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Notes -
My guess is that Dutton opposes it, but is trying to figure out a way to publicly oppose it which doesn't incur the wrath of the Liberals' own pro-Voice wing, and which doesn't paint a giant target with 'I AM A RACIST' written on it on his back for Labor and the Greens.
I read Dutton's requests for clarification as being basically attempts to get Labor to put up a specific proposal that he can then oppose - much like the republic referendum, the Liberal strategy will be to sidestep the question of whether a republic/Voice is a good idea or not in principle while arguing that this republic/Voice is a bad idea. Labor are making what is probably the correct strategic move in reply by refusing to give any such details - they're trying to force him into either admitting that he supports the idea in principle, in which case he has to join the Yes campaign, or that he opposes it in principle, in which case he has the aforementioned target on his back.
It does show how far the terrain has shifted, though. Go back twenty years or so and John Howard bluntly opposed treaty, Voice, etc., on the plain small-l liberal grounds that the Commonwealth does not recognise or privilege any race or ethnicity, and further the Commonwealth cannot make a treaty with its own citizens. That Dutton doesn't feel able to make a similar argument now suggests that he thinks his position is quite fragile. Some of that might be specific to him - Dutton is a former policeman who was formerly in charge of border control, so he has a reputation as representing the tougher, more hard-right wing of the Liberal party; it makes sense that he feels particularly vulnerable to accusations of extremism - but I suspect that is not all of it by a long shot.
On the ideological background of it all - what frustrates me most is how underspecified all the public activism or debate in this area is. It seems to be something that runs on buzzwords. The biggest example for me is sovereignty. The word 'sovereign' pops up again and again like a tic, and it is extremely unclear what it's supposed to mean. It's clearly not sovereignty in the Western, Westphalian sense - Aboriginal people are demonstrably not sovereign in that sense. It's 'a spiritual notion', apparently, but what that means is never specified - a sense of being-on-the-land? Um, okay? What is that? It 'co-exists with the sovereignty of the Crown'? Can someone spell out the political implications of that? If you try to look up any explanation, what you find is frankly a lot of waffle that no one seems to take at face value - the quoted elder there says "we are not subject to the Australian or British law but still maintain our own sovereignty", but good luck arguing in the public sphere that the law doesn't apply to Aboriginals!
And so on with so many of the other claims that seem to come up and time again. Another common one is that Aboriginals are the world's 'oldest continuous culture', another claim whose meaning is never specified and doesn't seem to bear up to scrutiny. So on and so forth. It's hard to escape feeling that, ultimately, there is no there there. Overall it seems that there is a desire among the Australian public to be nice to Aboriginal people, basically, but no consensus about what that means, so what ends up happening is that empty platitudes are voiced and no one thinks further about them. Certainly no one does anything.
Anyway, predictions...
Personally, I predict (but with low confidence) that the referendum will pass, and then conditional on the referendum passing, I predict that the Voice will have no real power. For all the symbolism, I don't believe parliament will do anything that would involve giving up any real power, so I think the Voice will have only the power to advise; and its constitution will be contingent on legislation, giving parliament the power to alter its make-up or defang it at whim. I predict the Voice will provide a bunch of well-paid committee jobs to indigenous activists in Canberra, and not make any difference as regards remote indigenous communities in poverty.
I would not be surprised if activists already expect the Voice to be ineffectual. The moment it's created, I predict the entire sector will turn to pushing for Treaty instead. Just as after the National Apology, energy shifted to advocating for constitutional recognition, and just as Malcolm Turnbull seemed about to achieve that, the Uluru Statement came out advocating for Voice instead, I predict that whether the Voice passes or not, in the next few years the whole sector is going to pivot to Treaty.
It's not meant to have power, and this is why they will immediately pivot to treaty. It is meant to boil the frog slowly. To change the baseline to "we gave them a voice but no real power, we have to do better!" and suddenly all the 'heroes' who wrangled the voice out of the government become racists or government stooges, just like the apology heroes are now.
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