Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander readers please note that this article mentions deceased persons.
Last month, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese announced the date of the upcoming referendum. At the launch of the government’s official Yes campaign, hundreds of people filled South Australia’s Elizabeth Civic Centre in anticipation, with thousands more tuning in online. It was a historic moment for some, in a historic place for others. The frenzied attention afforded to the Albanese government and its referendum was once afforded to murdered Black lives, a now-distant memory the penal colony insists we forget.
A few hundred meters away from the Elizabeth Civic Centre sits the Elizabeth Police Station. In its cells, my elder brother Wayne Fella Morrison spent his first two nights in custody. He’d never been in lockup before. On September 19, 2016, he applied for bail at the Elizabeth Magistrates Court, situated between the centre and the station. The magistrate ordered bail reports and remanded Wayne to appear by audio-visual link (AVL) in a few days’ time. At 12pm on that Friday, my mother, sister and I sat waiting in that court, excitedly anticipating Wayne’s release.
My brother didn’t make the AVL appointment. Instead, he had been brutally restrained with a spit hood by more than 14 officers at Yatala Labour Prison up the road. Still on remand, he was cuffed and placed face down into the back of a prison transport van with eight officers inside. Wayne died three days later in hospital. During the ensuing coronial inquiry, the officers refused to speak on what occurred in the van. Instead, they reiterated the word “privilege” hundreds of times in the Coroners Court, claiming their legal right to the penalty privilege against self-incrimination. Our family was left without accountability and my brother was again deprived of dignity.
It is telling that the location chosen to announce the referendum date would be in the same vicinity of Wayne’s week-long death journey at the hands of the state. As a reflection of the insensitivity of this referendum, our loved ones’ lives and deaths have been rendered invisible. And much like this referendum, my brother’s life was toyed with till its bitter end.
It’s also not surprising that Australia, which lawfully hoods children as young as 10 years old, would exercise its privilege to silence those who call for accountability, reparations and justice for the ongoing genocide it commits. Indeed the proposed Voice to Parliament is supported by a statement, from the beating blue heart of the state, that we are at the forefront of not their minds but their political prison.
This referendum and the proposed Voice to Parliament attempt to politically capture First Nations peoples and pacify our transformative movements. We endure state-sanctioned violence and fascism so the Australian population can bathe in the glory of their streamlined democratic state. I’m left questioning how we went from calling to defund the police, abolish prisons and #burnitdown, to completing the Commonwealth and entertaining the perspectives of racist tropes like “Advance Australia Fair”.
For generations, our families who have lost loved ones in custody have been wailing for change. We have attempted to meet with prime ministers countless times to discuss solutions critical to saving Black lives. Time after time, we have been refused and neglected, left to linger along with the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody and other reports that outline the hundreds of recommendations voiced for the purpose of tangible change.
It’s not that the Voice to Parliament proposal is overdue, it’s that it obviously holds no power. As Kerry O’Brien opined, it’s “simple, unthreatening and unambitious”. An acceptance of the status quo — as if the crumbs will feed us.
Linda Burney says the Voice to Parliament is not about reparations. I’m concerned this is because government is spending our reparations on what many expect to be a failed referendum. Currently the Voice to Parliament proposal and referendum have received more funding than that budgeted to keep Aboriginal Legal Services afloat.
This is an abomination, especially as Labor’s state and territory governments continue to wage war on First Nations communities. The Northern Territory government continues to renege on the recommendations of the 2017 royal commission to incarcerate more Aboriginal children. The Queensland government has twice suspended the Human Rights Act to cage more Aboriginal children, too. It’s not lost on us either that Australia has failed to fully ratify the United Nations Optional Protocol to the Convention Against Torture — a treaty to eliminate torture for all people on Aboriginal Lands.
This referendum is not asking us to vote on something that will sustain us, nor for compensation for that which has failed us. We’re not voting to end deaths in custody, to end state-sanctioned brutality or the continual desecration of Aboriginal Lands. It’s not a vote toward action on exasperating climate action and raging inequality. If you’re like me and you support political participation for the sole purpose of radical transformation, then this referendum is about stifling what’s possible in order to maintain what’s palatable — a means to our end.
As the civil rights giant Harry Belafonte, an outspoken opponent of Trump, said: “Dissent is central to any democracy.” In that vein, I continue to insist we dissent. For non-First Nations peoples that might look like voting No, or, better yet, not participating in the referendum at all. Instead use the day to call for tangible justice for murdered First Nations peoples at the hands of the state, and those surviving and resisting its abuse. Use the day to remember the movement for the inherent and inalienable rights that this referendum ignores. Return to the underpinning momentum, that which has been co-opted; movements anchored in resurgence of justice, sovereignty and decolonisation.
I’ve asked for years now: who will be accountable for our deaths? Because the hope of a First Nations future is predicated on us being alive. The proposed Voice to Parliament has given us no reason to believe that we will be fed. And we cannot survive off crumbs.
