Why can’t we just legislate a Voice?

I’ve seen a bunch of people asking why we can’t just pass a bill in Parliament creating the Voice, and then if it works well we could put it in the Constitution. It’s a good question! I wanted to know the answer: it turns out that we already tried that. And each time we did, a politician closed it down.

Since the 1967 Referendum when the Federal government first got the right to make laws about Aboriginal and Tories Strait Islander people, there have been organisations like the Voice. One of the two major parties would set it up, and it’d run for a while, until the other major party got into power and decided to shut it down.

Some examples:

• Aboriginal Development Commission – started by PM Malcolm Fraser (Liberal party) in 1980, shut down by PM Hawke (Labor party) in 1989.
• ATSIC – Created by Hawke in 1990, shut down by PM Howard (Liberal) in 2005. Howard split things up into two organisations:
• National Indigenous Council – closed by PM Rudd in 2008.
• Office of Indigenous Policy Coordination – closed by PM Gillard (Labor) in 2011 when she folded all of it’s work into the ridiculously named Department of Families, Housing, Community Services and Indigenous Affairs.
• Indigenous Advancement Strategy – created by Tony Abbott (Liberal) in 2016, and everyone seemed to agree that it was really badly done. Maybe that’s why it seems to have been chucked into the memory hole? I can’t find a Wikipedia page for it. Anyway, whatever it was doing got “transferred” by Morrison (Liberal) into the next organisation, called…
• National Indigenous Australians Agency – which was started in 2019 and still runs today.

Talk about wasteful! As Megan Davis says:

“…with every political cycle, every three years, our representatives and service providers must troop off to Canberra to curry favour with the newest government and the newest minister. The experience is exhausting and demoralising. The durability and certainty of the Voice will be critical to its effectiveness.”

The Voice of Reason, Megan Davis in the Quarterly Essay

And as far as I can tell, ATSIC was the only one that had mostly Indigenous people working for it.

This is why I now think it’s better to set the Voice up as a separate thing to Parliament, as part of the Constitution. It shouldn’t be something you can shut down just because it was made by the opposition party, or a previous leader you want to give the finger to. It’s time to stop mucking about and do this properly.