Dutton wants Indigenous programs audited. The irony? That’s what the Voice does

What followed was one of those endless fact-check arguments, one that kind of missed the point. The actual figure is secondary to the broad claim: it’s a lot. Enough. Or … perhaps … too much …nudge, nudge. And if you’re inclined to feel that way, you could make that claim for $6 billion just as easily as you could $30 billion. At a certain point, the numbers become abstract. This isn’t about accounting. It’s about the idea, redolent of Pauline Hanson’s vintage talking points, that Indigenous Australians enjoy a largesse other Australians are denied.

That’s how these audits – which initially seem an argument for the Yes case – can be sewn into an argument against the Voice. The common thread is the trope of special treatment. Perhaps the most persistent criticism of the Voice is that it gives Indigenous Australians an institutional status no one else can have. In this view, it is not a proposal for reconciliation, but for privileging. That’s what the No campaign means when it calls the Voice “divisive”. For some, that objection is limited only to its presence in the Constitution, which they feel shouldn’t establish a new, racially exclusive body. But conscripting the issue of government spending into this nudges the reasoning further: if the Voice is special treatment, then arguably so is dedicated funding. And if you’re going to start asking for more special treatment than you already have, then maybe we should revisit all of it.

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That would be a dark, punitive impulse. Alternatively, you could conclude that government, left to its own devices, has had its go with all this. If it can spend money on its own terms, then simply turn around and complain about how it was spent, then it has indicted itself. It has revealed it is in desperate need of some proper advice, perhaps from a representative body of some sort. That’s the promise the Voice holds, really. A kind of rolling audit, admittedly without the authority to compel or punish but, importantly, also without the party-political imperatives. I suppose then, it’s a matter of which auditor you prefer.

Waleed Aly is a regular columnist.