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News from Australia: we're probably not going to have a Constitutionally-enshrined "Voice" for Aboriginals.
Background: there was a statement by a bunch of Aboriginal groups a while back that they wanted a constitutionally-enshrined advocate in the governmental system*, along with a couple of other things. Opposition leader Anthony Albanese, of the Australian Labor Party, included this in his platform for the 2022 election, which he won**, and we're a bit under a month from a referendum***.
New information: support started high, and certainly the Usual Suspects want a Yes vote. But support has now crashed to the point that it's considered highly unlikely to pass.
Up until now I'd been thinking "well, maybe the US people are right about SJ having peaked in the USA, but that's cold comfort to me", but this has given me some real hope that it's peaking here as well.
*NB: Aboriginals can vote and run for office, and are slightly overrepresented in Parliament compared to the general population.
**Labor is our centre-left party; the other major parties are the Liberals (city-based centre-right), the Nationals (small-town conservatives, in a semi-permanent coalition with the Liberals), the Greens (historically a "hippie" party, and they still do hold basically all the stereotypical "hippie" positions, though they've gone majorly SJ of late), One Nation (alt-rightists since before it was cool) and the United Australia Party (alt-rightists since after it was cool, because an alt-right billionaire had too big an ego to support the existing alt-right party). I actually wound up voting Labor; the Liberals had gotten too comfortable in government to the point that they refused to discuss a bunch of what they were doing, which I consider a threat to democracy, the Greens want to ban One Nation and the UAP, which I consider a much larger threat to democracy, I live in a city so the Nationals weren't on my HoR ballot, the UAP is a bad joke, and while I preferred One Nation's stance on this particular policy (i.e. "get the fuck out of here with your reverse racism") I preferred the rest of Labor's platform to the rest of One Nation's by more.
***Our constitutional amendment procedure - a majority of citizens and a majority of citizens in at least four of the six states must agree to the amendment. Like most other Australian votes, it's mandatory.
Nobody (YES or NO) wants to talk about ATSIC. But I think we should talk about ATSIC.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aboriginal_and_Torres_Strait_Islander_Commission
When ATSIC was established in 1990, it was billed as a formalisation of the Tent Embassy (formed in 1972). There's some memory holing around this, but I can say (at risk of some deanonymisation) that this is the story we were told in primary school as it was happening. It was much celebrated with all the same platitudes we have now arguing in favour of the Voice.
15 years later, ATSIC was shut down due to being horribly corrupt.
And then for 18 years we have had approximately.... nothing.
When other government departments are found to be horribly corrupt (eg the NSW police force) we don't just abolish them. We clean them out and try again.
I think that's the best argument for creating a constitutional amendment - not just creating another ATSIC-like entity, but committing to cleaning it up and trying again when it inevitably becomes corrupt.
Ideally, we could put the Voice in charge of those pseudo-religious "acknowledgement of country" ceremonies we now have at the start of every event. A new priesthood, providing a new source of legitimacy for our nation. A spirituality bound to the land itself. Something vaguely god-shaped to fill the hole left by Christianity's untimely demise.
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Link to past Motte discussion on this issue
I stand by my assessment that the avoidance of defining the powers and privileges given to the Voice will kill any chance of success in the referendum (thankfully). 'Trust us and sign the blank cheque' is never a workable strategy.
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Something that's really stood out to me during this referendum process is, well, just how bad the Yes campaign is at making arguments or trying to convince people. There's a lot of quibbling minor points, or a simple inability to conceive of anyone genuinely disagreeing with them.
Meanwhile the No campaign is largely throwing mud at the wall - it knows that it only needs one reason to vote no per person, so it's focusing on throwing lots of ideas out there, suggesting that even one concern is enough reason to not go for the proposal, and consistency be damned. This isn't a great strategy from the perspective of ideological purity, but it is a great strategy from the perspective of actually winning a referendum.
Let me give an example. One of the most common No arguments is simply that the Voice is racist. The Voice is a proposal to give permanent additional democratic representation, in the form of a permanent lobby group attached to parliament, to a single ethnic or racial group. This cuts against Australian values like a fair go, and would 're-racialise' Australian society or the Australian constitution. How does the Yes campaign respond to that concern?
One common response is to point out that the Australian constitution already mentions race, so this can't re-racialise it. This is technically true - parliament only has enumerated powers in Australia, and section 51.xxxvi explicitly allows parliament to make laws on the basis of race. However, by convention that power is almost never used, and No voters worried about race seem like they would oppose that section anyway. Moreover, the fact that section 51.xxxvi exists is obviously not a carte blanche to pass any racial law whatsoever. If there were a referendum to reintroduce the White Australian Policy and the No campaign claimed it's racist, pointing out that the constitution already mentions race would not be a defense. So too here. The Yes argument is to pedantically nitpick without at any point addressing the No voter's real conviction - that it's wrong to treat people differently on the basis of race.
Another common response is to claim that the Voice isn't about race by nitpicking the word 'race'. For instance, here's UniMelb arguing that 'The criterion is indigeneity, not race'. Here's RMIT taking the same line. Here's the Human Rights Commission arguing that the Voice debate shouldn't be made about race, and that 'it's about participation, it's about equity, it's about elevating the position of First Nations' people'. But of course all of this is just irrelevant quibbling. Whether you call it 'race' or 'indigeneity' or 'culture' or 'heritage' it is still unambiguously a proposal to establish a permanent advisory body for a particular group of Australians on the basis of that group's ancestry - on the basis of who their parents and grandparents and so on were. It's still dividing Australians and giving greater representation to some Australians on the basis of something they were born with and did not choose, and that's the thing that the No voter is worried about. James Patterson in that third article says it in so many words: "either way what we are doing is putting into our constitution something that treats people differently because of a characteristic over which they have no control".
And so on for other arguments - it feels like this all the way down. The Yes campaign struggles to understand why anyone would vote No, so the Yes campaign just repeats clichés and slogans and tries to ineffectively obfuscate the nature of the proposal. At some point the fact is just that it's a proposal to give special additional representation to people whose ancestors were Aboriginal, and the Australian public don't like that idea.
Honestly, the all-to-all-people approach worked for Brexit. But in this case, one side (Remain) had a coherent, positive vision of what would be won, while the Voice referendum has inconsistency and emptiness on both sides. This is probably naturally conducive to the status quo.
