but we obviously disagree on the path that we should take to help achieve that goal..
I will continue advocating for better outcomes for everyone in Australia in the manner that I see as the best way to achieving this goal as I’m sure that you also will in your way.
✌️
_________________
- Side By Side - |
|
|
|
|
Magpietothemax
magpietothemax
Joined: 27 Apr 2013
|
| Post subject: | |
|
^Sure, I agree with your sentiments and do not want to clutter up the thread either.
However, I believe that improvements in outcomes for all sections of the working class will never be achieved without a clear understanding of reality.
So I will always challenge positions or ideas which I believe are standing in the way of such a clear understanding. It is only through discussion, and challenging the propaganda pumped out on a daily basis by the corporate media, that we have a chance to make the world better.
Naturally, not everyone will agree with me, and this leads to further discussion, etc.
_________________
Free Julian Assange!!
Ice in the veins |
|
|
|
|
Culprit 
Joined: 06 Feb 2003
Location: Port Melbourne
|
| Post subject: | |
|
I worked in a booth for the AEC for the referendum. Pretty clear to me that in my multicultural area, it would be a majority "NO". It ended up around 58% No. My perception during the day. Most didn't understand and simply didn't give a shit. I had around 5% of voters who actually didn't know there was a referendum and actually why they were voting. I was doing declaration votes and amazingly the amount of people who live in the area that are not on the role was flabbergasting. We had many voters ask if is it true that if they leave the form blank is it a yes vote cause that's what they read on Facebook. The only person I dealt with was an honest young man who said I don't understand and I don't want to vote either way. I explained that he had been marked off the role and he could do what he wanted and he just handed me back the blank form which went into the declaration vote envelope. We also had a few families where one person (the Father) directed all which way to vote.
The NO argument was simplistic and the Yes argument, well I still don't know what it actually was. It was drowned out. In the end, it was political and I suggest there will never be another referendum. Now those who pushed the NO and want a treaty with repatriations have no chance as those opposed will point to the failed referendum. |
|
|
|
|
David
to wish impossible things
Joined: 27 Jul 2003
Location: the edge of the deep green sea
|
| Post subject: | |
|
Interesting observations, Culprit. Is it a failure of communication, or are there communication barriers in our current society that can't be surpassed?
I feel like I'm posting too many Guy Rundle articles in here, but where else do you get diagnoses like this? At the very least, he has a knack for articulating stuff that I'm thinking:
https://www.crikey.com.au/2023/10/19/yes-progressives-voice-to-parliament-defeat/
| Quote: | After defeat, the Yes commentariat identify their true enemy: the Australian people
Guy Rundle
Many Indigenous leaders of the Yes campaign have declared a week of public silence, and who can blame them? Some will be politicking, creating new alliances for the post-referendum era. Some will be in genuine mourning, shellacked by the scale of the defeat. Some simply need, and have earned, a long sleep. Loss in any political contest is rejection on a scale few of us are likely to experience, and this one is a multiple of that. Going quiet this week may or may not be a good idea politically, as the No camp establishes its agenda and cements its version of history. But for some, it may be simply existentially necessary.
But as your correspondent noted, once the Voice became a referendum question, it became a white object, requiring 54% of the national vote to get across the line. Even the notion, argued by some, of non-Indigenous commentators stepping out of the way, could not be anything but a political act. In any case, it was one that would be impossible, had it been tried. The right wasn’t going to stop and would have filled the vacuum.
The less credible reason for the flood of Yes commentary was that, well, I would refer you to the “white object” point. For progressives/the knowledge class, there was, until a few months ago, belief that success was inevitable, and that it would crown a series of recent successes, from the same-sex marriage plebiscite, to the 2022 federal victory, the Greens surge, the Aston byelection win, and the reelection of Dan Andrews.
The stonking defeat handed to this most progressivist/knowledge class of proposals — change through recognition, and more talking, more elite convocations — should remind them how provisional their hold on power in the body politic is.
