Every election, when the Vote Compass quiz comes out, I rush to give it a go like just about every other sad lefty out there. The point of doing it appears to be to see just how far to the left I end up on the graph when compared to the major political parties.
Yet every time, I am disappointed. I already know due to sheer lived experience that the rights of three per cent of the population are a low priority in this country. But the questions around Indigenous affairs are consistently limited, and paint an inaccurate picture of the political persuasions of the Indigenous electorate.
This Vote Compass was no different. One of the two questions on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander rights asked whether our affairs should receive more funding — a loaded question when you consider that right-wing parties often use the provision of this funding as a racist dog-whistle. The other was about whether Australia should amend the Constitution to include an Indigenous voice to Parliament. It was my answer to this question that drove my result to the right.
As an Aboriginal voter who has been engaged in the sovereignty and land rights movement, I have long been critical of Constitutional change occuring before the long overdue negotiation of treaties. The Constitution was installed with the view that Aboriginal people had no rights on the lands on which they had lived for millennia. For example, voting rights that Aboriginal men and women had held in South Australia from 1893 were stripped in 1902 when white women won suffrage.
The Constitution installed colonial rule over a people who had never consented to it. So it makes no sense to change the Constitution before addressing the ills it was installed upon. On this basis I was critical of the Recognise campaign and of parts of the Uluru Statement, and remain critical of the proposal for the voice to Parliament.
The limitations of the Vote Compass questions on these issues reflect the extent to which they are a priority, both for mainstream white Australians and for the major political parties. We can tell the Morrison government has no interest in Indigenous affairs because, apart from committing some money to suicide prevention programs (albeit less than half the amount requested by NACCHO to undertake this essential work), its last budget showed a series of cuts. When the government is looking to extend cashless welfare card trials