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The main positive argument of the Yes campaign (as opposed to deflection of opposing arguments) is this:
Like, obviously this is just the politician's syllogism, and literally the same logic could lead you to sticking all the Aboriginals in re-education camps since we haven't tried that either, but the Yes campaigners do honestly believe it, and I think it is (somewhat) above the level of "clichés and slogans".
I think they believe it, but it seems to me that there's a level of magical thinking about the whole thing? We haven't tried a constitutionally-enshrined advisory body yet, but we have tried legislated advisory bodies before, multiple times, and they don't seem to have helped that much. I don't really see the case for what the Voice will do that ATSIC didn't do.
The argument is that the Voice can't be abolished by a government that doesn't like it, but, well... firstly, ATSIC lasted for fifteen years and advised both Labor and Coalition governments, and was ultimately disbanded on a bipartisan basis, so it doesn't seem like the issue there was one side of politics deciding it didn't like it and getting rid of it. Secondly, the proposed constitutional change for the Voice in no way prevents a government that doesn't like it from ignoring it. Not only can the government simply shovel all the Voice's representations straight into the shredder, parliament is given power to determine the 'composition, functions, powers, and procedures' of the Voice. A hostile government may not be able to totally abolish the Voice, but it is allowed to put a sign with 'Voice' on a janitor's closet and appoint a single non-indigenous person to meet in that closet once a decade, and call that the Voice. Nothing in the proposal as it currently stands compels a hostile government to treat the Voice as anything other than a joke.
In response to that I hear the argument that public and media pressure would force the government to take the Voice seriously - but public and media pressure right now compels the government to take indigenous issues seriously. The government does take those issues seriously, to the tune of having spent half a billion dollars on them in the Intervention. There's the argument that the Voice would be composed of indigenous people themselves who would offer more knowledgeable advice, but... the government at present has the power to solicit advice from affected local communities and indeed claims to be doing so. So again it's not clear what would be different.
But I think what bothers me more is that in practice, when I talk to people soliciting a Yes vote, what I hear on the streets are clichés like "better decisions are made when we hear from people affected" or "indigenous people just want a say in policy that affects them" or similarly vague statements that never really get to the point. The last time I talked to someone about it I heard statements like "I feel that we will never really be a whole nation until we are reconciled" and "Aboriginal people still haven't been recognised as the owners of the land that we now live on" and I just don't see how those statements make sense. These are thought-terminating clichés, not sensible discussions of a proposal for reform.
I suppose you could argue that "it's treating people differently based on race, so no" is a thought-terminating cliché for the no side. But it seems more substantial, to me? It lays out a clear principle, it's obvious how that principle applies, and it's also obvious how it can be implemented.
I mean, if you gave the Voice power to block legislation, then that would have tangible effects, and that can AIUI only be done by amending the Constitution (since AIUI if you did that via legislation alone the High Court would say "the Constitution says the power to pass federal legislation is exclusively invested in Parliament; this veto is unconstitutional", much like how they said that bills of attainder aren't constitutional because that's Parliament acting to try cases and the power to try cases is exclusively invested in the courts).
And, well, you can ask questions about whether some of the activists want exactly that. A bunch of them legit don't think that will be done, though, so you're right that there's a bit of a question mark remaining in those cases.
It would, yes, but nobody wants to give the Voice the power to block legislation.
I do think one of the problems the Voice has is that the rhetoric around it can't seem to decide whether it's toothlessly ineffective or it's a vehicle for radical change. There's a contradiction there and both the Yes and No campaigns struggle with it.
For Yes, the Voice is either a harmless, modest reform that just provides advice for parliament and definitely nothing to be scared of... or it would heal the soul of the nation and be a vital first step towards Treaty and Truth.
For No, the Voice is either a pointless, ineffective superficial reform designed to virtue-signal but won't do anything to solve the serious issues facing local Aboriginal communities... or it's a Trojan Horse designed to negotiate Treaty and establish a system of two-tiered citizenship that will take rights and land away from other Australians.
It can't be both conservative and radical, but I think the contradiction hurts the Yes campaign much more than it hurts No. The No campaign can afford to be incoherent - they only need to throw out one reason for a person to vote No, after all. It's the Yes campaign that need to build up a cohesive case and they've really been struggling with it.
I don't think that's true.
Look, I know that it's fallacious to assume that people always act rationally and therefore if they're doing something that seems to not make sense it must make sense in some hidden, often evil, way.
On the other hand, well, I took a quick look, and let me quote the Final Report of the Referendum Council, which AFAICT is not a forgery (if it is, please tell me so I can don the Mask of Ultimate Embarrassment and Shame):
These would seem to be activists who want it to have the power to block legislation.
I agree that a lot, probably most, of the "Yes" supporters honestly do not believe it will have power, and that their enthusiasm is therefore not explained by this idea (whether or not I believe their protestations to be accurate descriptions of reality*). But there definitely do exist some who want it, and they seem to have been among those that originally called for this to be Constitutional, which would seem to explain at least those people's motives.
*If the referendum were to pass, it is nigh-inevitable that someone in the Greens would publically ask for it to have powers. And at that point, the superweapon of "you racist" comes into play against Labour and (the rest of) the Greens refusing to comply (though not against One Nation, the Nationals, and to some degree the Liberals; they've written that off as a sunk cost). Do I think it'd actually make it through? Probably not; the HoR can be won with only people vulnerable to the superweapon, but while the Senate's mathematically possible it'd need every single LW party member and both non-RW independents so I think there'd be at least one person going "fuck it, I didn't sign up for this, shoot me" and one's enough. I'm certainly concerned enough about this issue not to risk voting Yes, though.
That's certainly in the report, yes. See page 30 of the full report (38 of the PDF). I'll grant that 'nobody' was hyperbole on my part. However, the report is collecting the suggestions of panels of indigenous people all over the country, rather than putting them forward as a practical proposal. As far as I can tell nobody is seriously putting forward a proposal for an indigenous Voice with the power to block or constrain acts of parliament. Any such proposal would be even more dead on arrival than the Voice currently is.
I certainly agree that the intent behind the Voice, particularly for existing indigenous activists, is to use it as a stepping stone to Truth and Treaty. I expect a move to Truth and Treaty regardless of the outcome of the referendum. If Yes wins, I think the Voice will be a body that pushes for further reforms. If No wins, I think it will be taken as evidence that the Australian people are deeply racist and ignorant (hence the need for Truth) and that Aboriginal people need a body that gives them real power (hence Treaty).
