What about the Progressive No voters?

When I started this blog, I promised I’d look into what’s been called the Progressive No. This is the group of voters who say the Voice doesn’t go far enough. I’ve found it the most complex part of this debate to understand.

Ever since the first British colonisers showed up and started taking land, there have been Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders who tried to organise a treaty. Britain had one with nearly every other Indigenous people it invaded. But for some reason, that didn’t happen in Australia. There were several attempts which got squashed or didn’t get as far as the British royalty signing off on it. So there has never been a negotiation for peaceful co-existence, and some people consider the land to be illegally occupied by the Commonwealth of Australia.

While the Uluṟu Statement dialogues were happening, a treaty was one of the options debated by Indigenous people from around the land. In the end, a majority of the delegates voted to ask for three things, in this order: Voice, Treaty then Truth. And when that happened, a large group of delegates left the Uluṟu Statement process. They wanted Treaty before Voice or Truth. You can read the Walkout Statement, which was made public and released to the media.

An advisory committee isn’t enough

Indigenous people in Australia have been living with the effects of attempted genocide for 200 years. The Voice is the bare minimum that they deserve. And many Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders are not happy that to get this bare minimum they have to get permission from millions of other people first. So the Progressive No voters are holding out for Treaty first.

Since there has never been a Treaty between the invaders and the people originally living on this continent, then Indigenous people have not been either defeated or persuaded to join the British commonwealth. By asking the Australian federal government to recognise Indigenous people in its constitution, the Uluṟu Statement folks might be “ceding sovereignty” to the invaders. People are concerned that the Voice could be used to deny or prevent a Treaty from happening later.

In case I’m missing some detail in my description, here’s some links so you can hear for yourself what the Progressive No group are saying:

• Treaty Before Voice, a website run by grassroots networks of First Nations people in Brisbane. They are active on Instagram if you want to keep up to date.
• The fight for a voice: the progressives voting No is an interview with Senator Lidia Thorpe by Daniel James, award-winning Yorta Yorta writer. You can listen to it on the page if you don’t have a podcast app, and it’s got a transcript if you’re a reader more than a listener.

We’ve also got Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people expressing a more nuanced view:

• Celeste Liddle wrote Voices beyond Yes and No in May this year, sceptical that an advisory body would actually make any meaningful difference. In June she wrote I remain undecided on the Voice to parliament. And I am exhausted. In these articles, she gives a great explanation of the issues that many Indigenous people have with the Voice. I can’t find more recent articles from her, so she may have decided by now.
• Kelly Menzel writes in The Conversation For a lot of First Nations peoples, debates around a Voice to parliament are not about a simple Yes or No.

My own reasoning

I hope I’ve done a good job of describing all of this, because several Indigenous people I respect very much are part of the Progressive No group. I’m not saying we’re besties or anything like that. They’re just people I follow on social media because we have things in common (like coding, or environmental causes, or arts and crafts). Some are already working on Treaty, others have been guided by their elders to vote No. At this late stage I’m almost certainly going to vote Yes, but I want to make sure I’m not missing an important reason to vote No. And if Indigenous people I know are voting No, that matters to me.

However, other Indigenous people I know personally are voting Yes. And I want to support them too. The only difference I can find between these two groups is to do with politics. I’m about the most left-wing person I know in my circle of family and friends, who tend to be more centre-left or mainstream centrist. But the people I follow online are more radical. None of us trust government or corporations to do the morally-correct thing. We tend to believe more in community and shared power than in hierarchy. So the progressive No voters I hear online are fitting in to that idea of not wanting to be part of what they (and I) consider a corrupt system, while the people I talk to in person have more trust in that same system of government.

The thing is, my progressive politics is more about evolution than revolution. I’m ok with incremental change, so the part of the Voice that really seems good to me is that it will be a permanent foot in the door of the current system. That foot could be used to gain a tiny bit more ground, or it could be used to shove the door wide open. I’m ok with both of those outcomes.

The other thing I genuinely believe is that getting an invading force to put you in their documents is not a defeat or a surrender. Doing what you have to do to survive someone else’s system is not ceding sovereignty. It’s living to fight another day. And so I will never use the Voice as an excuse to say “oh well, we fixed that problem, let’s move on to other topics”. In the same way that women getting the vote wasn’t the start or the end of feminism, I see the Voice as just one tool in a larger project of equality.

I think the Progressive No voters are right to be cautious of the Voice. It’s easy to become absorbed by a political system and lose your identity. But the 80% support for the Voice among Indigenous people reminds me that most people don’t have radical politics. A mainstream solution to problems will always be more popular. And for any solution to work, it needs to have broad support and participation from the people it’s going to help. It seems that Indigenous Australians are not very different from other Australians in that way.

We’ve got very urgent problems facing Indigenous people right now, and broad support for the Voice among Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders. So I’m choosing to support an imperfect fix for the system we live in today over a potentially better system that doesn’t exist yet. When Treaty is on offer, I’ll support that too with my time and money, not just my words. The Voice can be a new beginning, as long as we don’t let it be the end.