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I don't know if it was actually going to be called "the Voice" or if that was just a placeholder name, but it's so comically ominous. "There will be a Voice!" "We must consult the Voice!" "What will the Voice say?". Like something out of a Lovecraft story with a cult and an Old One.
I assumed the Yes campaign's insistence that the Voice would have no legal force was just a bad-faith position, as it's fairly easy to conceive of a dynamic where the Voice doesn't need legal force because it has the liberal media waiting to brand any government's disregard of the Voice as ipso facto evidence of racism, which will be used to declare that government's positions as morally illegitimate. When your enemy is campaigning to build a new weapon, don't vote to give it to him.
Definitely "Voice". Let me quote the actual text of the proposed amendment:
The term "Voice" is lifted from the Uluru Statement from the Heart. The word choice may have something to do with the significantly-aberrant Aboriginal use of English.
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Apparently I haven't been following this closely enough. Why were they bothering to have a referendum then?
As far as I can tell (from the full text quoted below), they don't actually have any power that a random Australian citizen lacks. Some guy could put together a club with his buddies, give it a fancy name, and carry out the same practices, create the same reports, and talk to the same people as the proposed "Voice".
Is there anything to it beyond a constitutionally-enshrined lobby group?
There was sort of this weird rhetorical loop between 'The Voice is a symbolic powerless body with no legal force' and 'The Voice will action real meaningful change due to its power' in which the former is probably more accurate but it never got firmly nailed down.
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The constitution would require that the Voice 1) exist, though its specific form and powers would be up to parliament, and 2) be permitted to make representations to parliament and executive government. So it would be required to have access to government in a way that a random club would not.
That said, yes, beyond that it is toothless. There would have been no requirement for the government to take its advice in any way, and parliament would have the ability to disband, reform, or reconstitute the Voice at will.
It would probably have just been a publicly-funded indigenous lobby group in parliament. If it had passed I very much doubt it would have changed anything of note.
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The lack of clarity around this is part of the reason it lost so badly. At least on the center and right there's also been some perception of the Voice as a possible Trojan Horse where in a few years a left wing government could give Aborigines a veto (or something less dramatic but still disruptive) and the High Court would shrug and say "Well, the constitution says Aborigines have a 'Voice', that could mean anything, so this is constitutional".
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Considering that the voice's powers would have been whatever parliament decided they would be, "it would have no legal force" is a facile claim.
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The constitutional amendment would have been:
So, yes, it would have been called the Voice.
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