Oh, they'll try. But as I noted to AshLael, I think getting decisively defeated in a referendum (they're looking at something like 60-40 and losing five states) could well solidify consensus against them. Remember: we're not as far gone as the USA. The Greens might be close, but Labor can't get away with simply calling 60% of Australia a "basket of deplorables". Look at the ABC's referendum coverage. It's slanted as fuck, but there is a pretence of neutrality that is just not there in the US's MSM; there is clearly an editorial policy in place that they cannot explicitly say "Yes is right" and that they do have to give a fair hearing to even central examples of "No" voters. Under a Liberal government that would be expected*, but Labour's in government and Labour wants Yes to win. There are still rules in the culture war here in Australia. And the SJers have been pointing out that one of those rules is that defying a referendum is bad juju.
(NB: it's great that there are still rules, and it's bad that we're having this referendum because that frays those rules just a little more. I didn't want this, even though I did vote Labor because elections unfortunately don't give you unbundled choices. But hey, silver lining, right?)
*for non-Aussies reading this: because the ABC is a government organ. While the ABC usually is willing to criticise the government, and it's considered bad juju to fuck with its editorial policies for partisan reasons (another convention that remains in place here), there is a threshold of hostile propaganda at which the Liberals would say "fuck it" and start firing people or simply defund the whole organisation.
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This won't work either.
When it doesn't work, the people who were against it because they knew it wasn't going to work are going to have zero incentive to continue cooperating.
Policies have outcomes. When repeated policy failures discredit moderate policies and drive the adoption of radical policies, the people who lose the vote over which policy to adopt also radicalize. You don't get to hand power to radicals, and expect the moderates to stay moderate. If you are resorting to radical solutions, you are committing your polity exclusively to radical solutions from that point on until the problem is solved. Given the general track record of radical solutions and the lasting nature of the problems in question, it is entirely possible that the problem will outlast your polity.
As in the other thread, you argue as though appeasement of radicals costs you nothing. That is a poor assumption.
I think you misread my post. I literally called the only "serious" Yes argument a formal fallacy.
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A chief issue with the amendment has been that the Voice proposal is so overwhelmingly vague.
It's essentially running for permission for the government to then go forth and create a body for the Indigenous, instead of actually providing clarity around the function, makeup, responsibilities etcetera
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This might just be my American ass talking, but I don’t see how these weird ethnic carve outs can possibly lead to more unity. My experience of Affirmative Action has been that it provokes resentment and negative assumptions that wouldn’t be there if everyone was given the same criteria for being hired or chosen. I would expect ethnic carve outs for parliament would have a similar effect especially when something unpopular passes that the Aborigines support.
I'm not australian either, but I don't think it's affirmative action (where you help individuals get better jobs). It's something more collective. Think about it: in the US (and also in Australia), instead of voting by states, you could vote by race or something like that. For example Lebanon votes by religion. That is not something I would want for my country (and it does not work very well in lebanon) but perhaps it makes sense sometimes, just like taking account of geographic differences makes sense sometimes.
No, this isn't a "everyone votes by races" thing. Nobody wants special white representation, or for that matter special Chinese representation (the largest nonwhite group in Oz). The idea is that everyone including Aboriginals votes normally for a non-racialised Parliament, and then also Aboriginals get a special representation that may or may not have powers to block laws.
It's not AA - and @MaiqTheTrue was only using that as an analogy - but it absolutely is explicit "some people have more representation than other people".
Well it's still as I said, excepted that the old usual system survives and makes it odd. We have something of the sort in the UE: if you are a binational, you can elect 2 governments, and those governments are ruling the EU together (I'm not sure it's not also possible to vote twice for EU parliament). As long as there are few people with two votes, it's not that important.
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The ancient Romans sometimes voted by tribe. Problems arose when they annexed like half of Italy and then threw all the new citizens into a couple of the 36 tribes, essentially making their votes worthless.
Not making a point here, just thought it was interesting.
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From the Wikipedia page on the proposal: "Under the endorsed design principles of the Referendum Working Group, the membership of the Voice would be selected by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities across the country, with an enforced gender balance at the national level"
I'm guessing that "gender balance" is a form of cultural imperialism and not a big part of how Australian aboriginals governed themselves before whites arrived.
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Ehhhh. I'm not sure I would consider the impending failure of the Voice (and you are right, it absolutely is dead in the water) as evidence Australia is turning against wokeness. I think it has a lot more to do with the specific circumstances of how the campaign has played out.
The left in general, and Albanese in particular, took the wrong lesson from the 1999 Republic referendum. They saw people who liked the idea of a Republic but disliked the specific model and voted no. They also (correctly) realised that any specific proposal will inevitably have details that will upset someone. But then they decided (foolishly) that the way to keep everyone on board was to provide no details at all.
This has been a disastrous decision, as it has left the government in the horrible position of trying to convince voters to create a new constitutional body, with absolutely no idea how that new institution will work. We don't know how many people will be appointed to it, who will be appointed, or by what method. We don't know how it will resolve differences of opinion among Aboriginal groups. We don't know what issues it will choose to address, or what sort of proposals it might champion. All we know is it will be almost impossible to get rid of.
They have tried to use this vagueness to convince the radicals that it will lead to transformational change, while at the same time reassuring the normies that it's just a toothless advisory committee and it won't change anything. It hasn't worked. The two groups have gotten the message intended for the other, and both have turned against it.
Which brings me to the other factor that is killing the Voice. It's utterly devastating to the Yes campaign that the two highest profile Aborigines in Parliament, coming from opposite ends of the political spectrum, are both violently opposed to the Voice. There's a lot of people who would quite happily vote to give Aborigines what they want, but it's not so clear that this is actually what they want. ("Yes" supporters love to quote an old poll saying that the Voice has 80% support among Aborigines, but this is an old poll taken back when the voice had widespread support among everyone. It's highly likely it's lost a lot of skin even among Indigenous voters, considering how much support in general has cratered.)
But though people are becoming increasingly sceptical about this specific proposal, there is still widespread support for giving Aboriginals special status and treatment. It wasn't so long ago that Yes had a massive lead - if the Voice were being rejected on principle that would not have been the case.
I'm not pointing entirely to the "this is evidence that we're already coming to our senses" direction. There's also the "getting crushed in a referendum - as is looking likely - builds consensus against the thing being voted on" direction. It gives One Nation more respectability if they're the only party that took a firm "no" and "no" wins, regardless of whether it was "no" winning properly or a "yes" fumble. The Greens can't claim consensus on this any more if they took their "consensus" to an actual vote and it got crushed.
