Reflecting on the Voice... one year on

October 2023 marked the beginning of the Gaza Genocide, and the failed 'Voice' Referendum.

Audio recording of article

Every day for the past year, those of us who continue to stand for humanity and refuse to normalise the most brutal of violence perpetrated against Indigenous peoples, have woken to scenes of horror.

We wake up in the morning and reach for our phones to see an unthinkable atrocity broadcast into our hands, captured by Palestinian journalists on the ground. Then, if we can stomach it, we turn on the tv or check the websites of imperial media to see that they have not covered it at all, or if they have, it’s sanitised through the talking points of an IDF spokesperson or the words of our cowardly leadership or even Zionist lobbies.

It is not just the horror that we feel but also the refusal to acknowledge that horror, the refusal to acknowledge the vast, immense loss of life, the refusal to acknowledge the worth of these lives, and the refusal to acknowledge the complicity of our government, and our media, and everyone here in this country who sits silent, and washes their hands, while living on stolen Aboriginal lands.

Every day we have sat in horror to witness how many people turn away from these scenes, and see how this violence is made ‘normal’ because it is being perpetrated against those bodies who are so dehumanised that in the words of Lana Tatour, they are being ‘removed from the category of human’.

It has been more than a year since October 7, 2023, and the western-backed and sponsored Israeli violence has intensified in Gaza, and in particular, north Gaza, where those few journalists who have not been killed and who are still reporting were over the weekend sharing their good-byes on social media. This morning, I woke to scenes of another massacre of burning tents and slaughtered children, and pictures of those children with smiling faces and bright eyes commemorated by accounts like Martyrs of Gaza. I checked the ABC News website and the SMH and other legacy media organisations to find no word on these horrific scenes.

As Palestinian-Australian writer Dr Randa Abdel Fattah wrote in a piece in Mondoweiss published today:

“Since October 7, we have seen, in real-time, live-streamed to our screens, apocalyptic scenes of violence methodically inflicted on a besieged population as the world watches on—in the service of a political project that has unfinished demographic business, that requires the extermination of the ‘brutes’, the elimination of the native, in order to achieve the goal of a Jewish majority and control over the entire stolen land from the river to the sea and beyond, into southern Lebanon and Syria. Each day has been a horrifying chronicle of industrialized genocide, domicide, scholasticide, infanticide, femicide, medicide, and ecocide.”

Over the past year, those of us who stand with humanity, those of us who refuse to see this horror as normal, and stand with Palestinians and the fight for a Free Palestine from the river to the sea, have also recognised that we ourselves have been changed in every single way. As Noura Erakat wrote on the anniversary of October 7:

“We are also forever changed: Our eyes wide open, primed to distrust media, social, and political authorities bullying us into becoming walking zombies obsessed with pop culture distractions, wide open to the fact that imperialism shapes the minute details of our daily lives.”

And yet, when I checked the imperial media today, I saw no mention of the latest atrocities. Instead, there were reams of coverage about the first anniversary of the failed Voice referendum, because the beginning of the genocide coincided with it.

The basic themes of most of the coverage were that the Voice was an attempt for ‘unity’ and not ‘division’; it was a gift; it represented hope; it was never going to be a magic bullet but it was ‘better than nothing’. The failure of the Voice was again about ‘misinformation’, ‘disinformation’, ‘toxicity’, lack of civic literacy, the difficulty of successful referenda, two-sidesim and even, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s decision to move forward with it even when the early polling showed it would fail.

There is still no reflection upon the role of racism in the tidal wave of ‘no’ votes in the majority of states and territories in the country, and the fact that the most racist parts of Australia voted overwhelmingly ‘no’. In the coverage, there is a continued optimism about ‘unity’ in the country; about closing the gap, about one day getting a voice or salvaging the ‘reconciliation’ process.

And yet, the coverage and politik on the Voice is remarkably silent on the issue of Gaza and how it changes absolutely everything including how we view imperialism and colonialism, the complicity of the imperial media and the allegiances paid to it, and the very nature of our own resistance.

Very early on, as we saw Albanese delivering a long-awaited referendum and positioning himself as a supposed champion of reconciliation, we saw in the very same month, just how willing he was to comply and support the slaughter of our Palestinian brothers and sisters. In March this year, law firm Birchgrove Legal submitted a 92-page document of evidence outlining the complicity of Albanese and the Australian government to the International Criminal Court (ICC)’s investigation into the Situation in the State of Palestine. The document was endorsed by 100 Australian lawyers and barristers.

Michael West Media reported that the actions included:

• Freezing $6 million in funding to the primary aid agency operating in Gaza – UNRWA – amid a humanitarian crisis based on unsubstantiated claims by Israel after the International Court of Justice had found it plausibly to be committing genocide in Gaza.

• Providing military aid and approving defence exports to Israel, which could be used by the IDF in the course of the prima facie commission of genocide and crimes against humanity.

• Ambiguously deploying an Australian military contingent to the region, where its location and exact role have not been disclosed.

• Permitting Australians, either explicitly or implicitly, to travel to Israel to join the IDF and take part in its attacks on Gaza.

• Providing unequivocal political support for Israel’s actions, as evidenced by the political statements of the PM and other members of Parliament, including the Leader of the Opposition.

In November last year, Declassified Australia’s Peter Cronau reported on the secretive US surveillance base Pine Gap near Alice Springs, which is “collecting enormous range of communications and electronic intelligence from the brutal Gaza-Israel battlefield - and this data is being provided to the Israel Defence Forces”.

