Aboriginal voice to the world

Creating a separate foreign policy for Indigenous Australians is a dangerous idea

Penny Wong might have been wise to wait for the result of the voice to parliament referendum before appointing an Aboriginal voice to the world. Instead, she jumped the gun by selecting Justin Mohamed as Australia’s Ambassador for First Nations People.

Other ambassadors, high commissioners and consuls-general are employed to represent all Australians. Mohamed is paid to represent some Australians.

Other diplomatic appointments are made purely on merit. Applications for the position to which Mohamed was appointed in March were restricted to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australians.

The Ambassador for First Nations People is tasked with the “development and implementation of a First Nations foreign policy”, with specific instruction to conduct “international First Nations dialogues on voice, treaty and truth with like-minded countries”.

The woolly 459-word job description betrays a sense of internal confusion. How exactly will the knowledge of First Nations people Mohamed is presumed to embody help solve “shared challenges such as health security, environmental management and climate change, and gender equality”? In what way are the experiences of Indigenous Australians about these topics “unique”?

More pertinently, the bureaucrats responsible for this mumbo jumbo appear to have given little consideration to the implications of establishing a separate foreign policy for Indigenous Australians.

Section 51 of the Constitution grants the commonwealth complete and absolute authority on external affairs with no limitations. It was established to ensure Australia spoke with one voice on the world stage. Now that has been increased to two.

The absence of concrete statements about Indigenous foreign policy has created a vacuum others are happy to fill. Sharp-eyed viewers may have noticed the twin-flagged brooch worn by Lidia Thorpe earlier this month when she addressed the National Press Club.

One was the Aboriginal flag, and the other was the banner of the Palestinians. It is a fashionable combination at rallies promoting the sovereignty agenda at which Thorpe is a frequent speaker.

Thorpe outlined her Middle East policy in the Senate five days earlier. She condemned the alleged violent occupation of Palestine, the “state-sanctioned murder of the Palestinian people”. First Nations people and Palestinians together were bound together in sorrow and anger, she said.

“We share a history and reality of attempted genocide and are both yet to experience liberation in self-determination, governance and sovereignty,” Thorpe said. “We know how it feels to be on the end of a slow, pervasive violence … We know about apartheid, and we know about being occupied by a power incapable of recognising the truth.”

The casual blending of the two causes and language inflation spells danger. It begs questions that no one thought it necessary to ask before establishing a diplomatic role representing some Australians but not others. If Aboriginal foreign policy conflicts with Australian foreign policy, which will prevail?

Can the secretary of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade pull rank over the First Nations ambassador, or is she obliged to negotiate with the representative of a sovereign people?

Which brings us to the defining question of whether Mohamed is an ambassador from Australia or to Australia. The Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties defines a treaty exclusively as an agreement between sovereign states. One assumes the Ambassador for First Nations People will be pivotal in hammering out a Makarrata.

Other diplomats are ultimately accountable to a democratically elected parliament. There is no similar mechanism to stop the First Nations ambassador from departing from the consensus view of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, supposing such a consensus exists.

This racially based appointment contains many of the same flaws as the voice to parliament. It would have benefited from the clarity that comes from open debate. Yet we were not allowed to vote on it, any more than we voted in favour of allowing Qantas to change the names of our capital cities, hoisting the Aboriginal flag on the Harbour Bridge or the sanctimonious acknowledgment of elders posted at the entrances to our banks.

Half-answered questions of sovereignty lie at the heart of the debate. When the Uluru Statement from the Heart says sovereignty has “never been ceded or extinguished”, what exactly were its authors getting it? It goes on to say Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander sovereignty “coexists with the sovereignty of the Crown”.

Yet the clear implication is that the native title agreements that followed from the 1992 Mabo v Queensland decision, and now cover half the continental land mass, are not the end of the matter.

The lack of verbal precision in the Uluru Statement hardly helps. It describes sovereignty as “a spiritual notion: the ancestral tie between the land, or ‘mother nature’, and the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples”. It describes the link as “the basis of the ownership of the soil, or better, of sovereignty”. The poetic language adds to the vibe but is ill-suited as the basis for a legal argument.

Chris Kenny continued his valiant attempt to defend the voice in these pages at the weekend, but by devoting an entire column to what the voice is not at this stage of the campaign, he must feel the argument is slipping away.

By blaming the myth-making of the voice’s opponents, he lets the government off the hook. The Prime Minister’s failure to deliver a pub-ready argument in favour of the voice is the biggest failure of a dismal campaign.

As with the voice to parliament, the Albanese government has struggled to make a case for this new class of diplomat beyond the trite assertion that it is the right thing to do. The position ranks alongside Labor-appointed thematic ambassadors such as Kristin Tilley, our Ambassador for Climate Change, Stephanie Copus Campbell, the Ambassador for Gender Equality, and Bronte Mueles, the Ambassador for Human Rights.

Older ambassadorial postings were made to real places in the interest of promoting Australia’s national interest. The assignment of the new ambassadorial class is to promote the narrow agenda of the elite. The epitome of the failure of prime ministerial leadership is his repetition of the phrase, “If not now, when?”. How about not in a trillion years, Prime Minister? Does never work for you?

The presumption that practical, prudent people would be prompted to vote yes by a rhetorical question stolen from the title of Primo Levi’s 1986 novel, Se non ora, quando?, indicates his attachment to the vision that prevails among the elite, a vision of a generation blessed with superior knowledge and more extraordinary moral courage than their forebears who have the wit and foresight to solve previously intractable problems. The clash of visions identified by Thomas Sowell in a series of books mapping the cultural landscape is at the heart of the failure on each side of the voice debate to comprehend the arguments of the other.

A utopian vision of solutions drives one side. On the other side is the tragic vision of the unannointed constrained by bitter experience and reality. For them, there are no solutions to conflicting claims of sovereignty, only trade-offs.