Monthly Archives: September 2023

From now until referendum day, we have removed the paywall on all Voice coverage. Read and share this article for free.

It is becoming clear the Voice referendum is our Brexit moment. The No case is being built around misinformation and fear. The basest anxieties are being stoked. As with Brexit, the choice made on October 14 will say a great deal about the country that made it.

A defeat would lead inevitably to a loss in international standing and influence a perception, quite inaccurate, that Australia has not forsaken its racist past. As occurred in Britain, there will be, a few months hence, asevere case of buyers remorse.

Lord Acton, the great English liberal Catholic historian, famous for his aphorism about the corruption of power, wrote: I exhort you never to debase the moral currency or to lower the standard of rectitude, but to try others by the final maxim that governs your own lives, and to suffer no man and no cause to escape the undying penalty which history has the power to inflict on wrong

We would do well to remember these words.

No campaigners in the current referendum, the first in Australia since 1999, are encouraged to concentrate on generating fear and doubt in voters, avoiding any discussion of evidence, history or statistics. In this appalling campaign, the No side just makes stuff up.

The No campaign slogan If you dont know, vote no is morally bankrupt. It encourages citizens not to engage with an important issue. Really, if you dont know, you should find out. This is basic decency on a question of such importance.

Coalition politicians have been circulating material in their electorates that asserts various falsehoods. This, from Dan Tehan, is an example:

If the Voice is approved, it would be the biggest change ever to our Constitution (rule book), in our history

They want the Voice to cover all parts of the government.

This would give the Voice a lot of power and control over everything, from the Reserve Bank to Centrelink.

It means there would be no issues, like the economy, national security, infrastructure, health, education, and more, that the Voice could not be involved in.

Instead of Parliament deciding the Voices powers, the High Court would decide. This could cause legal problems.

Do they really believe any of this stuff? Would any be prepared to sign an affidavit asserting that the claims are accurate?

The assertion that entrenching the Voice as an advisory body would represent the biggest change to the Constitution in our history is not only wrong but palpably absurd.

The Constitution of the Commonwealth of Australia never operated as written.

From the first week of the Commonwealths establishment in 1901, executive power was in the hands of a prime minister and cabinet (not mentioned in the Constitution) and Australia operates as a democracy (a word missing from the Constitution). Aboriginal people are now counted in the census (1967), the High Court is no longer subordinate to British courts (1975) and the Australia Act (1986) provides that the British Parliament can no longer legislate for us. The royal veto over legislation is still preserved.

No campaigners assert the 1901 Constitution is a non-racist document and that a Yes vote would introduce a racist element, so much so that Australia would be adopting Apartheid. That is both wicked and silly.

The decades leading up to Federation in 1901 coincided with powerful arguments, internationally, about scientific racism, the concept of a hierarchy of races with Nordic types at the top, then people from the Mediterranean, Asians, Africans and, at the base of the pyramid, mainland Australian and Tasmanian Aboriginal peoples.

Scientific racism, often misnamed social Darwinism, led to the appalling doctrine of eugenics with the premise that unfit individuals, and even races, could be culled. Eugenics had powerful scientific supporters, both from the left and right. Until the 1970s, that support was especially strong in Australia and central to the White Australia Policy.

Charles Darwin, to his credit, had rejected the hierarchy of races, proposing that all humans had similar physical and intellectual potential, with differences not being innate but the result of climate, diet and disease.

Throughout the 19th century, Aboriginal skeletons were eagerly sought by European and American museums and it was assumed that the passing of the Aborigines was imminent.

There was more interest in Indigenous Australians as specimens than as people.

White Australia was a powerful driving force in the Federation movement, and Alfred Deakin, a liberal reformer on most issues, was a zealot on race.

When the Commonwealth of Australia was inaugurated in January 1901, the premier of New South Wales, William Lyne, observed: Of the three great colonial possessions, Australias lot has been the happiest. Unlike Canada and South Africa, she has not had arace problem to solve.

C.E.W. Bean, our pre-eminent war historian, asserted Australia was the only continent without racial mixture. He did not count Indigenous Australians, seeing them as marginal, irrelevant or headed for extinction. He shared these views with his collaborator Keith Murdoch, Ruperts father.

The Australian Constitution was an artefact of the contemporary consensus about race and eugenics. First Nations people were dismissed as irrelevant out of sight, out of mind.