Not only that, in September, Declassified Australia’s Kellie Tranter revealed via FOI documents the extent of Australia’s complicity in Israeli war crimes and genocide by supplying Australian parts and components to the F 35-1 Adir fighter bomber aircraft which Israel has been using in Gaza.

“Australia’s collaboration extends beyond the F-35s’ mechanical parts and components, to also include the data gathering and processing that is critical to the successful operation of the F-35s as shown in the plane’s documentation.”

In all of the reflections from the Voice, what about the one that has changed us so deeply: the fact our own Prime Minister and government, who aimed to reconcile the country, now have blood-soaked hands?

The imperial media would like us to distance the Voice referendum and Indigenous policy from Albanese and the Australian Parliament’s complicity in genocide, but in my mind, they are intrinsically linked.

The Australian government’s support of Israel’s genocide - which has killed tens of thousands of Palestinians, so many of them children, with so many children disappeared under rubble and into Israeli torture centres, reveals its own motivations in Indigenous rights here on stolen Aboriginal lands. The Australian government’s support of genocide and the horrific daily massacring of men, women and children, suggests a politics that will only support black rights if it is in THEIR interests, and that means, one that does not disrupt the institutions that continually oppress blackfellas.

It is not enough to fight for something that 'is better than nothing’. ‘Better than Nothing’ is not any form of ‘progress’, however you wish to define the word, but rather becomes a concession or compromise. It is a compromise that is only about Indigenous peoples restricting their own radical imaginings of a future and instead, appealing to the goodwill of a government that is so willing to support genocide even when we are all witnessing the same genocide live-streamed for the first time in history.

The failed referendum also brought with it a reckoning for the imperial media’s role in the overwhelming no vote, with claims that it propagated ‘false balance’ and ‘false equivalences’, while uncritically amplifying racist arguments for the ‘no’ and misrepresenting the black sovereign no vote.

And yet, we have seen again how the imperial media’s collusion with the state and its allegiance to state violence has manufactured consent for genocide in the most horrific ways. We have seen how it equates Palestinian resistance with ‘terrorism’ while refusing to name state terrorism in the form of Israel and the US. We have seen how the imperial media has laid a foundation for impunity in which the violence has not ended but ramped up, and through its silencing of Palestinian voices, has further restricted any form of dissent so that protest is again criminalised. This is not anything new, or revealing about the imperial media and yet, it has further cemented the fact that the imperial media is first and foremost an organ of power, a powerful vehicle for propaganda, and its ‘journalists’ as highly paid stenographers who write for the pursuit of awards and not for truth. The imperial media has never changed how it reported on Indigenous affairs and has mostly been in collusion with the state, only able to report on black dysfunction, deviancy, and victimhood and never resistance.

The year since the Gaza genocide and the failed Voice referendum has given us a lesson in how appealing to the ‘goodwill’ of a country that is built on genocide, on the very bone and blood of Indigenous peoples, could have never succeeded, and even if it did, with the most non-threatening of proposals, only would have served to make white people feel good about themselves.

The year since has also changed us in the ways blackfellas have stood in solidarity with the Palestinian people because we recognise that this same 21st-century manifestation of violence has its roots in the same logic used to justify the colonial violence wrought upon our peoples at the very first invasions of Aboriginal lands. It has revealed how the systems that oppress blackfellas over here, are also the same systems that oppress Palestinians.

The practice of Black-Palestinian solidarity has continued to strengthen that it has become a threat to the establishment, so threatening that it was proponents of the Voice like Marcia Langton, Nova Peris, and Sean Gordon who came on board as the most adamant supporters of genocide, to attempt to delegitimize the voices of blackfellas who refuse to be complicit. Their names will be remembered decades later not for the Voice but for their support of the mass killing of Palestinian men, women, and children. The majority of high-profile Voice proponents have been notably silent in public on the Gaza genocide, which has not gone unnoticed. It suggests that the very same elitism that the Voice attempted to dismantle may have been replicated in the very strategy behind it: of a non binding advisory body designed by the same Parliament who is now on record as supporters of genocide.

A year on from the failed Voice Referendum, I can not distinguish or distance it from the genocide, not just because it happened in the same month, but because there is no distance between them both at all. The logics of colonialism and settler colonialism are all connected and the Albanese government has placed Australia amongst the worst in history for its role in it.

And I can’t help but ask myself a question, if we did have the Voice, if we did, at this point in time, have a constitutionally entrenched committee of blackfellas to advise the government, what would these same people have said about the genocide?

Maybe it is best we do not know the answer.

NOTE: Just after publishing I saw sis Lynda June Coe’s article on post-referendum reflections - please see here as well as this is very worth reading. Lynda writes:

“Since October 2023, the people of Palestine have been subjected to the horrific reign of terrorism and mass ethnic cleansing by the Zionist state Israel in its mobilisation to contain their occupation of Palestinian land. Some argue that Australia’s complicity in this bloodshed has been made loud and clear and more so alarmingly Indigenous leaders of the referendum campaigns’ support of Israel in its manoeuvring to eliminate an entire population of Indigenous people has been significantly telling.

The realities of global settler colonial domination have undeniably bolstered within us all an overwhelming sense of injustice - serving as a brutal reminder that Indigenous refusal and resistance is not bound by territorial borders nor settler nation states but embodied by our collective struggle for Indigenous life and liberation everywhere.”