Now, in the USA this wouldn't matter; tribal loyalty overwhelms national loyalty, this'd just be one more reason to despise the outgroup and fight harder. But in Australia we're not that far gone; stare decisis is a thing that still means something here (note for instance the lack of another republic referendum). Ironically, I got this pointed out to me by SJers worried about it.
Yeah, there's some truth to this - we do tend to be willing to say "Ok, we had that debate, one side won, let's move on". I've certainly heard some Yes supporters arguing that Yes needs to win for exactly this reason - there won't be an opportunity to come back and "do it right", people will just say "Nah we settled that. Not doing it".
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In Sweden woke peaked 9 years ago and has been in steady decline since then. It has been strange to see the anglosphere go woke while watching social media and society in general lurch to the right at home. A leading antifa member in Sweden once said the difference between a green voting liberal feminist and a neo nazi race warrior is a non white mob threatening their condo. The liberal middle class is only liberal and woke until it has consequences. Threaten their property values, and they will often demand whatever it takes to defend their lifestyle.
What happened in Sweden was that middle class areas experienced an increase in crime. Schools in good areas experienced diversity, and the dysfunction caused by hundreds of thousands of migrants entering the medical system started to impact the life of people who used to be woke. Unlike the US that much more urban sprawl, richer people in Sweden often life in downtown areas. When their daughters had to go home at night while Afghan gangs sold heroin in their neighbourhood, the interest for BLM narratives was replaced with enthusiastic support for law and order. Surging electrical prices limited enthusiasm for the anti nuclear left and has caused real economic damage to the Swedish middle class living in large homes that have to be heated in the winter.
Australia probably has gone woke because woke hasn't had a major negative impact on people's lives. You haven't had gun crime increase 1000% in 17 years, you haven't seen your electrical grid become unreliable, posh schools don't have 15 year olds pretending to be twelve causing mayhem in class.
The online right thinks the masses can be inspired by ideas and ideology. Rightwingers tend to have little interest in ideology and are content as long as they can barbecue. Australia will stop going woke when woke has an impact on people's lives.
It's kind of funny, we're seeing this in sanctuary cities in the US (looking at you NY). It's easy to be generous with someone else's resources...
The US primary system largely prevents wealthy urbanites going full GOP though, you can just elect a “tough on crime Democrat” who will say all the right things while also having the right broader ideology.
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I don’t get the impression that’s what’s going on in NY. The city is big enough that 50 or 500 or even 5000 bussed immigrants won’t tip any balances. It’s not Martha’s Vineyard, where they were a significant and unusual fraction of the off-season population.
The sticking point is that the Red Tribe is scoring points off of Blue Tribers. Can’t have that.
NYC is to all appearances actually having trouble dealing with them(and 5000 is an extremely low number- the Texas government claims to have shipped more than twice that many to New York and the real number is undoubtedly higher because of randos buying bus tickets for migrants), although that’s at least partly because NYC decided to shock them into a social service system designed for a smaller number of short term homeless.
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To quote a Swedish white nationalist from the old subreddit who made the same argument 3 years ago:
The big problem in the long term for the alt right is that America is so suburban. Suburbs are very blue pilling. When whites left cities in the 60s after being forced out by race riots they moved to suburbs and their views on race did a 180. We see similar trends in Europe where suburbia is the one place where nationalist groups can't make progress at all. In Sweden the weakest results for the Sweden democrats in every election has been suburban areas around Stockholm. Those areas are solidly neoliberal. Unfortunately for American nationalists urban areas are small, rural areas are too spread out and the suburban population dominates white people. The suburban demographic is naturally materialistic, rootless, individualist and globalist.
This really doesn't match my experience in the US: the average suburban dweller I know has a mortgage "rooting" them to their dwelling and presenting nontrivial costs -- real estate sales, movers, etc -- to up and move elsewhere. There may be some individualism, but the average suburban school has an active parent organization donating time and funds to local education. And there's no shortage of other groups meshing the community together: churches, youth/adult sports leagues, and so forth.
I wouldn't expect support for the alt-right to take off in suburbs -- whose inhabitants seem generally happy and content to just grill in their backyards -- but I think "solidly neoliberal" reflects what is actually a general conservatism in the sense of being change-averse: suburbanites don't want major political changes (locally or nationally: these might, gasp, impact property values), and garden-variety neoliberalism seems to be one of the least change-seeking platforms currently. In general, I think they want to keep things as they are, with an eye toward modest, gradual improvements and at least a stated preference for "be nice" policies with modest price tags. These folks aren't pushing to (re-)overhaul American health-care because they're largely employed and prefer the devil they know in their existing insurance plan. They aren't pushing to defund their police departments. But they might agree on increasing Medicaid spending or buying body cameras for police.
But perhaps Sweden's idea of a "suburb" is very different from what I experience day-to-day.
I suppose if you're a dissident rightist observing your outgroup from, well, the outside, it's easy to conflate a) the leftist urban laptop class / PMC who are mostly renters or at least live in inner-city flats and who are relatively eager to wage the culture war and are indeed "naturally materialistic, rootless, individualist and globalist" a) neoliberal/centrist suburbanites who are recognizable by occasionally publicly spewing the same liberal/woke snark as group 'a'.
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I would say that this is probably a factor, but what little I've seen of suburbs in Europe (example: the suburbs in Cry of Fear, a Swedish-made game set in a Swedish town, which I presume is all modeled fairly faithfully to real life) suggests that they aren't fundamentally different from American suburbs in terms of layout, construction, and even appearance.
And yes, I would also say that suburbs, in terms of their neo-liberalism, probably can be thought of in the leftist-sneering-sense of neo-liberalism in that they are foundationally conservative with some helpings of Blue Tribe-ness.
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Maybe Sweden is different. Here in the states, we are tolerating problems far worse than Sweden ever had. Wokeness hasn't diminished much if any.
The major blue cities have a murder rate that is more than 10x what Sweden has. And the public schools in our major blue cities have been terrible forever. San Francisco public schools are less than 10% white now as everyone either sends their kids to private school or moves to the suburbs.
Yet these American blue cities are not "lurching" (a mild slur by the way) to the right, far from it. In the past decades they have become woker and woker. If anything, it is the suburbs and rural areas that are becoming more conservative, despite having many fewer of the problems created by lack of rules enforcement.