The thumbnail 40% result was basically, I would say, 75% of the 25% who comprise the knowledge class — so about 18% of the vote, with non-European migrants and migrant-descended adding another 3%, Indigenous people another 2%, Gen Z (those who aren’t in the knowledge class group as students) another 4%, older liberal middle classes another 3% or so, and the final 10% coming from the 20-30% or so of the otherwise uncategorised non-tertiary educated who may have voted for it (those figures overlap a little).
On the No side, it is a relative monolith of the non-tertiary-educated. Which presumably divides into four reasons: brute racism against anything that would help “the blacks”; indifference to the issue, and no sense of being bound up with the Indigenous population of this continent; a conscious support of inherited institutions and the formal equality of the current arrangements; and a category of its own, but also overlapping all the others — a belief in the disinformation about taking your house, etc.
So there’s an interesting inversion. The Yes vote came from multiple sources, by social class, but had essentially the same vision. The No vote came from a relatively monolithic mainstream but had apparently very different reasons for rejecting it. The conclusion has to be made that the material-historical meaning of the vote has to be seen in “class” terms: it was a revolt against this march to “class” dominance by the knowledge class, led by the cultural producer elite at their core.
This was a big play from the knowledge class, carried along by an essentially “sealed” morality, an inability to see abstract values — “I have a moral duty to extend concern to all humans because morality must be universal and general — as an expression of their class and its way of thinking.” Universalist morality is not a universal truth, like a scientific law. The other morality — that moral obligation is attached to my own people, my own group, and that loyalty is morally better than equality of treatment — is that of people whose lives are more bound in the particular. The elite of the knowledge class has been trying to discredit this sort of thinking, to portray it as not a morality at all, for decades.
The attachment to the Voice was the final move in this recent historical passage. By achieving the Voice and implementing it in the constitution, the knowledge class would determine not merely the politics of the present but the meaning of Australian history as all leading up to the moment of the Voice, a sort of Paddle Pop Hegelianism.
The refusal of this by the electorate has made the cultural producer elite — the core of the knowledge class — and its commentariat very, very angry. Their first move has been to repeat the Democrats’ post-2016 play, dropping in a simplistic false-consciousness model, treating the mainstream as a blank slate onto which anything can be projected. This was a denial of the obvious truth: the Yes campaign was a shambles, the line put the “mess” in “message”, and the No campaign easily outpaced it. The second stage, which began last week, was simple hatred and disdain directed at the mainstream of the country.
Thus Sean Kelly in the Age/SMH:
I have been struck by the widespread conclusion, based on polling, that Australians were persuaded by the argument that the Voice would divide the country. Voters may well say this was what persuaded them. But it is likely that most were instinctively against the idea; of the reasons they were able to choose between to justify their choice, this one sounded most attractive.
Well, the Voice would divide the country. That is its intent! This was the great blind spot of the Yes campaign, run with to the end. The division — between Indigenous peoples and non-Indigenous Australians — was essential to recognition. It was the enactment of recognition. We weren’t creating a Voice, a separate assembly for, say, the benefits-dependent disabled, whose powerlessness, invisibility and suffering would match that of many Indigenous groups. We proposed to specifically recognise the separateness of Indigenous peoples by recognising no other social groups as requiring or deserving a voice assembly of their own. That was the essential mechanism of the Voice.
The Yes case — that this was really a higher unity, arising from the imposition of division — was gobbledygook, and sussed by the mainstream as such. When it was pinged by the voters, Kelly and others resorted to the idea that it wasn’t their real intent, which moved beneath the murky surface of real psych 101 stuff.
In The Monthly, Rachel Withers repeated, in the last few days ahead of the vote, the one trick many Yes advocates used, of taking Yes Indigenous leaders on trust, while asking No campaigners to prove their credentials:
Conservatives Nyunggai Warren Mundine and Jacinta Nampijinpa Price have been essential spokespeople for the No campaign, using their platforms to claim a Voice isn’t necessary, while Blak Sovereign Movement leader Lidia Thorpe leads the progressive No, who want a Treaty instead of a Voice. But these leaders have received far more coverage than the people they claim to speak for.
