Intellectual rearmament

There is no such thing as an easy win in politics. It is wrong to assume from the margin of last year's Aboriginal Voice referendum that the result was a foregone conclusion.

Yet when the Prime Minister announced the referendum in mid-2022, there was a substantial margin in favour of the Voice, allowing its supporters to dismiss those who spoke against it as Neanderthal racists, particularly if the critics were white, male conservative columnists of a certain age.

Two people gave me the courage to say what needed to be said about the Voice. The first was Senator Jacinta Nampijimpa Price, whose Maiden Speech in July 2022 passionately expressed the feelings many of us had hidden. Price reframed the argument from Aboriginal rights to responsibilities and the equalising bond of citizenship that accords the same respect to every Australian regardless of their background.

The second great enabler was Professor Nigel Biggar.

Professor Biggar is an Anglican priest, theologian, and ethicist from Britain who had not stepped foot in Australia until this month.

Biggar's much-anticipated book Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning was finally published in February 2023. Bloomsbury dropped the book in the final stages of editing out of fear for its likely reception from the woke establishment. It was eventually published by Harper Collins after Rupert Murdoch intervened.

Biggar is well qualified intellectually and temperamentally to navigate the tangled moral maze of post-colonial guilt. He declines to condemn British imperialism outright, but he does not claim that it was always and everywhere a good thing. This moral nuance enrages his critics.

Biggar takes us back to first principles to expose the flaws in the post-colonial argument. Assuming wrongs were committed in the early years of settlement, can Australians still be held responsible generations later? Is there such a thing as collective guilt, or should guilt only be attached to a person due to personal moral decisions?

These questions must be answered before we get to the question of reparations and who should pay what to whom. What proportion of Aboriginal blood in one's veins decides one's position on the ledger? Since Lidia Thorpe is of both Aboriginal and European inheritance should she be paying reparations to herself? We must wrestle with the moral and scientific basis for the theory of inherited trauma. Claims for personal injury sustained at Myall Creek would have been relatively easy to assess in 1838. A demand for compensation lodged in 2024 is a different story, however.

No biological mechanism for the intergenerational transfer of trauma has been established, so how is it supposed to happen? And how can one be held to have participated in a crime in which they did not participate and did not profit?

Biggar cites a letter published in The Times by a former British diplomat who recounted a conversation he had had with a ruler of Nigeria shortly after the country's independence. The ruler was pressing the case for reparations for decades of colonial oppression.

"I entirely agree," the diplomat replied. "And you shall have your compensation – just as soon as we get ours from the Romans."

As Professor Biggar writes in a memorable line in his book:

"The riotous jungle of history overgrows and obscures the causal pathways."

Biggar's influence in the final months of the referendum debate was not insignificant. It added cogency and intellectual heft to the arguments for the No Case many of us were making at the time, giving us arguments that were hard to refute.

The retreat to ad hominem arguments by Voice advocates as the referendum grew closer signaled they had run out of intellectual firepower. Ray Martin's late denunciation of No voters as dickheads and dinosaurs was a sign of desperation more than anything.

Many people deserve credit for preventing the establishment of a powerful sectarian institution that sought to lock a racial hierarchy in civic debate into the Constitution.

Two deserve special mention. Price gave us the courage and confidence to fight, while Biggar replenished our intellectual arsenal with unadulterated, clear-headed thinking.