With the 'yes' and 'no' cases for the Voice to Parliament officially published, it's getting more and more important to educate yourself on what the Voice is, and what it would mean for Australia.
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Though in fairness, the death knoll for the 'yes' campaign might already be ringing.
If recent polling is to be believed, support for the Voice is falling across Australia, especially in rural areas.
ACM's reader survey painted a very poor picture for the referendum's prospects in regional Australia.
![Katrina Humphries says there are matters of concern the federal government needs to address now regarding the Voice to Parliament. Picture via Shutterstock Katrina Humphries says there are matters of concern the federal government needs to address now regarding the Voice to Parliament. Picture via Shutterstock](/images/transform/v1/crop/frm/36FM9qHpEAtS8daVXYFgHBA/7dacae73-cbae-4685-bc5f-28a307ae1f63.jpg/r0_10_1164_667_w1200_h678_fmax.jpg)
But there are two other important takeaways from that survey that I feel haven't gotten enough attention.
The first is that the federal government has failed in explaining what the Voice is to voters.
A jaw-dropping 72 per cent of respondents said the federal government hasn't done enough to explain the Voice to the community.
The second takeaway is that far more people trust the news to deliver information on the Voice than government sources.
Only one in ten survey respondents said they got their info from government websites or ads, while more than 40 per cent go to news websites and papers like the masthead printing this opinion piece.
Sadly, we don't always live up to that responsibility, and many voters have been left without the information they need to make a well-informed decision.
Such is the point made by the much-loved former mayor of Moree, Katrina Humphries, in a guest essay published last week.
"Simple solution, answer the questions," she said in her piece.
Well Katrina, I'll try my best.
How will the representative body of the proposed Voice be appointed?
While it is true that no formal structure for the appointment of the Voice to Parliament has been laid out yet, politicians are at the very least misleading you, when they suggest there's no way to know how the Voice will be structured.
We already know key details about how the Voice will look from the many groups involved in securing the upcoming referendum.
To answer the question, the referendum working group for the design of the Voice has said the selection process should be chosen by First Nations people based on the wishes of local communities.
Learning the wishes of local Aboriginal communities in a way that doesn't leave anyone out is a large task for the government to set itself, but that's the point of this whole exercise: to hear more Indigenous voices.
More voices means more democracy, and more democracy is a good thing to strive for.
Will the Indigenous communities of Australia have delegates?
This is a harder question to answer.
In theory, the answer should be 'if that's what the community wants, then yes.'
In actual fact, this will have to be something parliament decides on, though it has already committed to make the Voice representative of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities.
If parliament decides that having delegates is the best way to achieve representation, then that's what will happen.
Will each Lands Council be appointed by the government of the day?
I'll be honest with you, dear reader, I have no idea what Ms Humphries meant by that question.
If she is asking whether the parliament will have the power to dismiss the Voice, then in theory, yes, but I imagine that would be career suicide for whichever party decides to do it, and since the Voice is set to be embedded in the Constitution the parliament would just have to revive it in another form anyway.
The Voice has also been designed to avoid becoming another ATSIC (Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission), which was abolished in 2004.
The Voice is more limited in scope than ATSIC, which will help it avoid the structural problems ATSIC faced.
If Ms Humphries is asking how the Voice will interact with Local Aboriginal Land Councils (LALCs), like the network of 120 LALCs that represent Aboriginal communities across NSW, then the answer, I would imagine, is that it will interact with them in a similar fashion to any other government body.
What is the tenure of appointees/members, and will they select leaders among themselves?
The tenure is yet to be decided, but members will serve for a fixed period of time to ensure regular accountability to their communities, just like politicians do.
One model for the Voice has proposed members serve four-year terms, with half the membership determined every two years and a limit of two consecutive terms for each member.
As for selecting leaders, the answer is probably not, but it's impossible to say for sure.
The point of the Voice is to represent the interests of all Indigenous Australians, which is why even though Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has been the "yes" campaign's most vocal supporter, he's taken great lengths to say it is not his Voice.
It is planned to be a Voice of the First Peoples of Australia. It has to come from them.
Will urban members stick with urban matters, and regional appointees deal with the regions, and so on?
They'll be elected to do that, yes.
Every model of the Voice proposed thus far has made specific mention of including remote representatives due to their unique needs, as well as a representative for the mainland Torres Strait Islander population.
But of course, politics is so often more complicated than that.
Like it or not, what people do in the cities affects the regions and what people do in the regions affect the cities.
Members will represent their community's interests, which sometimes means advocating for things that affect other areas, like how everyone is affected by the federal budget or climate change initiatives.
Will these Voice appointments be remunerated, and how much will members be paid?
It would be reasonable to think yes, as the Voice is expected to have a huge amount of work on its plate.
The entire point of the Voice is to help Close the Gap, and it'll be a full-time job addressing the gaps in health, education, jobs and housing which have persisted for decades.
As for how much they'll get paid, we'll have to see. The baseline for a federal MP is $217,060 (far too much if you ask me), but the minimum for local councillors is $25,650 (far too little, I'd say).
This is speculation, but I think it's reasonable to imagine Voice appointments would get paid some amount between these two figures.
Will there be an office of the Voice with administrative support, and would that office also be where regular folk get to ask questions and discuss what is relevant to them?
If you've read up to this point, I congratulate you. We're really getting into the minutia of it now.
It's at this point that I'd like to remind you that the point of a country's Constitution is not to outline every single little thing of how a government works.
Nowhere in the Australian Constitution does it say the Australian Government needs and office of administrative support, nor does the Constitution outline how "regular folk" can ask questions to MPs.
I'm beating around the bush here to avoid saying "I don't know," but the fact is I can't know. No one can know until Parliament outlines the Voice's full remit, and if people aren't happy with it, they can request to have it changed like any other piece of legislation.
Will landholders be required to pay "rent" in the future to a body that encompasses the Voice, hand-in-hand with sovereignty?
It should go without saying, but the answer to this question is 'no'.
While it's true that some proponents of the Voice have said they want a form of rent or reparations to be paid to the country's traditional owners, the vast majority of yes supporters recognise that we're a far cry away from even discussing something like that.
Could you imagine the uproar if a minority group of people forcibly took the land your parents and grandparents have lived on and forced you to pay "rent" for living on it?
Unless the sarcasm in that question was unclear, my point is that we don't need to imagine it, that's what actually happened to this country's First Nations.
And that's what the Voice is all about. It's not about privileging one group of people above another along the lines of race, it's about recognising the status of Indigenous Australians as this nation's first peoples and righting a horrible wrong that has historically been inflicted upon them which still holds them back to this day.
Hopefully this has gone some way to answering your questions. I've been writing this opinion piece for so long at this point my editor is starting to give me the side-eye.
For those who made it to the end, congratulations! And if you're a politics nerd like me and want to learn even more about the Voice, what it will look like, and how it came about in the first place, I'll list a few handy resources for you below:
- https://www.anu.edu.au/about/strategic-planning/indigenous-voice-to-parliament
- https://voice.niaa.gov.au/sites/default/files/2021-12/indigenous-voice-co-design-process-final-report_1.pdf
- https://www.aph.gov.au/Parliamentary_Business/Committees/Joint/Former_Committees/Constitutional_Recognition_2018/ConstRecognition/Final_Report
- https://voice.gov.au/about-voice/uluru-statement
Jonathan Hawes is a Northern Daily Leader journalist.
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