Withers tellingly left out all those Indigenous figures — Gary Foley, Celeste Liddle and Michael Mansell among the most prominent — who made it clear that, while they would not advocate for No, they felt the Voice proposal to be a mix of a nothing burger and a stitch-up. Ignoring these voices, with a more complex take, was essential to the Yes elite’s presentation of the issue, as one of obvious justice versus a malign and sinister cabal.
This faint whiff of totalitarian thinking ran through much of the Yes commentariat’s efforts. It had started early. In June, Age columnist Jenna Price stated:
There is only one way forward and that’s all-out war. If we want to pass the Voice referendum (which, honestly, should not even be up for discussion) we will need a leader to lead us to the vote.
That is the totalitarian mindset in essence: the other side of the argument should not even be thinkable, and thus arguable. Price was suggesting that Tim Wilson would make a good Yes spokesman. Bless. One could multiply such examples indefinitely (too many of them, alas, from this publication).
Katharine Murphy rounded this all out for Guardian Australia readers, with an obsessive trilogy of articles, a Duttoniad. On September 23, Dutton was a “one-man insurgency”. On October 7, as defeat approached, he was “the exploding fire hydrant of politics, pushing his party to the angry fringes”, and on October 14, referendum day, he was “Australia’s figurehead of fear and fake news like Trump but without the charisma”. The last article’s ludicrous, desperate comparison was a clue to her hopelessly incorrect analysis. Pushing the Coalition to the “angry fringes”? No won in more than 30 Labor seats and Yes won in a single Coalition seat. That fringe looks more like a wave. Sadly, this Duttomania has had a fair expression in this publication, replacing Scott Morrison derangement syndrome as an explanation for all ills.
There are many causes for the failure of the Yes campaign, but one of them is this absolute insularity of the progressive mindset. That’s a passive thing, an attitude among the wider knowledge class. Among the progressive commentariat it’s been an active enforcement, a truly self-destructive strategy, to reduce the pace of debate by steadily labelling every idea or attitude it doesn’t like as a symptom of something else, or a product of a cabal.
This has been made visible by the failure of the Yes case, because this is what contributed overwhelmingly to its failure. These publications should be arenas for forthright debate and acute self-scrutiny. But they are serving their commercial demands by publishing pabulum, in the same way that The Australian does, for its sunstruck readership of ageing Queenslanders. Guardian Australia and others tell people exactly what they want to hear so they will continue to read it over whatever ridiculous novelty-ethnic breakfast they are having in Thornbury on a Saturday morning. The eve of the referendum had seen a plethora of “this decides what sort of nation we are” pieces. Even Niki Savva got into the act:
Come Sunday, we will either see ourselves as measured, generous people, ready to set aside the daily woes of our lives … prepared to say Yes to something that will cost us nothing, but could measurably improve their lives. Or as a frightened, resentful people …
Which followed on from Peter Hartcher’s “A frightened nation? Yes or No?” a week earlier, which had the same cod cultural analysis, with the usual method: create a false abstraction of what the Australian nation is, drawn pretty much from the high Hawke era. Render any departure or dissent from it as a neurotic reaction to the received truth. Find that, in Jon Faine’s words, the nation failed the civics test. Yes, you know what’s coming don’t you, a bit of Brecht: the people, as audience, have failed the progressive commentariat. It is time to dissolve the people-audience, etc, etc… In recent days, the unquestionable split between the tertiary-educated and others in the vote has led Kos Samaras to try and tie it to economic class — which doesn’t work — and people like Patricia Karvelas and Waleed Aly to tie it to the “lack of information”.
That just goes to show that being educated doesn’t make you smart. The Voice wasn’t a right/wrong answer. It’s not exams, which progressives love, and everyone else hates. It’s not how the contents of thought differ, it’s the form of thinking that differs, and the different moral systems that arise from that.