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people are now estimated to number just 3.8per cent of the Australian population. A third are below the age of 15.

In the campaign for constitutional recognition through an Indigenous Voice to Parliament, the burden of arguing the Yes case has fallen on Linda Burney, Patrick Dodson, Noel Pearson, Megan Davis, Thomas Mayo, Marcia Langton, Pat Anderson, Pat Turner, Tom Calma, Ken Wyatt, June Oscar and others.

This is a dangerous strategy. The referendum involves all Australians, not just First Nations people.

The No case asserts the Yes campaign promotes division, that its framed as special pleading from an elite minority: This is what we demand.

In reality, the case is far more modest: Please listen to us.

To succeed, the Yes campaign requires powerful advocacy from within the 96.2 per cent of non-Indigenous Australians. The argument needs to be: This is the time to be honest with ourselves. First Nations people have a right to be heard.

So far, advocates from the 96.2per cent have adopted a small target strategy. Leaders of the Commonwealth government, from all six states five Labor and one Liberal (Tasmania) as well as from both territories, have been deferential and courteous, leaving the Yes case to First Nations people.

There probably could have been a bipartisan agreement to set up the Voice by legislation but Anthony Albanese, to his credit, opted for the harder way, because entrenching the Voice in the Constitution was a central element in the May 2017 Uluru Statement from the Heart.

It would have been cynical for him to have said, Well listen to you up to a point, but ultimately we reject what you ask for. We will take one step, but not the second adopting tactics, not principles, emphasising the brutal short term of politics not the unforgiving long term of history.

The questions in Australian referendums are almost invariably very short, only about principle. There are never any details about how a Yes will be implemented.

The composition, size, mode of election and terms of reference for the Voice will be determined by the parliament, not by the prime minister or the government, and Opposition Leader Peter Dutton should acknowledge that he would have to share in its creation.

Since the Albanese government does not have a majority in both houses of parliament, the composition and function of the Voice will require negotiation and compromise, in which Dutton and senators Jacinta Nampijinpa Price, Kerrynne Liddle and Lidia Thorpe could play a constructive role.

This should have been clearly stated, and repeated, from the outset.

Unhappily, the disinformation, gross exaggeration and Trumpian appeals to fear and anger shown by some No advocates have gone unchallenged. Powerful advocacy for Yes is hard to identify outside the Indigenous community.

Its time to recognise, and reject, racist elements in our history, which are embedded in the Constitution. Its time to break down barriers and share knowledge and experience, to act decently and recognise that life itself involves risk, every day.

Apart from the 1967 referendum, when there was no official No case, and an assimilation policy was broadly accepted by all major political parties, every subsequent change to the status of First Nations people has aroused bitter but unjustified fear and anger.

Every time there has been a change to the status of Indigenous people Mabo, Wik, the Apology there have been cries of havoc and alarm. None have had any justification.

Given its unpromising beginnings in 1788, settler Australia has been a country of remarkable achievement, outstandingly successful in most areas. But we could achieve far more for ourselves and humanity generally if we came clean about our past.

We have so much to be proud of. There are about 190 nations on Earth and Australia ranks in the top 10 on most social indicators.

No is a confession of failure, of the belief that if we attempted anything new, wed muck it up. So we remain prisoners of the past, back in Platos cave, surrounded by pessimism and apathy.

Yes is a vote for optimism, confidence, a vote for the future, an assertion that we are capable of great things, of acting with decency, courage and generosity.

Surely the choice is simple.

This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on September 16, 2023 as "The Voice is our Brexit moment".

For almost a decade, The Saturday Paper has published Australias leading writers and thinkers. We have pursued stories that are ignored elsewhere, covering them with sensitivity and depth. We have done this on refugee policy, on government integrity, on robo-debt, on aged care, on climate change, on the pandemic.

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The monarchy and the constitution

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Barry Jones The Voice is our Brexit moment - The Saturday Paper

Mark Carney was governor of the Bank of England from 2013 to 2020.

Mark Carney was governor of the Bank of England from 2013 to 2020.

Mark Carney has delivered a stunning takedown of Brexit and Liz Trusss government.

The former Bank of England governor accused those who backed quitting the European Union of wanting to tear down the future.

And he said Trusss disastrous mini-Budget, in which she planned to borrow billions of pounds to slash taxes for the rich, of creating Argentina on the Channel in reference to that countrys troubled economy.

