this post was submitted on 11 Jul 2023
29 points (91.4% liked)

Australia

3507 readers
186 users here now

A place to discuss Australia and important Australian issues.

Before you post:

If you're posting anything related to:

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:

Banner Photo

Congratulations to @[email protected] 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:

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: @[email protected] and @[email protected]

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 23 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

Not fucking side-stepping at all mate, doubt much of the world know about the internal going-ons of Australia, so always happy to share a yarn.

I'll break it down, but I'm by no means an expert and will probably get it a bit wrong.

I'm confident about this. Sky News is Murdoch's Australian version of Fox, he's started pumping out freely to rural Australia, where they usually have to pay for view and satellites and shit. It's picking up background steam and infiltrating the right wing of Australia, trying to do what it did in the US (hopefully he dies before this gets too far on). It's also shown for free in lots of gambling/sports betting places and pubs etc, where tradies/working class people are more likely to congregate.

He's making a spin-off channel dedicated solely to talking about a single issue, the creation of a layer between the two houses of government that is made up entirely of Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander peoples, they wouldn't have any legislative power, but a special advisory layer? to give a more enshrined voice to the the original inhabitants of Australia. This is called 'The Voice'.

The Voice, is part of a petition called the "Uluru Statement from the Heart". To quote the wiki "These reforms can be summarised as Voice, Treaty and Truth." Treaty should be pretty self-explanatory (and something that will finally get the Kiwi's to stop feeling so bloody special) and is proposed to be done through a commission (a public inquiry) called the "Makarrata Commission", and the Truth - which is I guess creating a historical record of what exactly happened, to who, to where, to what, to why, when and acknowledging all the bad shit done.

The truth and treaty aren't getting much flack, but the right is trying to create this impression that the voice would allow Aboriginal people to unfairly control the democratic process (despite having no authority) and is trying to drum up dog-whistling racist shit.

tl;dr: Just the slow, monotonous drum of the Americani~~z~~sation of Australia and an attempt at going the opposite path.

Some futher links: https://ulurustatement.org/ https://www.aph.gov.au/About_Parliament/Parliamentary_Departments/Parliamentary_Library/pubs/rp/rp1617/Quick_Guides/UluruStatement

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago

Minor correction... The Voice doesn't exist between the two houses of government. It will be an advisory body to parliament, thats it.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

@[email protected] To be clear, the referendum is only on the Voice to Parliament. Treaty and makarrata are separate issues that the current Labor government, to my knowledge, has not committed to addressing. This is why some, in what is known as the "Progressive No" campaign, reject the Voice. They believe it falls well short of what is needed and will be used by current and future governments to delay progress on Indigenous rights. Governments will be able to point to the Voice as evidence of them listening, whilst being under no legal obligation to actually listen to or act on any of the recommendations being made.