Edit: I think I might have caused some confusion. By "slur" I mean that lurch is being used as a slur here. "My outgroup moves like a drunk or a zombie". I do not mean that there is anything wrong with the word lurch.
I think a big reason is that those who aren’t “woke” and haven’t drunk that koolaid generally find it much easier to simply leave and move to someplace safer and less woke.
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No, it is not. It is simply a descriptor that can be applied to any group of things or persons with equal effect. Drunken revelers walking the street after last call lurch in the same way I do getting out of bed in the morning, and we are not diminished for such a description.
I agree this is the start of a totally unnecessary hyperstitous slur cascade, and NO! DOWN! BAD! STOP!
Ah... I get it the objection. Yes, there is no problem with using the word lurch. Lurch, lurch, lurch. It's fine. Use it all you want.
But when you refer to the arguments of your political opponents in the same way that you are refer to the movements of a drunkard, then you are slurring them. "Swedish voters are drunkenly stumbling to the right" is just as bad. Lurch itself is not a bad word.
You rang?
Give this man a medal.
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I recognize that this is purely anecdotal, but my overall sense of "blue spaces" (and I live in one) is that in the last 12-18 months there's been an increase in the number of, as the kids say, "based" takes. Especially since the moderator revolt a few months back, a number of previously-radical local subreddits seem to have pivoted towards the center a bit, even if it's IMO quite-modest statements like "local property crime is bad for the community, and actually I want the police to do something" or "letting homeless folks shoot up drugs and openly defecate in the street across from the local elementary school is hardly 'compassionate' to anyone involved" get upvotes and positive engagement.
I'm jealous of New York City and LA. Various "based" events are taking place there that have no chance of occurring in the Bay Area.
e.g. a Yarvin and Peachy Keenan thing in LA in May, now some Katherine Brodsky and Anna K thing there too...
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Agreed. I wouldn't say I'm hopeful yet, but I just visited with some very historically progressive friends in CA, and all were sort of hinting at things having gone too far, which I don't think they ever would have dared to do a year ago.
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Among average liberal suburban normies in the US, one generally accepted narrative regarding political history is that Republican administrations between 1968-92 have committed a horrific, unspeakable, terribly evil etc. crime against BIPOC by enacting a policy of mass incarceration of African-American (and, to a much lesser extent, Latino) young men in the name of the 'war on drugs' and 'law and order' in order to pander to the racist sentiments of hwhite garbage humans. (As far as I know, nothing of this sort has ever happened in Sweden.) Therefore there's no chance at all of any politician making the kamikaze decision of trying to drum up support for law and order.
I do think that the spectre of Donald Trump allows people to tolerate a higher level of crime and dysfunction than they otherwise would.
People weigh their own safety vs. the social undesirability of voting Republican. In our current epoch, the surge in murders and crime hasn't been enough to overcome the very strong social undesirability of Donald Trump. So they continue to vote for progressives despite a worry that things aren't going that well. Because the alternative of a "literal fascist dictatorship" is worse.
As far as I know, the abnormally high violent crime rate of the '70s and '80s in the US reached its zenith around 1991 and then started declining around 1994, with increasing speed, but this trend later reversed around 2012, and if not then, then surely by 2014. Around the same period, marked by the scandals around Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Freddie Gray etc., this trend was paralleled by increasing rethoric focused on police brutality, essentially laying the groundwork for the abolish-the-police tendency.
None of this had anything to do with Trump.
In normal times, voters could be expected to respond to the post-2014 crime surge with more law and order policiies. Not immediately, mind you. The crime surge didn't happen overnight and only really started to take off post-2020.
However, Trump has antagonized the left to the point that they started to play zero sum team politics above all else. Here in Seattle, politicians are always deflecting from our drug and crime wave by waving at national politics. Voters seem happy to play along, and continue to elect far left politicians even though concern for crime is rising significantly. Anything else is support for the evil Republicans, which is simply not done.
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I don't think it's social undesirability at this point. The main issue a lot of people (myself included) have with Trump is the fact that he is likely to bring about huge systemic instability. Most people who have some vested interest in the current amalgamation of systems and institutions in the US are very reluctant to support the sentiment of "it's all rotten, tear it all down" coming out of the populist right these days. Conservatism used to be about avoiding rapid change due to the possibility of unforeseen consequences. Now it seems to embrace it.
If you interpret that sentiment as reactionary, then I think there's little contradiction. When Reagan campaigned with the slogan of making America great again in 1980, I suppose it resonated with Boomers who basically felt that "America used to be pretty great when I was younger but now it has all gone to shit, can't we like just go back to being normal?!", and when Trump campaigned with the same slogan in 2016 it resonated with many voters for the same reason. It's not about promoting rapid change, at least in their minds, but about radically undoing rapid change.
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It would be nice if critics of "huge systemic instability" had a general theory of what "huge systemic instability" actually consisted of. For an example, weaponizing the federal security services against political opponents seems like something that should be pretty damn destabilizing, but somehow it's never accounted such. Likewise, a coordinated campaign to foment serious racial conflict, culminating in massive outbreaks of organized political violence should probably give one pause. One of the most thoroughly black-pilling moments I can remember is when, during the BLM riots, one of the moderate blue regulars here opined how they just wanted Trump gone so things could calm down.
You changed too much, and now our trajectory is both blind and ballistic. We repeatedly warned you not to do that, and you either ignored or mocked us. You burned the stability, and now you complain that we're not sacrificing our values to replace what you willfully destroyed. Conservatives are realists; they aren't going to pretend that things aren't as they plainly are. Rapid change has been happening for years now, and further rapid change is inevitable. The only question is what the nature of that change is to be, whether some new stable system can be salvaged from the rapidly-disintegrating wreck of our previous construction.
Okay: WWIII is plausible soon, and SJ is able and willing to form a fifth column. So, avoid people that will especially inspire SJ to do this.
Yes, this is spineless pragmatism that rewards their treasonousness. I know. I'm past caring. Hold on for now, root-and-branch later.
The most plausible path I see to WWIII is internal strife boiling over inside America, fatally compromising its ability to enforce the Pax Americana, resulting in a lot of countries lunging for the cheese while the cat's busy dying of a cerebral hemorrhage.
Granting unlimited social and political license to an irrational, irresponsible, and highly aggressive faction of ideological zealots seems like one of the best ways possible to cause internal strife to boil over inside America. Those of us taking the beating can see that you are compromising our values, interests and welfare in a vain effort to secure your own. Why should we not return the favor?