Speaking at a summit in Montreal also attended by Labour leader Keir Starmer, Carney said: For years, the rallying cry of the Brexiteers was broken Britain. But their solution - to take back control - ended up code for tear down the future.

He went on: When politicians proclaim that our great democracies are broken, its not because they want to fix them, its because they want a licence to demolish.

Its a model, and its a repeated model, that uses a constraint to starve the beast of government in the misguided view that slashing leads to growing.

Carney, who led the Bank of England from 2013 until 2020, added: When Brexiteers tried to create Singapore on the Thames, the Truss government instead delivered Argentina on the Channel - and that was a year ago.

Those with little experience in the private sector - lifelong politicians masquerading as free marketeers - grossly under-value the importance of mission, of institutions, and of discipline to a strong economy.

And the bad news is that while these tactics never work economically, they can work politically. Brexit happened, Donald Trump was elected. So we cant dismiss the impact of anger, but we must resist its power.

Truss was eventually forced to resign as prime minister after just 49 days in office.

Story continues

She has since defended her plans to slash taxes to boost growth, insisting that she was the victim of the powerful economic establishment.

It also emerged last week that she is writing a book on how to save the west.

See the rest here:

Mark Carney Has Delivered A Stunning Takedown Of Brexit And Liz Truss - Yahoo Movies UK

Pothole repairs are at their lowest level in five years. Britains biggest municipal council, Birmingham, went bust a few weeks ago. The backlog in processing asylum claims is so great that would-be migrants are being housed on barges.

The air traffic control system went down for more than a day on the back of a single error. Shoplifting is at epidemic proportions.

The train system is beset by strikes, and ambitions for a major new high-speed line are watered down again and again, while the costs blow out. The water companies are discharging raw effluent into seas and rivers. The flagship offshore wind industry seems to be running out of puff.

In recent opinion polls, 58 per cent of respondents agreed that Britain is broken, and 76 per cent said it was becoming an appreciably worse place to live.

Britons, notoriously, love a good moan. Complaints about things getting worse are often made with an almost delighted relish. The sense that the country is in long-term decline, ever since the end of empire, is an almost unshakeable item of faith.

So its not surprising that confirmation bias abounds. Choosing from the menu above, every gloomy Briton is an assiduous compiler of their own catalogue of woe.

There has been a recent shift, though. In the early years after the Brexit referendum in mid-2016, the most enthusiastic doomsayers were Remainers people who had voted to stay in the EU, and subsequently seized upon any and every shred of evidence which might suggest that Brexit had been a calamitous mistake.

Former prime minister Boris Johnson, the most ardent of Leavers, waged a relentless one-man war against these doomsters and gloomsters, as he often called them. His argument was that Brexit was a great opportunity for Britains rejuvenation, if only the British people were up for embracing it.

With his departure, though, this buccaneering Brexiteer bravado has all but evaporated. Now, its the right-wing press in which youll find some of the gloomiest inventories of everything thats wrong with Britain.

Britain is in a state of distress more profound than our leaders are capable of addressing, says one recent headline in the Tories in-house newspaper The Daily Telegraph. Labour and the Tories have joined forces to condemn Britain to national failure, reads another. Britain isnt in managed decline: the country is about to fall off a cliff. On it goes.

My hunch is that the gloom now gripping the British right probably stems from the widespread expectation that the Conservatives will lose government next year. They have little to show for 13 years in power, and now they face a spell under Labour. For a Tory, that is pretty depressing.

But the left has precious little cause for levity either. Infrastructure is run down, and public services are struggling, but taxes are already at a record high and government borrowing is maxed out and costly.

That leaves Labour with little ability to drive a new political or economic agenda. Whats more, there is also little will: the public is concerned with the soaring cost of living, not seized with a desire to embrace any new progressive vision or policies.

The aftershocks of Britains big Brexit rupture, magnified by the COVID-19 pandemic and the Ukraine war, are only just beginning to settle. Some commentators hope that this will restore Britains lost sense of proportion and pragmatism. Lets hope so, because the alternative is a potential descent into pessimism and paralysis.

See the original post here:

It's not just the 'Remainers' whingeing Britain really is broken - The Australian Financial Review

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UK SMEs not ready for 'avalanche' of Brexit 2.0 rules and taxes - Financial Times

In the same way that Britains more Eurosceptic newspapers will take even harmful policies and suggest they illustrate the successes of Brexit, those that campaigned for Remain rarely miss an opportunity to remind their readers that the 2016 vote was a mistake.

