Voice as a threat to democracy ‘a nonsense’

A CAPACITY audience filled St Kilda Town Hall on Monday to support Kol Halev (Voice from the Heart): The Jewish Voice for Yes, an initiative by Stand Up Australia and the Jewish Community Council of Victoria to engage Jewish Australians to support the Yes case in the referendum on an Indigenous Voice to Parliament.

Stand Up CEO Courtney Winter-Peters drew parallels between Jewish displacement and the plight of First Australians. “We ourselves have travelled the path of an anguished heart … We will not be bystanders.”

Noting Kol Halev will be launched nationally, she said key communal groups, including the Australasian Union for Jewish Students, Jewish Youth for Yes, the National Council of Jewish Women of Australia and the Sydney Jewish Museum, have become partners.

Rabbi Ralph Genende reflected, “We are a people who have been burned by exclusion and powerlessness, more than any other … The Uluru Statement from the Heart speaks directly to my Jewish heart.”

Keynote speaker Professor Marcia Langton, foundation chair of Australian Indigenous Studies at the University of Melbourne, emphasised the purely advisory role of the proposed Voice.

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people are “three-to-four per cent of the population … a third of our population are the poorest people in Australia”.

“How is it that by giving us recognition through an advisory body, a body that would advise Parliament and the executive government, that we are a threat to democracy? It’s a nonsense.”

She said claims that the Voice would introduce a racial element into how Australia is governed are groundless, explaining the Race Power section of the Constitution is an existing racial element, while the Voice is not about race but about First Australians’ peoplehood. “Jews are not a race, you’re a people. We [Indigenous Australians] are a people.”

Rabbi Genende hosted a panel including Jamil Tye, a Yorta Yorta man, director of the William Cooper Institute, named for the Australian Aborigines’ League founder who staged a landmark protest over Kristallnacht at Melbourne’s German consulate in 1938. Tye retraced a 1930s attempt to establish an Indigenous advisory body “that didn’t make it past the prime minister’s office”.

Dr Todd Fernando, a Wiradjuri man, and Victorian Commissioner for LGBTIQ+ Communities, said No-case supporters arguing there is not enough detail about the Voice have no shortage of online information to access.

Hannah Hammerschlag, Stand Up’s general manager, urged her audience, which included many communal leaders, to talk to their organisations about the Voice. “We have the power to influence those around us. Have conversations with your congregations, your members and other stakeholders.”

standup.org.au

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