this post was submitted on 01 Mar 2024
60 points (98.4% liked)
Australia
3613 readers
114 users here now
A place to discuss Australia and important Australian issues.
Before you post:
If you're posting anything related to:
- The Environment, post it to Aussie Environment
- Politics, post it to Australian Politics
- World News/Events, post it to World News
- A question to Australians (from outside) post it to Ask an Australian
If you're posting Australian News (not opinion or discussion pieces) post it to Australian News
Rules
This community is run under the rules of aussie.zone. In addition to those rules:
- When posting news articles use the source headline and place your commentary in a separate comment
Banner Photo
Congratulations to @Tau@aussie.zone who had the most upvoted submission to our banner photo competition
Recommended and Related Communities
Be sure to check out and subscribe to our related communities on aussie.zone:
- Australian News
- World News (from an Australian Perspective)
- Australian Politics
- Aussie Environment
- Ask an Australian
- AusFinance
- Pictures
- AusLegal
- Aussie Frugal Living
- Cars (Australia)
- Coffee
- Chat
- Aussie Zone Meta
- bapcsalesaustralia
- Food Australia
- Aussie Memes
Plus other communities for sport and major cities.
https://aussie.zone/communities
Moderation
Since Kbin doesn't show Lemmy Moderators, I'll list them here. Also note that Kbin does not distinguish moderator comments.
Additionally, we have our instance admins: @lodion@aussie.zone and @Nath@aussie.zone
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Be careful with outcomes based achievables. Its a nice sounding phrase, but as the Abbott government, and their successors found out when they introduced and favoured the Indigenous Advisory Council, (to the detriment of the National Congress).
Without the buy in from the people themselves you get no where fast. A body and decisions about your life foisted upon you by a distant and obscure leadership leads to poor putcomes and decision making.
A different example, to illustrate my point:
I and my peers were once forced to learn Indonesian when the school had other subjects available and a notional choice. The Principal decided the enrolments in Indonesian weren't high enough. So all students from the primary school who'd learned Indonesian were told they must carry on with Indonesian while the rest of the year could pick. Suffice to say little Indonesian was learned in the years following, and few teachers stayed due to their inability to control a student body who were made an enemy in their own education. I'm not saying the student body were right in how they acted, but the source was an out of touch decision by a distant leadership.
Back to the Abbott decision:
In the case of Abbott's direct outcomes based solution all the money spent seems largely wasted, as the larger population indicators over the period have all deteriorated quite dramatically.
This is a key reason why the structure of the Voice was so important. The model proposed in the calma*, langton report went a long way to ensure fair representation of all Aboriginal nations across Australia. (notice i say nations, not people. There was a glaring omission by both sides about the guarantee of personal democratic rights that was never addressed in the campaigns).
Anyway, here i've gone rabbiting away again. Suffice to say the 'involvement' of stakeholders in the research and decision making process is key for a trustworthy and effective governance. This is largely why the failure of the referendum hasn't blown back on the Labor party, as evidenced in the Dunkley by-election, with a minor 3 point swing to the libs and a Labor retention.
Thats more about the implemwntation of a represntative body not if it is in the consatitution tho. Any hope of this system being implemented wich im in full support of got killed by the gamblw on putting it in the constitution which would have ensured none of these things.
But we're back again at, putting it in the constitution lifts the negotiating position as a, 'this will happen' we just have to work out how, from 'this might happen, convince us that we should'. The bargaining positions fundamentally change.
Give it a few years, another of these commissions will be implemented, or expanded etc. And the cycle will continue. Perhaps it'll even resemble the Voice proposals, but they'll never have the constitutional backing. And they're weaker for it.
The money spent on the referendum was worth the risk of failure. And the residual benefits ameliorate the cost of failure to a larger degree than people give credit.
Why should one particular race have a position of power with more bargaining power than any other race or represntative body. Im a firm beleiver in equality sounds pretty anti equallity to me.
The silent majority where always going to vote no anyone with half a braincell could have told u that.
Ah, 'race', always dangerous ground to take the discussion to.
The constitutional change wasn't about 'race'. It was about giving a group of people with a similar context an irrevocable minimum base of contact for the wider community to engage with, and build upon.
I don't know that calling all aboriginal australians a single race is well thought out. I defer to 'nations'. The important distinctions between people, especially where policy decisions are concerned, are their contextual groupings, not ambiguous 'racial' groups. This is demonstrated in no better place than the population of Australia, we are many races, and they aren't what defines an 'Australian'.
To say one group in a society, who is identified as having particular impediments to their prosperity, getting particular attention is anti-equality means you misunderstand the point of the Australian, and Western, model of social welfare states. Instead of demanding equality for all, which has been tried and failed through many different types of governance structures its more practical to demand minimum standards for all. And thats really what we attempt to do in Australia, we equalise to a minimum standard. If you want more, go for gold.
Your comment reflects a confusion about the 'apples to apples' comparison, (say white to black) but the focus on race is the comments problem. So far as you can ever distinguish a specific 'race'.
The real 'apples to apples' comparison is with other contextual groupings of people in Australian society who do, or do not get much attention from the government. These groupings are diverse and overlapping they include, disabled people, the oil and gas industry, farmers, immigrants, Tasmanians, retail workers, retailers, the Swedish diaspora. These are all groups of people based on all sorts of significant contextual and cultural, geographical characteristics that aren't based on the ambiguous term race.
Read the calma langton report, and you'll see their approach to a Voice representative body never treated the Aboriginal people of Australia as a single entity. They have a plan for a broad spectrum of geographic and nation based representation.
race /rās/ noun
Im pretty sure the definition of race covers exactly what u described.
Still even using your language i disgree with giving a specific group of people an irrovocable anything of power with the only prerequsite being that u are of that specific group.
Sure give disadvantaged a represntative voice but u really need to be carefull with making something irravocable eg the americans where given irravocable guns to fight the british and now they have to live with the consequences of that decision.
I'm happy you've looked up the definition of race. My comment was about your use, not the definition.
Now we are on the same page, i'm sure you can see that the use of the word 'race' didn't meaningfully capture the kind of group we're talking about.
Unfortunately you've applied my use of the word irrevocable too broadly. Fair enough there was no explicit mention of group. I was inferring the ability of Parliament to remove without replacement, not the general populace, who always have the referendum option for constitutional change open. We had previously discussed the need for parliamentry restraint as a key reason for the Voice, therefore i didn't feel a need to re-establish the notion. Nonetheless, now we understand each other on that point also.
Your last point is good, and i largely agree with the sentiment. The problem with the US constitutional example is that its not an example of an irrevocable law, and no law should be thought as irrrevocable in the broad sense. They could and probably should amend their constitution.
Lack of gun reform in the US is actually a problem of their legal and political systems losing the essence that makes the Western legal system strong. Our legal systems are supposed to slowly react with the changing world, be it a local Magistrate interpretting common law, or the Constitution, these legal instruments are built as changeable entities. Because as you rightly point out nothing can be truly irrevocable. (And this is why i am personally worried about the increasing codification of laws, like the police assault offences i highlighted earlier).
With my clarification of parliament being unable to revoke a Voice power, i hope you understand the misunderstanding between our positions.