Having untied itself from Brussels regulations, Britain is now becoming the toxic poster child of Europe. That is according to a campaigner quoted in The Guardian on Wednesday in an article criticising the government for failing to ban 36 pesticides that are not allowed in the EU. Of these, the paper noted that 13 are considered highly hazardous, while four are highly toxic to bees, one contaminates water, and one is highly toxic to aquatic organisms.

There is obviously a story in this, especially given the Tory promise that environmental regulations post-Brexit would not slip lower than those set in Brussels. And it seems right that campaigners should urge the government to bring tougher rules into play. But to say, as The Guardian does in its first paragraph (albeit in quotation marks), that Britain is becoming the toxic poster child of Europe is quite a stretch.

All but six of the pesticides were allowed in the EU when Britain formally left, just three years ago. The paper saves this rather significant piece of information for its fifth paragraph. Businessman and former Brexit Party MEP Ben Habib described this presentation as putting Europhilic dogma ahead of reality. He told The European Conservative:

If these pesticides are so awful, all of Europe was, until recently, toxic! This is yet another Remainer/Rejoiner scare story.

To classify 12 of them as carcinogens, nine as endocrine disruptors, and eight as reproductive toxins is more Guardian-esque hyperbole. Many chemicals, if absorbed excessively, have potentially adverse health outcomes. It is all about the dosage. I repeat: these pesticides were until recently widely used across Europe.

The Guardian needs to maintain some form of rationality in its apparent unfettered desire to promote the EU and do down the United Kingdom.

After all, it is not as if there arent plenty of other sticks with which to beat the current Tory government.

Read more here:

Brexit Bitterness Continues To Cloud Reporting The European Conservative - The European Conservative

The UK is falling further behind the EU in restricting chemicals that pose a risk to human health and the environment, according to a new analysis.

UsingtheUK governments GB approvals registerand theEuropean Commission active substances database,PAN UK, the Pesticide Action Network, found 36 pesticides that can be used in the UK but are banned in EU countries.

The government has repeatedly promised that our environmental standards wont slip post-Brexit. And yet here we are, less than four years later, and already were seeing our standards fall far behind those of the EU, said Nick Mole, policy officer at the charity.

Of the 36 chemicals, 13 are considered highly hazardous pesticides a UN concept used to identify the most harmful chemicals including four that are highly toxic to bees, one that contaminates water and one that is highly toxic to aquatic organisms. The chemicals will now be in use in the UK for between two and five years longer than in EU countries, said PAN.

The analysis also revealed a growing threat to human health. The list of 36 pesticides also includes12 classified as carcinogens, nine endocrine disruptors (EDCs) and eight developmental or reproductive toxins.

Thirty of the chemicals in question were allowed for use in the EU when the UK left the bloc on January 31st 2020, but have since been removed from the EU market. Theremaining sixchemicals have been approved by the UK government since Brexit.

PAN said the divergence in standards is largely down to a UK government decision to grant all pesticides with licenses due to expire before December 2023 an automatic extension of three years.

Mole said the findings are not only concerning for human health and the environment:UK food exports containing pesticides that EU growers arent allowed to use are likely to be rejected, he warned. Given that the EU still accounts for around 60% of UK agricultural exports, the impact on farmers could be devastating.

A Defra spokesperson toldEnds Reportthat very strict regulation only permits the sale and use of pesticides where scientific assessment clearly shows they will not harm people or pose unacceptable risks to the environment.

An HSE spokesperson added: Divergence between Britain and the EU is an inevitable consequence of our independent pesticides regime what is not inevitable is a fall in standards.

A draft UK National Action Plan for the Sustainable Use of Pesticides was published in February 2021. The final plan was due last year but is yet to appear.

The UK government has been under fire in recent weeks for what campaigners perceive as a move to water down various green commitments.

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Green Brexit doesn't extend to pesticide protections - Footprint

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LONDON Brexit: the Conservative Party drama that will never, ever end.

Years after being ousted from office, former British PM Theresa May took a fresh potshot at her longstanding Tory nemesis and successor Boris Johnson, saying Johnson struck a bad deal to exit the EU.

May was replaced as prime minister by Johnson in July 2019 after months of fruitlesss attempts to pass a Brexit withdrawal agreement that could command the support of the House of Commons.