It’s not the Voice which will continue to hold indigenous people back, although I give all credence to Blak cynicism over it… it’s this mor0nic zero-sum dominator culture which has metastasised into global capitalism.
The only thing which can save us all is solidarity against the omnicidal ruling class. MLK was assassinated just as he was about to broaden the civil rights movement to encompass the poor. We never hear much about that… Just like we never hear about a whole lot of things.
Everybody trapped in the matrix needs to ask what the matrix is, and band together against the Agent Smiths of the world. Identity politics is a divisive trap – the only politics of identity we should be pursuing is that of the 99%. The filthy rich are the common enemy not just of us all, but democracy, civilisation, and biodiversity itself.
I really am staggered at how we can just take extinctions in our stride, as if they aren’t unforgivable atrocities of the highest order. We will solve nothing until we break this most toxic of systems.
I’ve been wracking my brains for years to find a chink in the armour, and it’s all but impregnable. Every revolution is co-opted by the powerful. The only feasible solution which has presented itself to me is to create an alternative non-hierarchical civilisation as a game, so that it can have a large number of members and be developed into a working model of a civilisation in parallel to this utter shemozzle, and we can all just jump ship when enough people realise we’re otherwise done for.
Nobody’s coming to save us. We have to work out a solution, and it starts with recognising our biggest problem, which we all share. Otherwise, all we have are lies to cling to while it all crumbles and burns.
Love the idea of the game as a working model. I too have been wrestling with this one as well. As I see it the engine room that powers the matrix and keeps us trapped is the economic system itself. For hundreds of years the only systems we’ve ever able to envisage are fuedalism, communism and capitalism (with socialism being a halfway house between communism and capitalism). We need an alternative because surely it is the capitalist system that creates the mega rich and, worse yet, gives personhood to corporations allowing them to effectively compete against and simultaneously use human beings.
I think the trick is to allow people to mostly follow their intrinsic motivation, where they’re happiest to do stuff for free, while incorporating some means of directing effort where it’s needed. That’s the basic problem of collective endeavour.
There will always be things few want to do which require more than a few, but I think that problem is relatively easily solved by making everyone do all the nasty jobs when they’re young, as a rite of passage which ensures they have empathy later. An advance payment to society, so to speak. Not so different from the concept of national service some countries have.
The platform would be a mobile app like a MMORPG, part The Sims, part GitHub, all wiki and hierarchically flat, and we could collaboratively work out its rules on the fly while it’s just a game. Once it’s at the stage of v1.0, its function is mostly to establish the new culture (social operating system) and enable collaborative course correction and planning, but it should be designed so that we can work without the platform if/when it goes down, once we’re familiar enough with its principles.
Just consider how many atrocities occur because there’s a buck in it, and how much absolutely necessary stuff goes wanting because there isn’t. How much maddening, demoralising perversity we’re forced to accept daily.
Fck that noise, I say. I can see a way out.
The economic system is absolutely our prison. It’s a collective illusion we’re free to shatter.
Nice.
A Yes vote will not inhibit any of those desirable and necessary improvements happening.
Well…
There, we fixed it. Moving right along to the next item on the culture war agenda…
If you need stitches, what good is a band-aid?
Although I’ll be voting yes because there’s no way I want to do anything the horrible end of the no crowd would be happy with.
Basic logic, not mutually exclusive issues and nothing is stopping us from walking, talking, chewing gum and farting; old delaying tactics and there may not be another chance for a generation e.g. see the Republic ref, which had Howard doing everything possible to stymie…..25 years ago….
how does The Voice prevent First Nations people from dissenting? – us Whites do nothing but bitch and whine all the time, and we’ve already won
I think the author’s argument is that the Voice isn’t going to prevent anything from happening. Including racism as normal.
But voting No strengthens the arm of the Duttons and Hansons of the world so good luck with achieving any much needed change when you defeat the Voice.
I have met many with awful, traumatic family stories and seen the struggle to work through events that have left hurt, anger, frustration and a deep exhaustion. There is a sense of just bashing your head against a brick wall.
Sometimes coming from a different direction changes everything.
It looks like a promising new direction, that required generosity from the ‘white’ Australian population, is not going to ‘get up’.
My experience around trauma has taught me that something like the Recognition and the guaranteed ‘voice’ would work – not overnight but in time. It becomes the ‘anchor’ to hold onto and the space to both hear and be heard.
I am afraid that all those who have felt this first step towards healing was not enough and should not be accepted will now have nothing, should there be a successful No vote.
Go and read the Coroner’s Report on the author’s brother’s death, Ken. Be interested in what you think.
The time to imbed indigenous views into policy making, through supporting the Voice and voting Yes, is right now. None of the issues identified by Rule will be addressed through some “progressive No” – it instead permanently takes the possibility of national reconciliation off the agenda.