It's the first anniversary of the Voice referendum , and I've been reading Shireen Morris's Broken Heart: A True History of the Voice Referendum. Morris is not an Aboriginal person but she is a constitutional lawyer and from 2013 onwards she worked for the Cape York Institute (CYI) under the leadership and guidance of Noel Pearson, first as an employee and later as an academic continuing their close collaboration. No-one was closer than her to the events that led up to the Referendum, and I learned a lot reading her story. The story begins in 2012. The then Labor Government had appointed an Expert Panel to advise on options for constitutional recognition of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. Its key recommendation was to add a racial non-discrimination clause to the Constitution as a way of fleshing out the race power added in 1967. This proposal was quickly and roundly trashed by conservative lawyers, with Greg Craven, one of our leading right-wing experts
In my last post I reviewed Mark Considine's assessment of the results of neoliberal policy reform in Australia's social services. In each case, the results have been bad for service users and governments, who get poorer quality, more expensive services. However, they have been very good for the entrepreneurs who get into this market, who have been able to get rich on government money. This is pretty much the story of the whole neoliberal project. Ordinary punters are promised that if we reduce workers rights, the rights of indigenous people and pesky environmental regulations and provide government 'incentives' to business, this will turbo-charge economic growth and everyone will benefit. Turns out that this isn't true. Rich people keep on getting richer, while the rest of us stay about the same or even get poorer. Meanwhile, we are crossing various ecological boundaries, threatening our futures in the name of 'economic growth' now. One answer to thi