TALK ABOUT MISAPPROPRIATION.
100 years before Dr Martin Luther King Jnr delivered his “I Have A Dream” speech, the USA was commencing a civil war, one of the causes of which was slavery. The newly minted US President, Abraham Lincoln, was vehemently opposed to slavery, and he signed the Emancipation Proclamation thereby ending slavery. Abraham Lincoln ended slavery, but sadly, he did not manage to end racial discrimination.
An author whose work had a strong influence on my life was Harper Lee, whose book To Kill A Mockingbird, I read in high school. There were two main mockingbirds in that book, Arthur “Boo” Radley and Tom Robinson. The latter was unjustly accused and convicted of rape in Alabama, a state that still had racial segregation.
Today, we saw a preposterous, hard-right-wing former chief of staff to the most appalling former Australian Prime Minister misappropriate Martin Luther King’s speech to attempt to justify opposition to The Voice To Parliament. At the time that Martin Luther King made his speech, African Americans were infantilised and told that they could not vote as voting was too difficult, in some of those states. Martin Luther King spoke of his dream for America where a person would be judged on the strength of their character, not on the colour of their skin.
A major difference between the African Americans and the Australian Indigenous is this. With the colonisation of North America, it was the First Nations Americans who were dispossessed by the Europeans. The African Americans were transported to America as slaves. In Australia, the Indigenous were dispossessed by the British colonisers. The Australian Indigenous were not counted as humans in the Census until 1967.
The Australian Indigenous and the African Americans experience structural disadvantage and discrimination.
The proposed Voice To Parliament will NOT, despite the falsehoods of those who oppose it, create a tricameral parliament. Nor will it give people special privileges. It will give the Indigenous Australians, particularly those in regional and remote areas, the right and the chance to be consulted and raise concerns on issues and decisions that concern them! That is not giving people privileges!
The main objection to the Voice is that it will threaten the privilege of European Australians!
The reality that the right-wingers who carry on about equality will not accept is, you cannot unify people with divisive policies and divisive rhetoric. Similarly, we need to understand that we will never have a country comprised of one people. There will always be minority groups, and I am a member of a minority group. And amongst those minority groups, there will be intersectionality.
True equality will be achieved not by denying the minority groups a seat at the table, but by allowing people to be who they are, and by including minorities. And equality needs to be replaced with equity. And, in keeping with the spirit of Martin Luther King’s speech, where a BIPOC, LGBTIQA person can stand for politics and when others say, “So what? It is the strength of their character that matters.”