Australian Senator Blasts Albanese Govt Proposal for Indigenous People as 'Fundamentally Racist'

Instead of tackling racial inequality, the so-called “Voice” initiative will most likely result in the emergence of a group of government bureaucrats with little public accountability, Australian Senator Malcolm Roberts told Sputnik.

Hundreds of protesters have rallied in Sydney on Saturday to oppose the Australian Albanese-led government proposal to establish an Indigenous people’s advisory group within the Cabinet.

If approved during the upcoming national referendum on October 14, the proposal would give Indigenous people the right to be consulted on policies that affect them, a measure that is dubbed “the Voice.”

“The paramount thing to remember” is that the proposal “will hurt” the whole of Australia and that “it’s bad for Australians in general," Senator Malcolm Roberts said as he hailed the Saturday rally.

In this context, he mentioned the government body Aboriginal Torres Strait Islanders Commission (ATSI), which was abolished in the early 2000 in the aftermath of corruption-related litigation involving the organization’s chairperson Geoff Clark.

“There was very little accountability [in ATSI]. What Prime Minister Anthony Albanese wants to do now is entrench it in the Voice so there'll be no accountability whatsoever. That's the real thing that I'm concerned about,” the senator stressed.

According to him, “We have to remember that anyone who believes that Aboriginals can't make it without special treatment is fundamentally racist.”

Roberts also recalled that, “There's been no legal advice that the government has shared with us on its formation of the Voice proposal.”

He then commented on the upcoming referendum in mid-October, when voters will be asked whether they agree to alter the Constitution to recognize the First Peoples of Australia by establishing an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice.

“The Voice will be set up to make representations direct to parliament and the government, […] and that means it'll decrease the power over everyone outside of the Voice. There are no details, no cost, it's open-ended, it's unbounded, it's unlimited, it's unworkable. The [forthcoming] referendum will leave the details to the politicians, [and] instead of having a people's constitution, we will have a politicians’ constitution,” the senator claimed.

Roberts then quoted journalist Paul Kelly as saying that if the Voice-­related amendments to the Constitution are passed, “this will be the biggest change” to Australia’s history. The senator asserted that by adopting the Voice, the government “will be ceding” Australia’s sovereignty.

The latest surveys have meanwhile indicated that about 60% of respondents oppose the Constitution’s reform pertaining to the Voice initiative, while 40% says “yes” to the measure. Opponents of the reform argue that it would confer special privileges on Indigenous peoples while adding unnecessary bureaucracy. The opponents also say that there is insufficient detail about how the measure would work.