The bitter politics and hypocrisy of the Voice debate will mark it as yet another ugly chapter in Australia’s history

A usual plaudit for a book is that a reader “couldn’t put it down”. But a plaudit for David Marr’s new book, Killing for Country, which documents his family’s history as professional killers of Aborigines in NSW and Queensland in the mid-1800s, is that it is one you have to keep putting down.

It’s not just the brutality of the large-scale killings Marr documents that requires regular pauses, but the voices of white people discussing it — either in the most cold-blooded pragmatic terms, or in terms of horror.

The chilling fact is that, no matter what was actually known or protested about at the time, the killings didn’t stop.

Support for Indigenous Australians

Marr’s history documents events which were not just cases of rounding up Aboriginal people accused of crimes, or events that just happened in the early years of white settlement, but the systemic shooting and poisoning of people living on land they had been living on for thousands of years, or who may have adapted to living peaceably on stations, or even in working in towns.

It continued at least into the 1890s.

The immediate horror of the story clashes horrendously with our image of ourselves, and with the lofty ambitions of those who oversaw federation, and the writing of our Constitution, as the former chief justice of the High Court, Robert French, observed in a speech to the National Press Club this week.

David Marr’s new book documents his family’s history as professional killers of Aborigines in NSW and Queensland in the mid-1800s.(Four Corners: Harriet Tatham)

Noting resonances with the current referendum debate, French quoted some of the opposition to federation and the constitution at the time, with one contributor observing that “the people aren’t ready to federate; they don’t know what it means; [and] their leaders and their newspapers are not brainy enough or honest enough to try to teach them what it means”.

He quoted the then premier of Queensland, Samuel Griffith, observing that “there is no doubt that here, as everywhere, there will be timid men who are afraid of launching into something new; but when was ever a great thing achieved without risking something”.

French observed: “The Australian spirit evoked by the ‘don’t know, vote no’ slogan is a poor shadow of the spirit which drew up our Constitution. It invites us to a resentful, uninquiring passivity.”

Linking the past with the future

The headlines from the former chief justice’s speech focused on his affirmation that, in his view, the Voice posed no constitutional or legal risks.

But his speech also manages to link up, in a way which has often not successfully occurred, the past and the future embedded in the Voice debate.

“It does not require a black armband view of history to conclude that colonisation did not bring unalloyed benefits to our First Peoples,” he said. “Nor does it require rocket science logic to conclude that we live today with the cross-generational effects of that collision.”

Whatever your views on the idea of the Voice, it is not just the ugly racism exposed by the debate about it — which has seen Indigenous people on both sides of the debate subjected to abuse and death threats — it is the spectacular failure, hypocrisy and opportunism that has been on display on occasions among our politicians that has already marked it as another ugly chapter in our history.

The willingness of some sections of the media to perpetuate misinformation, and of other sections of the media to get lost in attempts at false balance, has made nigh on impossible a reasonably rational debate about what a permanent advisory body to the parliament and executive, whose actual remit would be defined and controlled by the parliament, might mean both symbolically and practically to Indigenous Australians.

Once again, it seems our leaders and newspapers “are not brainy enough or honest enough to try to teach Australians what it means”.

And this is not because those leaders didn’t know.

Voice referendum essentials:Conflict over how to help Indigenous people

French quotes John Howard — now a vocal campaigner against the Voice — from 2007, saying:

“I believe we must find room in our national life to formally recognise the special status of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders as the first peoples of our nation. We must recognise the distinctiveness of Indigenous identity and culture and the right of Indigenous people to preserve that heritage. The crisis of Indigenous social and cultural disintegration requires a stronger affirmation of Indigenous identity and culture as a source of dignity, self-esteem and pride.”

Now, Howard says, people should vote no to “maintain the rage” against the Voice, which he says would create “a new cockpit of conflict about how to help Indigenous people”.

Conflict over how to help people — if conflict was what the Voice produced — is apparently a worse outcome than possibly addressing “the crisis of Indigenous identity and culture”.

Former prime minister John Howard is a vocal campaigner against the Voice.(ABC News: Shaun Kingma)

Howard’s self-described political love child, former prime minister Tony Abbott — who has always claimed a special interest in, and affinity for, Indigenous people — said this week that, rather than pursue the Voice, “we should end the separatism, which has bedevilled Indigenous policy for many decades now”.

“Aboriginal people are fine Australians,” he told ABC RN, “and they should be encouraged to integrate into the mainstream of our society.”

What “integration” means is as unclear now as it was when Abbott advocated the “mainstreaming” of Indigenous services when he was prime minister.

And if there is any model that currently defines how Indigenous policy is executed at the federal level, it is the one imposed on us by Abbott as prime minister when he insisted on bringing Aboriginal affairs into the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet — a department with no experience in service delivery.

LoadingBlocking change, no matter what the truth is

No campaigners regularly now rage about some mysterious bureaucracy which allegedly worthlessly chews up billions of dollars in wasted funding to Indigenous people.

That would be the National Indigenous Australians Agency, the body set up by the Morrison government and which morphed out of the structure set up in PM&C by Abbott.

The Coalition also appointed an Indigenous Advisory Council “to provide advice to the Government on Indigenous affairs, [focusing] on practical changes to improve the lives of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people”.

The inaugural, government-appointed chair of the council — which sounds like it had a job pretty much identical to that proposed for the Voice — was another prominent No campaigner, Warren Mundine.

That the policies that many of the prominent politicians leading the No campaign are actually campaigning against come from their own side of politics, or are based on their own previous statements, and their own policy legacy, is just one more depressing aspect of what has proved a very flawed debate.

Coalition figures from Howard to Peter Dutton insist their difficulty is not with constitutional recognition but with the specific proposal for the Voice.

Robert French on Friday reflected that the very act of recognition proposed by the referendum “is the creation of the Voice”.

“I do agree with John Howard that recognition in the Constitution is a strong affirmation of Indigenous identity and culture,” he said.

“A stronger and practical affirmation will give content to that recognition by the creation of the constitutional voice to Parliament and the Executive Government,” he said

After many months of bitter debate, his words remind us that we are back at a point where it seems that, no matter what the truth may be, we will not let it lead to any change.

Laura Tingle is 7.30’s chief political correspondent.