In May, the #Queensland Liberal-National opposition provided bipartisan support for legislation establishing a 3-4 year #TruthTelling process, as a necessary precursor to the (extremely belated) negotiation of a treaty or #treaties with Aboriginal & Torres Strait Islander peoples. And they did so in response to the #UluruStatementFromTheHeart (that had called for #Voice, #Treaty and #Truth).
At the time, opposition leader #DavidCrisafulli had personally encouraged people in his state to "embrace this [truth-telling] wholeheartedly". On the day the legislation passed, he said: "I believe in truth-telling and to me that means telling it like it is. […] We cannot shy away from the real experiences of #Indigenous Australians throughout history. We must tell the truth about the real challenges they are facing today."
But now, five months later yet before any of the formal processes of truth-telling have begun, he's withdrawn #LNP support for the legislation, promising to tear it up should his party be voted into government at the next election.
He claims he is doing so because he is listening—to the voices of the 'No' voters, who outnumbered the 'Yes' voters at last Saturday's #referendum.
In response, #Labor Premier #AnnastaciaPalaszczuk has said that the process of truth-telling and treaty negotiation won't be pursued without #bipartisan support.
So, what lessons might be drawn from this development?
If voters say they don't want their government to listen to the voice of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, then voters are probably also saying they don't want to hear the truth themselves.
Supporters of the Statement from the Heart who advocated for #Voice before #Truth or #Treaty often did so explicitly on the assumption that Treaty would be the hardest, and so it is better to start with the 'easier' ask of a #VoiceToParliament in order to build momentum. Yet in Queensland, the failure of this 'easier' step at a federal level now means the process of truth-telling (which had been moving forward and could have helped build lasting community consensus) has been thoroughly derailed.
Ironically, the Voice referendum was defeated via the noise created by the various 'voices to parliament' that have been long established for rich corporate colonisers (Murdoch press, Minerals Council, Macquarie Bank, etc.). So now that its been confirmed that these old voices remain supreme, #DavidCrisafulli is just tidying up leftover mess.
By reneging on their previous support for truth-telling, the Queensland #LNP are also showing they don't really respect the voters they claim to be acting on behalf of.
The #referendum wasn't about #Truth-telling or #Treaty (despite the No campaign's various fear-mongering attempts to hypothesize all kinds of treaty outcomes). It was about #Voice.
Qld LNP have decided that when voters said "No" to Voice, what they really meant was no to Voice+Truth+Treaty.
(Imagine the bemusement at LNP HQ if #QldLabor had responded to the resounding 'Yes' in the 2018 postal survey on #MarriageEquality by saying "what voters have really said here is that they think marriage has been too restrictive, so we're going to introduce legislation for #polycule marriages"...)
Constitutional legal theory typically embraces the argument that constitutional (rather than merely legislative) protections are necessary to prevent a vulnerable minority from having their rights and basic wellbeing undermined by the desires of the majority. This decision by Qld LNP is an excellent illustration of that very phenomenon (the preferences of the majority trumping the plight of the minority), and so a confirmation of why Indigenous peoples were asking for a constitutional Voice in the first place.
@jillL One of the many 'polite' ways of saying "shut up, I don't want your voice to be heard anywhere near the levers of government". How many who used that line actually would have been happy if parliament went and legislated such a body?
The No campaign's primary raison d'être as well as its modus operandi was to provide as many spurious-but-respectable-sounding lines as possible for people to affirm their comfort with the #WhiteSupremacist#SettlerColonial#StatusQuo without needing to come out and say so directly.
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