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At the risk of sounding a little preachy, I don't think your us vs them mentality is doing you any favors here. I'm not sure what you think my views are, but I'm pretty sure the "you" described above doesn't encapsulate them particularly well. I'm not if favor of moving in the current direction and haven't been in a long time.
I am, however in favor of moving slowly. Despite what you may think, we did not end up in this situation overnight. Institutions have moved away from their traditional roles bit by bit over the last several decades. If we want to reverse any of this with any semblance of our current society intact, the progress is going to be equally slow. Thinking that we can quickly fix anything by tearing institutions apart is just going to make the situation far worse. We'll loose what we still have.
Seems like a big "if". There is nothing left of the law, the constitution or our civil society. Nothing to save, nothing to conserve. Nothing to lose but our chains, as the kids say. We are fast approaching truly epic and colossally dangerous amounts of freedom.
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I've seen video broadcasts of organized, uniformed thugs publicly celebrating the political murder of someone very much like me, with the tacit support of a national political party, and the contented acquiescence of "moderates" everywhere. Some situations really are us vs. them. This is one of them.
Seven years ago, the previous iterations of this community were worrying over the insane levels of runaway polarization spreading through every corner of society, and how this needed to be corrected or there would be hell to pay. The problem was not corrected, and now there is hell to pay. An "us vs them" mentality continues to deliver superior predictive power. What benefit is derived from pretending otherwise?
Well, it's a shot in the dark, but my guess is that you are a fairly average moderate light-blue Blue Triber, with some serious doubts about the excesses of the Social Justice movement and considerable nostalgia for the 90s-2000s era. I could be wrong, but it seems a reasonable guess. In any case, it is at such "moderates" that the above critique is aimed.
And other people are in favor of moving quickly, and moreover have done so. Results matter. Facts on the ground matter. You have to actually engage with what has happened, and what is likely to happen next. I see no way that "moving slowly" is going to be able to do that.
Sinkholes form over years or decades, but the part where the ground opens up and swallows your house with your entire family inside can happen in seconds. Something building up slowly does not mean it remains slow once it starts rolling.
In any case, I argue frequently that it all goes back to the Enlightenment, so that's three centuries back, give or take. The best estimate I've seen for the tipping point past which the situation became acute is 2014, but one can make arguments for the 90s or the 60s. The historical question is entirely separate from the question of what is happening now, though. And what is happening now is a runaway culture war death spiral, driven by mutually incompatible values. It took a long time for those values to become mutually incompatible, but now that they are, things proceed much more quickly.
It seems unlikely to me that you can unscramble an egg, but it would certainly be amusing to see someone try. What's the nature of the problem, and what would a solution look like, roughly speaking?
If I am forced to choose between all the institutions being captured by my tribal enemies and used to crush my tribe and its values without mercy or recourse on the one hand, and destroying those institutions and probably a lot of other things besides on the other hand, I am going to be heavily in favor of destroying those institutions. Sure, there's value in stalling and hoping for a miracle. Barring that miracle, it is not hard to figure out where things are going. We, Red and Blue collectively, continue to search for better ways to hurt the outgroup without individually getting in too much trouble. Soon or sooner, one will be found and used that our institutions cannot survive, and those institutions consequently won't survive.
Trump is a symptom of this process, not a cause. It doesn't matter whether he loses or wins this next election; the process will continue either way. Nothing he has done or might plausibly do is going to cause "huge systemic instability" outside the bounds of the huge systemic instabilities that are already growing at breakneck pace. If the system were not already completely fucked, people would not be lining up to vote for a geriatric con man.
So it goes.
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Also, the corruption. Putting in so many completely inexperienced family members, and extracting money (e.g. via forced use of your hotels) is banana republic stuff that weakens all kinds of good things.
I think Trump is an order of magnitude less corrupt than the alternatives on offer from the Democrats or even the other republicans. He's done nothing that even gets close to the ouster of Shokin, let alone the rest.
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This leaves conservatives with few useful tools to counteract rapid change which has already produced its consequences. I need to reread Burke, but I don't think there's anything about conservatism that would preclude modern day versions of an invasion of France to restore the monarchy.
I think there are quite a few tools that are there, but that are not being used. The problem is that for the last several decades, a lot of political attempts have been made to fix cultural problems. Culture, while maybe upstream of politics, is still downstream of economics. If there were ever any real economic efforts made to change culture, I think we'd see some interesting results. Such efforts would have to be sustained and coordinated though. So far that has proved elusive.
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I wouldn't call that a slur. It can sometimes have the connotation of drunkenness, but it can also merely connote suddenness.
The pejorative meaning crowds out other meanings. If your movements were described as "lurching" you would not feel this as a neutral descriptor.
No one says, "the goalie lurched to his left, making an amazing save". They say "the goalie lurched to his left, tripping on his face". It is only used in a negative context.
In fact, I'll go further. A negative connotation matters more than the actual definition. There are tons of words that average people can't define but they know are "bad". Using these words to describe your outgroup reveals a bias.
"The ship lurched to the port side."
"The ship of state lurched to the right."
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I wouldn't necessarily think that the describer had a negative opinion of me, though. If someone described me as lurching around sick, well, he's probably got a negative opinion of being sick, but not one of me. And when used in the abstract the "drunk" connotation is less relevant and I wouldn't take a negative connotation from someone describing a group including me as "lurching" in an abstract sense.
Also, you are participating or attempting to participate in what appears to be the early stages of a hyperstitious slur cascade and this is bad.
Funny enough, I stated earlier on this week's thread that I only participate in hyperstitious slur cascades once 90% of people have joined. (versus Scott's 70%).
I stand by that here, and believe that lurch is used negatively nearly 100% of the time. We'll have to agree to disagree.
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Is identification as indigenous as lax in Australia as it is in the US? I saw this article on the "first indigenous female surgeon" in Australia awhile back and it made me wonder exactly what they consider indigenous over there.
It's unclear.
In practice, the dominant line is that you don't need to prove Aboriginality, and that it's deeply racist to start quizzing people about their ancestors. Past that, there is a three-part test - 1) be of Aboriginal descent, 2) identify as Aboriginal, 3) be accepted as Aboriginal by your community. But all three criteria there are extremely questionable and sometimes tautological.
