In this video, Megan Davis spends about an hour talking about the importance of removing racial discrimination from the constitution. This was in 2012. She gives many good reasons why the Australian constitution needs an anti racial discrimination clause.
Fast forward to 2017.
The Referendum Council dumps the anti racial discrimination clause. This is despite more than 5 years of mainstream media propaganda trying to convince everyone why it was needed.
The stated reasons for the Referendum Council leaving out a prohibition on racial discrimination clause was that it wouldn’t advance self-determination, and wouldn’t provide a platform for treaty and truth-telling.
Well no shit. It doesn’t tick every single box. Neither would the Declaration of Recognition if they had bothered evaluating that against the same checklist. But the Declaration made it into the package.
A constitutional prohibition on racial discrimination – despite many good reasons to include it, was completely left out. ICERD (International Convention on the Elimination of all forms of Racial Discrimination) reviews continue to raise the weaknesses of the Racial Discrimination Act and the racist parts of the constitution as a major failure of Australia’s compliance with this important human rights convention. A constitutional anti-racial discrimination clause would have had a decent chance at preventing the cashless welfare card and the NTER. Both of these racist laws would probably be unconstitutional if a prohibition on racial discrimination were in the constitution and if ICERD were properly implemented. The legislation could be challenged in court, or to the Australian Human Rights Commission. The Human Rights Commission would then have the backup of the constitution itself. And even though going to a court might be expensive and time-consuming – it would be a deterrent to those drafting legislation that they have to make sure that they are not drafting something racist and unconstitutional.
A Voice to Parliament on the other hand would just give members of Parliament a bit of extra information to make their decision on a bill. Parliamentary backroom deals and members telephoning each other to get a bill through will happen regardless. “You vote yes on this bill, I’ll owe you one, wink wink…”. That’s how Parliament works – a “Voice” won’t change that. Watching the drama yesterday of the cashless welfare card passing the senate it’s clear that this is exactly how it works.
The real reason they left out the anti-racial discrimination clause is because there is a secret agenda behind all of this, and that is to decolonise. And you don’t need to remove discrimination under decolonisation by “free association”.Compare UN General Assembly Resolution 1541 annex Principles VII and VIII.
“Integration” (preambular recognition) requires the removal of discrimination – it needs to happen on the basis of equality. But “free association” (federalism with “First Nations” as per the Uluru Statement) does not.
The colony is so petty that it went out of it’s way, getting Megan Davis to back-flip on the anti-racial discrimination clause. They could have just left it in there – the Australian people would probably not bat an eyelid at it being included, it would protect everyone and make the Australian constitution look a bit less backward.
Image by edith lüthi from Pixabay