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How many times were we told that the Indigenous Voice to Parliament was a “modest” request?

Oh, and don’t forget “gracious”. It was a “modest and gracious request”.

Except now prominent “Yes” campaigner Stan Grant says it wasn’t modest at all. It was “monumental”.

No kidding, Stan. That’s why 61 per cent of the country voted ‘No’.

The modest and gracious request was neither modest, nor gracious, nor a request.

It wasn’t modest, because it gave people of one particular race special powers within the constitution that no other race had.

It wasn’t gracious, because it was based on a lie, the lie being that it was modest.

And it wasn’t a request, because it was sold using barely disguised emotional blackmail and bullying.

Big Ask

The former ABC journalist told the ANU Crawford Leadership Forum last night:

“The Voice was never a modest ask; it was monumental.”

Amazing. Indigenous activists decide it’s time for truth-telling about the Voice after the vote.

He continued:

“Perhaps this was the opportunity lost by the Yes campaign, to not let the Voice truly speak. Instead it was shushed, shrunk small enough to fit into politics.

“In the consultants’ suites and the lawyers’ dens, it was determined that if the voice was made so inoffensive people may say Yes.

“Instead, it was so inoffensive, people found it so easy to say No.”

Yeah, nah.

It’s true that the ‘Yes’ campaign repeatedly lied about the Voice, as Grant now admits. But that’s not why they lost.

They lost because Australians weren’t stupid enough to be fooled by them.

Flip-Flop

Every time Albanese said it was “modest”, we knew it wasn’t.

How did we know? Well, anything Albanese says can be assumed to mean the exact opposite.

I’ll prove it:

• ‘Elect me, and your power prices will go down by $275’ actually meant your power prices will more than double.
• ‘We’ve got a plan for the cost of living’ clearly meant ‘Get ready for a dozen consecutive interest rate rises.’
• ‘We stand with Israel’ means ‘We’ll abstain from voting for them on the floor of the United Nations.
• ‘I won’t go missing when the going gets tough’ meant, ‘You can call me Airbus Albo and you can catch me if you can.’

We can do this all night.

The second reason we knew it wasn’t a “modest” request was because activists like Noel Pearson and Marcia Langton were obviously so desperate for it to get up.

Remember Langton throwing a tantrum and promising never to bestow a Welcome to Country on us ever again if we didn’t grant her “modest request”?

Remember Pearson promising to “fall silent” if we didn’t agree to his “modest request”?

If it was so “modest”, why the promise of such histrionics if they didn’t get it?

But mostly, we knew it wasn’t “modest” because it was undemocratic, racially discriminatory and a trojan horse for separatism and black sovereignty.

So when Stan Grant complains that the Voice was “so inoffensive people found it easy to say No to,” all he does is demonstrate that he still doesn’t get it!

Melodrama

But Grant wasn’t done. He went on to say:

“That’s what this vote has done, this is its cruelty: it has robbed me of you. Australia has decided who we are. It has reminded me of the space between us.”

Grant is wrong again.

If the vote did anything, it ensured there was no space between us by rejecting the idea we should be divided by race.

He added for dramatic effect:

“The Constitution is not our problem. Our conscience is our problem.”

Wrong again, Stan.

That Australians judged it a problem to insert race into the Constitution showed that our conscience was working just fine.

And he finished with this:

“This is the Australia I bequeath to my children. Like all orphans they will have their memories and however pained they may be, they can never be reconciled.”

The Australia Stan’s children grow up in is a country where they will be judged by the content of their character, rather than by the colour of their skin. And you can’t be any more reconciled than that.

Unless, of course, you want something else. And I can’t help but think that’s big Stan’s problem.

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Originally published at The James Macpherson Report.

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Photo: Wikimedia Commons