Will this utter debacle for progressives serve as some sort of wake-up call to editors and proprietors of these publications that, for the good of the country in general, and left and genuinely progressive and liberal thinking in particular, they must create centres of forthright and uncompromising debate, so that ideas and strategies are genuinely tested against reality, before being applied to the world?
Or will they now retreat further into a self-justifying, incurious and complacent disdain for the beliefs of two-thirds of the people they share this continent with? If they do, and imagine that they will not now meet a more concerted and organised resistance to their worldview, then they may themselves be taking that long sleep. |
_________________
"Every time we witness an injustice and do not act, we train our character to be passive in its presence." – Julian Assange
Last edited by David on Fri Oct 20, 2023 3:56 pm; edited 1 time in total |
|
|
|
|
Jezza
2023 PREMIERS!
Joined: 05 Sep 2010
Location: Ponsford End
|
| Post subject: | |
|
^ Keep posting the Rundle articles, David.
Always enjoy reading his pieces.
_________________
| 1902 | 1903 | 1910 | 1917 | 1919 | 1927 | 1928 | 1929 | 1930 | 1935 | 1936 | 1953 | 1958 | 1990 | 2010 | 2023 | |
|
|
|
|
Culprit
Joined: 06 Feb 2003
Location: Port Melbourne
|
| Post subject: | |
|
David, my perception is a lack of education on what the "Yes" vote was all about. Australians as a whole have no idea what our constitution is all about hence we have many quoting US BS. Throw in the MSM pushing the likes of Conservatives Nyunggai Warren Mundine and Jacinta Nampijinpa Price as First Nations people voting "NO" so that means it must be wrong.
I will add that my view is Mundine and Price are looking for a payday (Reparations). They are going to be totally disappointed as they have given the conservatives a gift on a platter. They may have won the battle but they will lose the war. They have helped put back the First Nations movement for 50 years. |
|
|
|
|
David
to wish impossible things
Joined: 27 Jul 2003
Location: the edge of the deep green sea
|
| Post subject: | |
|
Glad to hear, Jezza. 
Culprit, I think you may have the wrong end of the stick there (certainly with Price, not 100% sure with Mundine) – their position has always been more or less indistinguishable from that of the mainstream Liberal and National parties, and they're certainly not hoping for anything more radical than the Voice. Price has specifically spoken out against reparations:
https://www.skynews.com.au/australia-news/voice-to-parliament/shadow-indigenous-australians-minister-jacinta-price-calls-on-prime-minister-albanese-to-come-clean-about-the-uluru-statement-from-the-heart/news-story/eb60c39ef5d111b7e84edb7bc4ec3808
| Quote: | Senator Price, who joined the shadow ministry after her predecessor, Julian Leeser, resigned his ministry over the Liberal Party’s opposition to the Voice, said that the Australians she spoke to couldn’t understand why the government would pursue a treaty with its own citizens and are “dumbfounded” by the idea of reparations for Indigenous Australians.
“People are dumbfounded at the idea that non-Indigenous Australians should be paying some kind of compensation or reparations to those of us who are of indigenous heritage for things that occurred in our history, you know, 150 - 200 years ago,” Senator Price said.
“Those of us alive today are not responsible for what occurred in the past and there's no one around today who's 150 to 200 years old, either.” |
As has Mundine:
https://www.skynews.com.au/australia-news/voice-to-parliament/what-the-hell-are-these-people-warren-mundine-blasts-voice-advocates-for-wanting-to-rip-down-this-country-and-destroy-it/news-story/388f2f179d6fa28fcea3de3d141be989
_________________
"Every time we witness an injustice and do not act, we train our character to be passive in its presence." – Julian Assange |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
You cannot post new topics in this forum
You cannot reply to topics in this forum
You cannot edit your posts in this forum
You cannot delete your posts in this forum
You cannot vote in polls in this forum
You cannot attach files in this forum
You cannot download files in this forum
|
|
The Rules
FAQ
Usergroups
Calendar
Search
Log in
Register