We often hear a comparison with New Zealand, but a key difference is that the Maoris in New Zealand have their own de facto government and leadership structure. At the time the British arrived in New Zealand, there was a reasonable degree of social organisation among Maoris. They weren't all united, but there were leaders who could be negotiated with, and who for their part recognised the need to come together and organise a leader who could negotiate on their behalf with the British crown. Moreover, today there are Maori authorities who are able to self-police. This is important because there are specific political rights attached to being Maori. I understand that Native American tribes are similar in the US - they have their own recognised governing authorities and they can be very strict about who counts as a tribal member, including policing false claims.
There is no recognised pan-Aboriginal authority in Australia, and 'traditional leaders' is an extremely woolly category. At the time of colonisation, there were no Aboriginal nations, but rather there were hundreds upon hundreds of extremely fragmented language and tribal groups, with minimal political organisation. It is not like the Maori or the Iroquois. So Aboriginal leadership needs to be confected.
Part of the issue is that, well, to over-generalise for a moment, you have two broad camps of Aboriginal people in Australia. The first is in remote communities, especially in the NT or in bits of rural Queensland or WA. These people are usually of almost exclusively Aboriginal descent, they're politically voiceless, and they often suffer crushing poverty and have other terrible outcomes. The second, however, are in the major cities. This group is almost entirely mixed-race, often with less indigenous background than European, and their life outcomes tend to be comparable to that of the general Australian population. Many just pass as Anglo, often because that is in fact the majority of their ancestry. This person, say, looks indistinguishable from any other Anglo woman. (The Palawa are an interesting example because they're an ethnic group that exist exclusively as mixed-race. There are zero fully Palawa people left.) Not all are like that, but you can still see an obvious gap between people like this (very striking if you compare her to her mother) or this and, say, these people or this.
The second, urban group, however, has a much stronger political voice and is significantly more outspoken. People in the second group are sometimes very good at leveraging the first group's very real issues into activism for Aboriginal people in general, and because they're the better-educated, more politically-engaged group, they tend to capture the lion's share of benefits for Aboriginal people.
But this leads to claims like e.g. "two people born in the same hospital on the same day, one is ATSI and the other isn't, and the ATSI person has ten years less life expectancy" - statistics that only work by virtue of grouping people with average life expectancy in a category with people with terrible life expectancy. There's a two-step like this that can be done whenever necessary, because the category 'Aboriginal people' is too broad in practice to usefully group people.
I would not be surprised if there's a similar gap like this in the US, with a distinction you can draw between Native Americans on reservations and Native Americans who are more integrated with the rest of society?
This was my impression too, but recently I was looking at the NAPLAN results* and I was surprised at how poorly Indigenous students** actually did. For every test I looked at, Indigenous major city students did significantly worse than even Non-Indigenous very remote (for both Indigenous and Non-Indigenous the percentage "passing" decreases from major city to regional and further again to remote). More specifically the below percentages include students who were "Strong" or "Exceeding" (and excludes students in the other categories of "Developing", "Needs additional support" and "Exempt").
Year 3 (approx 8.5 years old) Numeracy scores
Indigenous major city - 37.3%
Non-Indigenous very remote - 50.3%
All the other grades and subjects showed similar results, e.g.
Year 9 (approx 14.5 years old) Reading scores
Indigenous major city - 35.3%
Non-Indigenous very remote - 50%
Unrelated to this thread, another possibly surprising result from NAPLAN is that students with a language background other than English (LBOTE) (either the student or parents/carers speak a language other than English at home) do better than non-LBOTE on every single test at every grade level, including English/Language arts (e.g. 71% vs 56.5% in grade 3 spelling). Based on Australian demographics, many LBOTE students would have Asian ancestry.
In less surprising news, boys did better than girls at numeracy (e.g. 67% vs 62.1% in grade 3), girls did better than boys at English/Language arts (e.g. 71.4% vs 62.4% in grade 3 reading), major city kids did better than very remote kids (e.g. 69.5 vs 50.3% in grade 3 numeracy for non-Indigenous), and kids with at least one parent who have a bachelor did MUCH better than kids where the highest level either parent had achieved was grade 11 (e.g. 79.6% vs 31% in grade 3 numeracy).
*NAPLAN is "a series of tests focused on basic skills that are administered to Australian students in year 3, 5, 7 and 9." On that page, click "Achievement by subgroup" then the "Comparison by" dropdown on the right to get to "Indigeneity by ABS remoteness"
** Defined by NAPLAN as "one who identifies as being of Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander origin", therefore presumably including the mixed-race city dwellers.
Ah, good call. Thanks for looking up the data and keeping me honest.
I'm not particularly surprised by LBOTE results - statistically most LBOTEs are likely to be immigrants or first-generation children of immigrants, which is a group that's going to be selected slightly more for talent. I'm not sure I'd attribute it mostly to Asian background, or at least, certainly not East Asian background. These are NSW figures from 2021, and on page 4 they have a chart of non-English native languages. The biggest single one is actually Arabic, and Indian languages are overall more common than Chinese languages. I don't know whether you included Indian when you said 'Asian', but certainly for me, when I hear 'Asian' I think Chinese or East Asian, and those are very different cultural spheres. At any rate, the LBOTE/non-LBOTE gap is quite small and equalises or reverses in a few domains, so I'm not too stressed about it. Immigrants usually do slightly better on most metrics just from selection effects, and Australia's immigration process prioritises the skilled and successful.
On Aboriginals specifically... so the regions do worse than the cities on every metric. I can't see how to cross-reference indigenous status with urban or regional status on the website, but I suppose I can get an inkling of it by comparing NT indigenous figures (which will be mostly regional) with ACT figures (which will be urban). The NT indig-non-indig gap is significantly larger than the ACT gap on every metric, often twice as large, which seems consonant with the idea that regional Aboriginal people are significantly worse off than urban Aboriginals - though even urban Aboriginals are still doing worse than urban non-indigenous people.
So I accept correction on the claim that the urban indigenous cohort generally have similar outcomes to comparable non-indigenous people. They are generally better-off that indigenous people in the regions (as this summary notes, p. 8-9), but still lagging behind non-Aboriginal people.
You're probably right that selecting immigrants who are skilled is a better explanation for LBOTE doing better than non-LBOTE.
Yep, it's hard to navigate and I stumble upon it accidentally from https://www.acara.edu.au/reporting/national-report-on-schooling-in-australia/naplan-national-results the bubble "Achievement by subgroup" then the "Comparison by" dropdown on the right to get to "Indigeneity by ABS remoteness". Definitely remote are significantly worse off than urban Aboriginals.
