Is there enough detail?

If you’ve spent 5 minutes talking about the Voice with a group, you’ll have heard someone say that there’s not enough detail to vote on. And that’s both true and false.

Is there enough detail to put an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice to Parliament in the Australian Constitution? Yep. Is there enough detail to know how it will work after we do that? Nope. And that’s on purpose.

The point of the referendum is to “enshrine” the Voice in our Constitution. That’s so that it’s permanent and can’t be closed down by a government that doesn’t like it.

The Constitution is the document that sets out the structure of our government and how it works. At the moment it says that we should have two houses of Parliament, a Governor-General and a High Court, plus the States. It’s also got a section to say who is in charge of which bits of money.

And the Constitution doesn’t have much detail on any of those things! Like, this is what it says about the High Court:

The judicial power of the Commonwealth shall be vested in a Federal Supreme Court, to be called the High Court of Australia, and in such other federal courts as the Parliament creates, and in such other courts as it invests with federal jurisdiction. The High Court shall consist of a Chief Justice, and so many other Justices, not less than two, as the Parliament prescribes.

There’s a few more subsections under that, because being a judge with power over some of the government needs some legal boundaries. But that’s all it takes to create a High Court if it’s in the Constitution. And because it’s in the Constitution, if the Prime Minister, the Governor-General, the High Court or any of the States get mad at each other, none of them can just get rid of the others.

So if we vote Yes in the referendum, we’ll be chucking a new section into the Constitution that says we’ll have a Voice as well as Parliament, the Governor-General, the High Court and the States.

That leaves us with the difficulty of deciding who gets to be part of the Voice, and how it works, but that’s something that reasonable people can disagree on. And we might change our minds over time, too. So we’ll argue for a while then write some legislation about it, which can be changed if we need to. Next week I’ll write up some posts about the different ideas of how the Voice should work.

Base photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash, text by me.