With the Voice to Parliament Referendum date announced to be October 14 2023, this thread will run in the lead up to the date for general discussions/queries regarding the Voice to Parliament.
The Proposed Constitutional Amendment
Chapter IX Recognition of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples
129 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice
In recognition of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples as the First Peoples of Australia:
there shall be a body, to be called the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice; the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice may make representations to the Parliament and the Executive Government of the Commonwealth on matters relating to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples; the Parliament shall, subject to this Constitution, have power to make laws with respect to matters relating to the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice, including its composition, functions, powers and procedures.
Past Discussions
Here are some previous posts in this community regarding the referendum:
- The Voice referendum official Yes/No pamphlets
- Linda Burney says there is everything to gain and nothing to lose by supporting the Voice
- Families distressed after 'highly misleading' video used by anti-Voice campaigners goes viral
- The Indigenous Voice to Parliament – separating fact from fiction | 7.30
- 10 questions about the Voice to Parliament - answered by the experts
- The yes pamphlet: campaign’s voice to parliament referendum essay – annotated and factchecked
- Fact-checking for the "No" referendum pamphlet was not compulsory
Common Misinformation
- "The Uluru Statement from the Heart is 26 Pages not 1" - not true
Government Information
- Referendum question and constitutional amendment
- voice.gov.au - General information about the Voice
Amendments to this post
If you would like to see some other articles or posts linked here please let me know and I'll try to add it as soon as possible.
- Added the proposed constitutional amendment (31/08/2023)
- Added Common Misinformation section (01/07/2023)
Discussion / Rules
Please follow the rules in the sidebar and for aussie.zone in general. Anything deemed to be misinformation or with malicious intent will be removed at moderators' discretion. This is a safe space to discuss your opinion on the voice or ask general questions.
Please continue posting news articles as separate posts but consider adding a link to this post to encourage discussion.
It's very relevant. We need to decide if we want to irrevocably change the country. We need more than "don't worry about it"
The composition of the Voice is not irrevocable. The vote in the referendum is whether you support the notion that there is a constitutionally-mandated Voice, and not whether you approve of the specific model being proposed. Parliament can change the specific model at will, regardless of whether it is the current Labor Government or a future LNP one. The only thing that will be irrevocable is the fact that some Voice exists.
Which makes the voice completely irrelevant. When the LNP are in power the voice will be 1 spot held by some white idiot like Barnaby Joyce or Scomo. If One Nation ever got in power the voice would be some white racist saying that the indigenous people want to all be shipped off to the middle of the country and left alone in a fenced area with no contact with the rest of the country.
It doesn't matter its still a step in the right direction.
Besides its just asking to be heard and that's it, the voice doesn't have the power to make any rules or changes. So it really doesn't matter.
What does matter if it it's voted down now it will never comr back meaning one nations people will have no chance at a well legislated voice in the future.
So if your argument is no because its not set up well enough thats shit, because we need to crawl before running.
This doesn’t make your voice heard any more than any of the existing indigenous advisory boards. It just gives you one more voice to be ignored, and to be used as a political tool by the government of the time. LNP get in and make some cronie the single person in the voice who makes recommendations that harm indigenous people - how does that help you?
Your argument is basically “it’s better than nothing and will lead to more”. My argument is that it is nothing, and if it goes through it will be pointed at for decades as a way to go “look we gave them a voice, we don’t need to do any more”.
Sorry mate this is kind of absurd.
When new legislation is passed by government, yes there is (rightly) much debate between elected representatives around exactly how that legislation should work.
Once legislation is passed there is rarely much meaningful change beyond incremental improvements / adaptions.
You're suggesting that every newly elected government will just discard legislation from the previous government. If this were likely, every new government would have been doing it with every contentious issue throughout our history.
This isn't much of a thing in this country but it's not impossible. Fear radicalisation and trivial legislation. Not an argument against the voice though.
Untrue. The high court would have something to say about an aboriginal voice being composed of non Aboriginals.
Would they? There's nothing in the proposed constituational amendment that says that the body has to be made up of indigenous people and indigenous people only.
Constitutional interpretation relies on all sources used to draft the document. Intentions must be gathered as this is a founding document, therefore all Acts spring forth from it. Explanatory documents, the Uluru statement itself, and documents by the referendum working group all support the idea of the A&TSIVoice being for ATSI people only.
Yet the constitution amendment doesn't say it, no matter what the "idea" is.
What's your point? This is the reason we have the courts. We could write into infinity the processes and procedure of a voice but the other bodies are free to determine those for themselves, we are leaving this to Parliament so that the voice can change according to need and times.
Should there ever be a need or a time when the Indigenous voice isn't entirely made up of indigenous people? If not, why not protect that in the constitution?
Because there are functional problems to this issue. The representative portion may be, but their might be other public servants who aren't aboriginal and may be excluded if mentioned in the constitution. If you insert functional requirements into the constitution to enable such things you remove the ability to change the Voice's functions as mentioned before. Legal interpretations suggest that a voice would have to be comprised of ATSI people regardless.
And that's where I can see people having concerns. By voting Yes, you are opening the door for a model that you may not agree with. I can see people being hesitant about it, like it's a trap. But that's just my devil's advocate opinion, the fact is that this will unlikely affect anyone who isn't ingenious in a tangible way.
It's well overdue for us to genuinely celebrate our indigenous heritage and ensure our constitution allows us to embed this culture into our country's DNA.
This isn’t “celebrating” our indigenous heritage. If anything it’s doing it a disservice by having the white people go “here you go little fellas, you can have a high chair up with the adults at the big table, but just shoosh and let us decide what’s best for you”.