Percent strong or exceeding for Year 9 reading:
Indigenous major city - 35.3%
Indigenous inner regional - 29.9%
Indigenous outer regional - 25.1%
Indigenous remote - 15.7%
Indigenous very remote - 8.5%
Non-Indigenous major city - 68.3%
Non-Indigenous inner regional - 57.2%
Non-Indigenous outer regional - 55.3%
Non-Indigenous remote - 55.7%
Non-Indigenous very remote - 50%
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American here, I'd say that is the case here.
The US is a little different because unlike Canada and Mexico/Central America there are almost no purely American Indian peoples left. Even in deepest reservation land in Oklahoma everyone has some European ancestry.
There are some fully native people in Alaska and and there are a handful in Hawaii (in the 1950s it was estimated that maybe 10,000 Hawaiians were of pure native descent), but in the 48 states I don’t think there are any (well, maybe one or two, but you get the point) 100% native Americans, whereas there are (as the previous user said) still aboriginal Australians with zero European admixture.
If you look at old 19th century photographs of many American Indian tribes in the Southwest (many in the rest of the country had already largely assimilated) there are pretty much no people with that full phenotype alive today in the continental US.
I think this is not true out west -- definitely in the eastern states there was substantial intermixing, but given that the Western tribes were mostly only crushed a few years before being put on reservations, I'm not sure when the mixing would have taken place? Prior to the reservation system it would have been pretty limited due to the generally tense (up to extremely hostile) relationship between settlers and settl-ees, and afterwards interbreeding with reservation Indians was pretty uncommon both due to geographical concerns and people being quite racist.
Unless your definition of 'full phenotype' is unusually fussy, I'd be surprised if folks like this were not substantially descended from pre-Columbian bloodlines -- and you see folks like that everywhere in the rural west.
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There are pure blooded Sioux and Navajo left. You’re right that the typical casino Indians are all heavily mixed, the majority are white-passing and are mostly European by ancestry, and their organizations are dominated by 90% white types. But you’re overstating it immensely- the reservations in South Dakota and some in New Mexico have pure Amerinds.
I'm not saying they're all heavily mixed or white-passing, I'm watching Reservation Dogs now and there are clearly cast members who are of predominantly (although far from entirely) Amerind descent (although some are actually native Canadian, perhaps tellingly). But are you sure there are 100% pure Sioux left? Are there DNA results from currently alive (and not extremely elderly) people that confirm this? I'd be very surprised, but I'm willing to concede if there are.
Don't have any genetic tests, but I have unusually large amounts of exposure to both the Sioux and the Navajo reservations through work.
Pure-blood natives are rare, but they do exist. Somewhere around 1/100 maybe. They're usually easy to spot in that they speak very differently (not sure how to describe this, it's like they struggle with making certain sounds and so replace them with similar but different sounds) and look quite different (similar to the Aboriginal examples above)
Additionally, they're all quite old, and will be gone within a few decades. None I've known were married to a pure native.
Unlike with whites, no one I've met seems to care about this racial mixing. Most see it as a cultural identity more than a blood identity (though non-zero blood relation is typically a requirement, and some have stricter rules)
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It's one-drop. I suspect at least a little part of why it's one-drop is because the old classification is kinda inextricably linked with the Stolen Generations (between 1905 and the 1970s, there was a policy of bringing "half-caste" i.e. mixed-race children up white rather than leaving them in Aboriginal camps, which was a pretty-good idea in principle but was done with abusive boarding schools; lately, people have started calling this "cultural genocide", because of course they have).
Of course, when I say they're overrepresented both the numerator and denominator there are one-drop, so that's not a lying statistic. I suppose I could try to work out statistics for full-blooded Aboriginals (there still are significant amounts of them on the mainland, particularly in the Northern Territory, although there are zero in Tasmania), but since all the official statistics are one-drop that would be hard.
Aren’t the full blooded aborigines mostly living in reservations so you can just add up the numbers?
No. There's plenty of proper blackfellas in urban areas.
A new wave arrives with each well-intentioned but ham-fisted curtailment of civil liberties in an aboriginal community (eg alcohol bans, opal petrol, and don't get me started on the fucking Cashless Welfare Card)
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A lot of them are, but AIUI there are still quite a few in the Northern Territory outside of the official reservations; it was never that heavily colonised.
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I do wonder if many white Americans might start trying to establish some sort of Native American identity ala Elizabeth Warren. The collapse in white identification in the U.S. census from 2010->2020 shows that this process might already have started, as people realize a need to have some plausible other race to avoid the worst discrimination. Native American would be the best choice if you could get it - as it seems to be on top of the dejure privilege hierarchy right now.
Apparently, Native American tribal membership often goes back to registers made by the U.S. government in the 1800s. If your ancestors are on that list, you're in. If not, you're out. But the lists were never that accurate and many people were left out who shouldn't have been. Add 150 years, and we have the curious case of 90% white tribe members barring Natives with less admixture from the tribe in order to prevent dilution of casino money.
Hasnt this occurred in Canada in a huge way? The indigenous population surged between 2000 and 2020, this is an example from the (official) Statistics Canada website:
Those are chareidi/amish tier birth rates if you’re talking organic growth; indigenous Canadians aren’t that fecund, it’s pretty much all whites deciding to identify as natives.
In Canada there was an issue where the feds were trying to minimize the number of official Indians (because they are a federal responsibility), and had policies like "Indian father, white mother" --> Indian, but vice versa and you were denied status.
This was recently reversed, so there may have been a surge of metis (not the same as Metis, which is even more complex) people (who may or may not look kinda white, but are usually at least recognizably mixed) becoming officially recognized. I think they are even doing this a few generations back, so somebody who had a white grandmother --> mixed father with Indian wife living on the rez would now be recognized, which seems fairly legit.
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Unless you’re trying to claim benefits from the government off of it, no one will actually stop you from just calling yourself an Indian. Is Australia the same way?
In Australia it's potential illegal to even question someone's claim of Aboriginality.
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eatock_v_Bolt
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Right, there's also the tennis player Ashleigh Barty. She had an indigenous great-grandmother, and so via this 1/8th connection she became the "National Indigenous Tennis Ambassador for Tennis Australia." "I'm a very proud Indigenous woman and I think that for me taking on this role is something very close to my heart. I'm very excited," she said about this.
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