But she argued in a series of interviews aimed at promoting a new book that the U.K. would be better off if Tory MPs had jut accepted her agreement and moved on.

It wouldnt have given either side 100 per cent of what they wanted but it would have given the country a better overall deal, May told the BBC.

Now a backbench MP, May was replaced by Johnson, who in 2019 struck a new EU deal that eventually passed following a landslide general election victory. That election gifted Brexiteer Tories a big enough majority to break the deadlock.

But key aspects of the agreement in particular its rules on Northern Ireland trade have had to be overhauled since Johnson himself was booted out by angry Conservative MPs in 2021.

In a separate interview with LBC, May said Johnsons agreement, which included the much-contested Northern Ireland protocol, was a bad deal.

I had always said that the deal that he accepted, with that border down the Irish Sea, could not be accepted by in my view by any U.K. prime minister, because of the separation between Great Britain and Northern Ireland that it created, she said.

But he accepted what the EU had actually proposed in the first place, and then claimed it was a great victory.

And on the back of that, of course, he was able to say hed done Brexit and on the back of aiming to get Brexit, he was able to get the very good election results, May added.

Read the original here:

Theresa May says her Brexit deal was better than Boris Johnson's - POLITICO Europe

Staff in the U.K. Foreign Office were crying and in a state of mourning following the Brexit vote, the offices former chief Simon McDonald has revealed.

During an interview for the BBCs documentary series State of Chaos, McDonald said he saw people in tears and in shock the morning after the 2016 referendum, and decided to tell his ministers he had voted to remain in the European Union.

On this solitary occasion I decided to tell my colleagues and therefore let ministers know that I voted to remain in the European Union, McDonald said.

Under the civil service code, officials are expected to maintain impartiality and not share their own political preferences with ministers. But McDonald, who served as top civil servant of the office from 2015 to 2020, said he felt ministers likely knew his vote anyway, so decided to embrace it.

He also wanted to convey a message to a group of people, most of whom I felt had voted to remain in the EU, that their personal feelings were beside the point.

Still, McDonalds confession is bound to anger Brexiteers. McDonald himself said he knew the Foreign Office board was not entirely comfortable that he had revealed his vote, and the former deputy Cabinet secretary, Helen MacNamara, told the BBC she doesnt know why that would be a good or helpful thing.

The interview is part of the new episode of State of Chaos, a three-part series that follows the tumultuous events in the British government from 2016 to 2022.

Read the original here:

Remainer UK civil servants were in tears over Brexit, top official says - POLITICO Europe

Mark Carney was governor of the Bank of England from 2013 to 2020.

Mark Carney was governor of the Bank of England from 2013 to 2020.

Mark Carney has delivered a stunning takedown of Brexit and Liz Trusss government.

The former Bank of England governor accused those who backed quitting the European Union of wanting to tear down the future.

And he said Trusss disastrous mini-Budget, in which she planned to borrow billions of pounds to slash taxes for the rich, of creating Argentina on the Channel in reference to that countrys troubled economy.

Speaking at a summit in Montreal also attended by Labour leader Keir Starmer, Carney said: For years, the rallying cry of the Brexiteers was broken Britain. But their solution - to take back control - ended up code for tear down the future.

He went on: When politicians proclaim that our great democracies are broken, its not because they want to fix them, its because they want a licence to demolish.

Its a model, and its a repeated model, that uses a constraint to starve the beast of government in the misguided view that slashing leads to growing.

Carney, who led the Bank of England from 2013 until 2020, added: When Brexiteers tried to create Singapore on the Thames, the Truss government instead delivered Argentina on the Channel - and that was a year ago.

Those with little experience in the private sector - lifelong politicians masquerading as free marketeers - grossly under-value the importance of mission, of institutions, and of discipline to a strong economy.

And the bad news is that while these tactics never work economically, they can work politically. Brexit happened, Donald Trump was elected. So we cant dismiss the impact of anger, but we must resist its power.

Truss was eventually forced to resign as prime minister after just 49 days in office.

Story continues

She has since defended her plans to slash taxes to boost growth, insisting that she was the victim of the powerful economic establishment.

It also emerged last week that she is writing a book on how to save the west.

Read this article:

Mark Carney Has Delivered A Stunning Takedown Of Brexit And Liz Truss - Yahoo News Canada