What we learned this week about the direction of the Voice debate

By Lisa Visentin

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The Voice referendum bill cleared the parliament on Monday, firing the starting gun on the campaign proper for the Yes and No camps. The issue dominated the final sitting week before the winter break, and the government and Coalition have dug in on their positions and sharpened their attacks on each other, setting the stage for the next phase of the campaign.

Here’s what we learned:

The Coalition will argue there is an alternative pathway to constitutional recognition in a bid to set Labor up to take the blame for an unsuccessful referendum.

Opposition Leader Peter Dutton used a speech in parliament on Thursday to call on Prime Minister Anthony Albanese to drop the Voice from the referendum proposal and instead ask Australians to vote only on the issue of constitutional recognition of Indigenous Australians.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and Opposition Leader Peter Dutton have dug in on their positions. Credit: Fairfax Media

Framing the offer as a “hand of friendship”, Dutton said the Coalition would work with Labor to instead legislate a Voice.

With the Voice referendum bill already through the parliament, this was never an offer the Albanese government would contemplate accepting, not least of all because it would defy the wishes of the Uluru Statement from the Heart for a constitutionally enshrined First Nations Voice.

Albanese immediately dismissed Dutton’s offer, saying the Liberal leader lacked empathy, and on Friday he reaffirmed his government was all-in on the referendum.

“I’m committed to having a referendum. The legislation has been passed …[T]he referendum will take place in the last quarter of this year,” Albanese said.

But in an attempt to tie Labor to a failed vote, Dutton has also urged the government to call off the referendum altogether if it appeared doomed, saying the prime minister had a duty not to risk reconciliation efforts.

“At the moment, the country is not ready to vote for the Voice as the government is proposing, and if it goes down … I do think it sets back reconciliation and that’s something that he’s [Albanese] acknowledged himself,” Dutton told ABC radio on Friday.

The Coalition will depict the Voice as an ill-defined but powerful body with a limitless scope to reach into every aspect of public policy and government decision-making.

In a question time attack that spanned four days, opposition MPs barraged Indigenous Australians Minister Linda Burney with more than 15 questions aimed at the scope of the Voice, asking her to rule in, or out, issues that would capture the Voice’s interest.

She was asked whether the Voice would seek to influence the Reserve Bank’s position on interest rates, whether it would make representations to the chief of the Defence Force on the location of military bases, and whether the government would abolish Australia Day if the Voice recommended it.

For the most part, Burney did not engage directly with the questions and framed the Voice as being interested only in closing the gap on Indigenous disadvantage and not “bothered by culture wars”.

By the end of the week, Dutton was giving radio interviews saying the Voice would reach into “every area of public administration” and would “grind the whole system of government to a halt”.

“They can advise the tax commissioner on tax policy, they can advise the treasurer on any element of the budget, they can advise the defence minister, or the chief of the Defence Force about defence acquisitions or where a defence base should be located. It goes into every area of government responsibility,” Dutton told 2GB radio on Thursday.

The government will portray the Voice as being narrowly focused on addressing Indigenous disadvantage and the Coalition’s attacks as a scare campaign.

In a bid to counter the opposition’s offensive, Albanese stepped up his efforts to explain the Voice to the public across a slew of TV and radio interviews this week.

“It’s an advisory body only. It doesn’t have veto power, it won’t have any power over the parliament, but it is a chance to listen,” Albanese told KIIS FM on Wednesday.

In parliament, the government tried to sharpen the Voice’s purpose by saying it would focus on matters “specific” to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people or that affect them “differently” to other members of the community.

Burney and the prime minister both referred to these guard rails of “specific” and “differently” – which were taken from the attorney-general’s second reading speech on the Voice bill – to argue that the Voice’s foremost concern would be achieving practical outcomes that improved the lives of Indigenous people.

Albanese said on Friday: “I’ll tell you what Indigenous Australians don’t do. They don’t say, ‘We want a Voice to decide where a road will be or a defence base will be’. They say, ‘We want a Voice because we’re frustrated by our circumstances, by the gap in education, in health, in housing’.”

But the government has become further mired in a legal debate as to how much weight the High Court would place on the second reading speech when the constitutional provision itself is broader in scope. The provision allows the Voice to “make representations” to the parliament and executive government on “matters relating to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples”, with no caveats of “differently” or “specifically”.

Constitutional law expert Anne Twomey, who was among a group of legal experts involved in drafting the provision, said the High Court might place some weight on the second reading speech in interpreting the scope, but it would not be decisive.

She said the Voice provision had been deliberately drafted to give the body a broad remit to offer advice to ward off legal challenges about what issues it should or should not be weighing into. Instead, its scope would primarily be constrained by political pressure, rather than the law.

“The intention behind it was that there would be political pressure for the Voice to focus on the things that are most important to Indigenous Australians and not go squandering its resources on follies,” Twomey said.

“Could the Voice make representations about Australia Day? Yes, it could, if it wanted to.”

The government and the Yes campaign are emphasising that the Voice is about constitutional recognition.

The prime minister and his front bench have repeatedly reached for this line – that the referendum is about “two things” – to explain the Voice.

“This is about two things – recognition of First Peoples in our nation’s Constitution, our most important founding document; and secondly, that we would listen to Indigenous people about matters which directly affect them,” Albanese said this week.

While support for the Voice is lagging in the polls, there has long been widespread support for constitutional recognition and there is a clear intent to tap into the latter.

Targeted social media ads rolled out by the Yes23 campaign recently urge people to “vote Yes for Indigenous constitutional recognition” and make no reference to the Voice at all.

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