Then why not ask Indigenous Australians what they think? Vote Yes if it's what they want, vote No if they don't.
(The answer, by the way, is that about 80% of Indigenous Australians are in favour.)
🤣 Sorry but those polls being used to say "80% of Indigenous Australians are in favour" is pathetic. Just over 1000 people, potentially significantly less with crossover, means you can throw that statistic in the bin.
The largest poll being only 738 people is absolutely mind boggling. Imagine using that number to extrapolate out to an entire population of a country.
Tell me you don't understand how polling works without telling me you don't understand how polling works.
Even nation-wide polls often use a sample size less than 5 times that, and I shouldn't need to tell you that the Indigenous population of Australia is less than 20%.
The polls' conductors would admittedly tell you that obtaining a representative sample of Indigenous Australians is rather difficult, but this is accounted for in their margins of error, which are less than 10%. 80% ± 10% is still a pretty overwhelming majority.
You don't understand bro, he has "Indigenous friends". He definitely knows what he's talking about!
And he has the gall to say in one comment
while in another pretending he's not claiming it's
It's quite fitting that the biggest proponent for a No vote here perfectly embodies everything wrong about that campaign. Zero facts or evidence, misinformation everywhere (5 million Indigenous Australians lel), shifting the goalposts every time debunks one of their claims and then attempting to take the moral high ground by pretending everyone is accusing them of racism (which they obviously can't be guilty of as they have "Indigenous friends" who they mention in every second comment). And now they've started co-opting Progressive No arguments because they realise those play better here, even though their initial bad faith questions two months ago were straight out of the Conservative No playbook.
I understand how polling works, and I understand that a sample size that small doesn't extrapolate out with any certainty or accuracy to a population of ~5 million.
They can say their margin of error is 10% but it doesn't make it correct.
You cannot conclude that 80% of a 5 million population support something based on a poll of 700 people lol. Absolutely absurd.
It probably would, actually, since that would be roughly the same ratio of polled people to total population as the polls used to determine the views of Australia as a whole.
But the Indigenous population is actually much lower than 5 million anyway. Try just over 812,000.
It's not very complicated. You can look up the formula for how to calculate a margin of error based on your sample size, total population, desired confidence level, and the percentage of the portion that gave an answer.
z × sqrt(p × (1-p)) / sqrt((N-1) × n / (N - n)), where p is the sample proportion, n is the sample size, N is the total population size, and z is the z-score associated with your desired level of confidence. I'm using a 99% confidence interval; I was going to use 95%, but it turned out that with this sample size you can actually be a lot more confident than that and still keep quite a low margin. The z-score is 2.58. When I put in your figure of 5 million (remembering that this is actually more than 5× too large!), 700 people, and 80%, the margin of error is a measly 3.9%.Real polling is more sophisticated than that, since they account for how representative they believe their sample is of the whole population, but that's what it boils down to. They know what they're doing far better than you or I, and they're quite confident.
If you want to oppose the Voice, do so, and face whatever accusations may be levied at you because of it. But don't hide behind the lie that it's a racist policy imposed by white people on Indigenous Australians. Because the evidence is clear on that matter: Indigenous Australians support it.
You've thoroughly thrashed him, applause.
The evidence is not clear. A poll of 700 people is not “the evidence is clear”.
Margins of error are not “truth”. You can decide you’ve got a margin of error of 1% and be wildly and massively incorrect in your results.
Also not sure why you’re saying I’m hiding behind a lie that it’s a racist white policy? Where did that come from?
Not entirely true. HC will likely set some sort of minimum standard for composition eventually, probably minimum standards for how they can provide representations if parliament decides to make it hard for them to do so.
It might do that. Or it might not. The inter-state commission is a good example of that.
The rich put them there. We Australians don't really have a choice. The Libs are complete garbage and Labor have abandoned their principles just to get power. They are only slightly better?
What other choice do we have?
You mean Rupert Murdoch put them there.
If you are not an Indigenous person then the voice will not really be advising on things that are relevant to you. And the voice is fundamentally an advisory group that will present their concerns to the government. The government will then act on this advice. It will still be the government making laws and policies. It just needs to be constitutional so that it can't be terminated like previous advisory groups have been.
Considering the level of disadvantage that Indigenous Australians experience, don't you think it's reasonable that they should have greater say (a voice) on how to address the issues that are relevant to them?
The problem is that those people who will be given the voice will actively work against the needs of those they pretend to represent. Just like all politicians.
How will that help anyone?
So, your plan is to burn it all down and live in an anarchist commune?
Don't threaten me with a good time.
Or they just won’t, because nothing in this change to the constitution makes them or even says they need to even consider any advice. That’s one of the problems lots of us have with it - it changes literally nothing.
I think this is one of the most valid criticisms of the voice proposal. I agree it doesn't go far enough in ensuring that governments listen to the voice. This is a big part of why I was on the fence with my vote for a while.
Yet people call me racist and "far right" for having this concern lol.
You would rather us have bo hope then the smallest opportunity to maybe be heard
There are already plenty of indigenous advisory boards that hold no power. Why do you want another that also provides no guarantee of any power?
It may be a valid criticism but it's not a valid reason to vote No. Remember that the advisory body is only half of what is happening here, the other half is constitutional recognition. Indigenous Australians have asked for this in overwhelming numbers. By itself, that is as good a reason as any to vote Yes.
But even in the event that the advisory body is ineffective in its initial state, the beauty of this system is that it can just redesigned by the next government. It doesn't have to be perfect right out of the gate to have a positive effect.