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Teela Reid is the second Voice advisor to be exposed for her radical views. If the Voice is a “modest proposal”, why did the Prime Minister choose Marxists to promote it?

A second prominent member of the Prime Minister’s Voice Referendum Engagement Group, Sydney lawyer and activist Teela Reid, has now been exposed for her pro-Communist and anti-Australia Day views.

Named by Prime Minister Anthony Albanese as one of the “remarkable people” advising him on the Voice, Reid is on record praising the “radical roots of the Communist Party”. She believes that changing the date of Australia Day is “a cop out,” campaigning instead that Australia’s national holiday be abolished entirely.

The Daily Declaration has previously reported on the Voice “architect” and high-profile campaigner Thomas Mayo, who has likewise expressed sympathies for Communism and opposition to Australia Day.

More radical even than Mayo, Teela Reid has claimed that “racism is synonymous with Australia,” that her country is “a nation without a soul,” and that it is “disingenuous” to think Australia Day will remain if the Voice referendum is successful.

The Voice: No Modest Proposal

The revelations, unearthed from social media by various news outlets this week, follow a recent poll suggesting a majority of Australians will vote against the upcoming Voice referendum.

They also complicate the Prime Minister’s efforts to convince Australians the Voice is a “modest proposal”.

As Sky News host Amanda Stoker recently asked, “When people like Teela Reid and Thomas Mayo — designers of the constitutional Voice — are such extremists, how on earth can Australians trust Mr Albanese when he says the Voice is ‘a modest proposal’?”

 

A Newspoll survey conducted in late June found the “Yes” vote falling to a new low of just 43 per cent and the “No” vote rising to 47 per cent.

And a poll conducted by Australian Community Media this month found just 38 per cent support for the Voice, and 55 per cent of respondents planning to back the No vote.

Teela Reid on Communism

In March 2021, Teela Reid appeared alongside Thomas Mayo as a guest speaker for the Search Foundation, the successor organisation of the Communist Party of Australia.

The seminar in which Reid took part was held to commemorate the centenary of the founding of the Communist Party of Australia and was titled “The Party! Snapshots of Communists in Australian History”. At the event, she praised 1970s Communist activism and told attendees, “I think that what we need is to get back to these radical roots of the Communist Party.”

In a Facebook post by the Search Foundation from February 2020, Reid is seen giving a speech that brims with classically Marxist language, wherein she explained that “the Voice is a journey with all Australians to begin to demolish the systems that continue to oppress us”.

Reid used similar language in a 2020 article she wrote for the Griffith Review:

The struggle for a First Nations Voice has been 250 years coming, ever since Captain Cook landed uninvited in 1770. It is about the fight for land rights, water rights and the right to save our planet from the colonial structures that have attempted to destroy it. It is about the fight for peace and justice, compensation and reparations, the freedom to speak for country and control our own affairs. A constitutionally entrenched First Nations Voice is recognition that our sovereignty never was, never will be ceded.

In a newly unearthed tweet from 2019, Reid likewise wrote, “Aboriginal people built the nation and now it’s time you pay rent.” 

As recently as January of this year, she tweeted that “every Aboriginal elder in NSW should be living rent-free,” and tagged then-Premier Dominic Perrottet and the state’s opposition leader in an effort to draw attention to her radical proposal.

Teela Reid on Australia Day

Reid has been campaigning to abolish Australia Day since at least 2020. In January of that year she repeated the hashtag “#AbolishAustraliaDay” twelve times on Twitter, along with the imperative to “SHOW UP,” and a raised fist and bomb emoji.

Her 2023 Australia Day tweet was almost identical.

But that wasn’t all she had to say. In a conversation just prior to this, Reid tweeted, “changing the date is a cop out”.

Later in April, Reid took to Twitter to argue that the Voice, if enshrined in the Constitution, must lead to the abolition of Australia Day.  

“Imagine winning the Voice referendum, then still forcing us to celebrate on 26 January despite our Ancestors declaring it a day of Mourning,” she tweeted.

Reid added that “It might be the Australian Government ‘preference’ to keep things like Australia Day, but trying to limit the scope of what the people can advocate for to change is just stupid.”

In June of this year, the day after Indigenous Australians minister Linda Burney told Parliament the Voice won’t result in any changes to Australia Day, Reid hit back on Twitter:

Teela Reid, an ABC Darling

Teela Reid insists that, although she is pro-Communist, steeped in Marxist ideology and regards modern Australia as a colonialist system of oppression that must be overthrown, she is not ‘radical’.

Of serious concern for Australians is that, despite Reid’s radical activism — or perhaps because of it — she is a darling of the taxpayer-funded national broadcaster. A search for her name on the ABC website yields 1,690 results.

However, the ABC conspicuously neglects to mention Reid’s support for history’s deadliest ideology that is responsible for the deaths of up to 150 million people.

Questions That Must Be Answered

Teela Reid is the second high-profile person, chosen by the Labor Government to advice the Voice Referendum process, who has an obvious Marxist outlook and who views the Voice as the means to an end for much more radical ambitions.

How many more Marxist activists will be exposed in the ranks of Labor’s advisers on the Voice?

Why has the Labor Government been so reticent to explain what the Voice will look like and be able to achieve?

If Mr Albanese believes the Voice is a “modest proposal”, why did he recruit Marxists bent on overthrowing modern Australia to promote it?

Why are Marxist Indigenous Australians welcome to advise on the Voice while conservative Indigenous Australians are locked out of the conversation?

Until answers to all of these questions are forthcoming, every Australian would do well to vote “No” on the upcoming referendum.

Image via The Ethics Centre.