issuevoter wrote on Sep 1st, 2023 at 7:45am:How do mixed blood people identify as Aboriginal but not European? Isn't there something illogical in this? It cannot be by percentage, as many of the most vocal are clearly more European.
I call it Pascoe Syndrome as a psychological construct.
These questions cannot be brushed off as frivolous. There are increasing legallities involved.
If the Voice were made law, could one of these mixed blood people be appointed to the body?
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The Voice is about CREATING an Aboriginal ' nation's that never has existed and doesn't yet exist.
As Hobbes well knew, it was being represented in parliament, with its elaborate rituals and ongoing political bargaining, that had gradually fused the English nobility and the gentry into assertive, self-conscious estates, whose collective identity transcended their deep differences.
In his masterpiece, Leviathan (1651), which was published in the same year as the first application of the noun “representative” to parliament, he therefore argued that it was the political process itself, with its unifying symbols, ceremonies and practices, that converts the mass into “the people”.
Instead of the people creating the polity, it was the polity that brought “the people” into being, defining the “who, what and when” that took disparate individuals and through participation in the political system gave them a collective identity.
But nothing ensured the process of constructing a “people” would be a pretty sight – least of all where the politics of difference was involved. Rather, as the subsequent centuries painfully showed, the politics of difference relied on a logic that defined “us” by the exclusion of, and vehement opposition to, “them”. Drenched in grievance, and exploiting it to create group solidarity, ethnically and racially based representation was invariably deeply divisive – as each of the voice’s predecessors, and its overseas counterparts, proved to be.
It is that process Australians are being asked to endorse under the guise of “recognition”: not the acknowledgment of an Indigenous “people”, which – divided as it is by geography, descent, language, location and social class – scarcely exists, but the institutional mechanism by which such a “people” will be given a permanent identity and shaped into a distinct political nation.
The determination of who is and who is not eligible to take part in the voice; the periodic recording of eligibility on public electoral rolls and official voting registers; the repeated rituals of selection; the voice’s own deliberations, and the symbolism that accompanies them: all those will combine to conjure that nation out of whole cloth.
There may, for sure, be disagreements among its members and constituents. But the proposal’s entire point is to replace the many voices of Indigenous Australians with a single voice.
And if the wretched history of ethnic and racial representation has any undeniable lessons, it is that the greater the cleavages within a group, the greater is the attempt to strengthen group solidarity by heightening and hardening the distinction between “us” and “them”.
It is therefore hardly unreasonable to fear that this artificially constructed identity will undermine our shared identity as Australians who deserve mutual respect and decent life chances simply by virtue of equal citizenship.
Nor is it unreasonable to fear that the triumph of the politics of difference will transform this country into a state that attempts to house two increasingly hostile nations within a single political breast.
That would not be recognition; it would be misrecognition. And far from doing no harm, it would corrode our already fragile political fabric. Whether Australians fall into that trap is what the next six weeks will determine.
HENRY ERGAS COLUMNISTSpot on, as usual.
