MALLEE’S No.1 Voice critic, federal MP Anne Webster, at many points argued there wasn’t enough detail to vote yes.
Fitting, then, that one day after her constituents voted no, Dr Webster shares more detail about what her opposing stance meant.
“We need to be able to do a full audit of where the funding is going now, which programs are working, which ones are not, and listen to people on the ground and hear what they have to say about those programs,” she said.
Ah yes, listening to people on the ground.
If only there were some kind of overarching body.
Perhaps it could be chosen by people on the ground.
When Parliament is writing a law or designing a program, they could listen to that body.
It would tap into centuries of knowledge about the people who these laws and programs are about.
We could call it the Voi- ...
Oops, sorry. That’s exactly what Dr Webster spent the past year campaigning against.
Bit late for that now.
But on to her comment’s other idea: that we need to listen to people by auditing them.
(Gotta wonder if the ATO ever tries that line. “We’re here to listen to you” would be a heck of an opener to “show us all your receipts from the past five years”.)
When passing up the offer of establishing a democratic way to get ground-level advice to decision-makers, Dr Webster argued against what she called a “Canberra voice” because Australia didn’t need “more bureaucracy”.
Now, her solution is to send in the auditors – you know, white-collar types from Canberra and the capital cities – and to pretend this isn’t some gigantic pile of fresh bureaucracy.
Is this a good idea?
Perhaps we can run it by the auditors themselves.
We can ask big-four firm EY, which has said: “EY Australia fully supports a constitutionally enshrined voice to Parliament in order to bring about real change to secure the social, political and economic future of First Nations peoples.”
Hmmm.
We can ask Deloitte, which has said: “Deloitte strongly supports the spirit and intent of the Uluru Statement of the Heart and will work to uphold its message of reconciliation … Deloitte is supportive of enshrining a First Nations voice in the Constitution.”
Hmmm.
We can ask KPMG, which has said: "As a firm, we are proud to support a yes vote in the referendum. We believe it is an important next step on a long journey towards a reconciled nation. A reconciled Australia is one where we recognise our shared past, present and future and where, in that future, the voice of Indigenous Australians is heard, understood and respected. We believe constitutional recognition and the Voice will lead to a stronger, fairer and better nation for all.”
Hmmmmm.
Lastly, we can ask the darlings of Dr Webster’s previous Coalition government in PwC, which have said: “PwC’s Indigenous Consulting and PwC Australia believe that a voice can genuinely deliver practical local, regional and national outcomes. Our work across the country for almost a decade provides us with a significant body of work on which to form this view.”
Hmmmmmmm.
Of course, Dr Webster’s “listen to people on the ground” principle can’t apply to those pesky external auditors, can it? Maybe we should just keep this audit as an in-house job.
Good news!
There’s already an existing layer of bureaucracy for that: the Australian National Audit Office.
And wouldn’t you know it, in the past 20 years they’ve completed a lazy 83 performance audits in the Indigenous sector.
Maybe it’ll be the 84th one that finally does the job.
Unless, of course, Dr Webster is proposing an entirely new audit body for this calculator-wielding, spreadsheet-combing blitz.
But we know how she feels about creating all-new bodies, especially those focused only on Indigenous Australians, don’t we?
After telling us the Voice risked “dividing us by race”, she couldn’t possibly argue for a new audit body focused solely on one group of people.
This isn’t to say there isn’t waste or that programs can’t be delivered better. The same is true of a lot of government functions.
But pitching this as the answer really just seems like an elaborate, indirect way to allegedly achieve a result – listening – that the Voice could have arrived at with more ease.
Likewise, assessing Dr Webster’s latest push isn’t to diminish the referendum result.
The Australian people were emphatic in deciding they didn’t like what was before them.
For many reasons, it’s understandable they voted the way they did.
But Dr Webster possesses an intimate knowledge of how government works.
She is regularly in a position to be shaping and voting for or against laws.
Unlike most other voters, she’s able to send a mailout to every household in the electorate.
So if those voters are promised, in print, “there are better ways forward”, there are plenty of reasons for her to be judged on the accuracy of that statement.
Same with all of her many statements on the Voice.
She separately indicated support for listening to First Nations people and for constitutional recognition, but combining those two things through a voice somehow led her to conclude it “won’t help Indigenous Australians”.
Twice in the days before and after the referendum, Dr Webster bemoaned that the vote had become “political”, yet she used her position as a politician and her political party’s communication resources to get involved in the debate.
She shared her views widely, but when a First Nations senator contested some of her statements in Sunraysia Daily, Dr Webster wrote a letter to the editor that remarked on the senator’s response being “platformed by this publication”.
Someone else having a platform?
The horror!
After media releases, and interviews, and a mailout, and warning Parliament of the prospect of something called a “voice economy”, Dr Webster last month said: “My view is that I don’t need to engage in what I believe fundamentally is a very divisive process and a very divisive referendum.”
Don’t need to engage?
Probably past putting the toothpaste back in the tube on that one.
A full audit of public contributions to the Voice debate might conclude Dr Webster’s were a web of contradictions.
