Dutton and Price are digging the Voice’s grave, one long prepared by Liberals past

It’s no secret Peter Dutton’s Liberal Party appears intent on cornering itself with a shrinking base of ever older, more male, more conservative and arguably more rural voters.

Most commentators — rightly perplexed at the party’s steadfast refusal to unspool itself from its daily outrage politics and repudiation of established norms — have accordingly read its Voice to Parliament stance as yet more evidence of a reckless or plucky but nonetheless indifferent slide into oblivion.

Writing in The Saturday Paper, Paul Bongiorno pondered whether Dutton’s position was part of a “cunning” albeit “truly bizarre” strategy to privilege rural and regional voters above those in metropolitan areas.

“He has ceded ground within the Coalition to the Nationals on policy and on personnel,” Bongiorno observed. “Dutton is not the Liberal leader in the accustomed understanding, but rather the leader of a new political movement to put the city slickers in their place.”

There’s no doubt that Dutton’s Voice stance and elevation into the shadow ministry of the National’s firebrand first-term Northern Territory Senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price speaks to the party’s political recession within the Coalition partnership.

But the idea these twin developments are emblematic of a conscious decision to chart the abiding contours of a new Liberal political identity is inarguably one Dutton and his platoon of Voice gravediggers would reject.

The better view is that the philosophical tradition and values of the Liberal Party, as Dutton construes them, always stood in the way of his taking a benign stance on the Voice, much less supporting it as a matter of principle.

So much is borne out by Dutton’s speech at the Sir John Downer Oration in Adelaide last Tuesday, where he told the gathered party faithful: “I am determined to demonstrate to Australians that prosperity and progress come not from the radicalism Labor is peddling, but instead from the tried and tested liberalism which is our bones.”

“We are the Liberal Party,” he went on to say, “a centre-right party of the classical liberal and conservative traditions; a party which seeks to preserve what’s good about our society, but always looks to improve it.”

The obvious difficulty for Dutton, however, is that what’s passed for conservatism in Australia in recent decades is not of the disciplined Burkean variety he invokes, but instead a collection of resentful animosities grounded in white supremacy, partisan attachment to the repression of the vulnerable, corruption, and a rigid, sanctimonious moralism that equates social change with social decline.

Where once the Liberal Party considered its contribution to history as marked by slow, fitful progress, its position on a variety of issues, not least Indigenous reconciliation, has long been characterised by a resolve that would instead see it condemn the nation’s future to the dusty shackles of the past.

In the late 1980s, John Howard led the charge against the Hawke government’s push to establish the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission (ATSIC) — a decentralised advisory First Nations body — accusing the Hawke government of seeking to create a “black parliament” or “black nation within the Australian nation” and, in so doing, “divide Australian against Australian”.

Similar arguments were brought to bear against the question of Native Title in the following years, with then-opposition leader John Hewson, for instance, describing it as a “recipe for uncertainty and division” and a “millstone around the country’s prosperity”.

Upon being elected in 1996, the Howard government surprised no one when it put an end to 26 years of bipartisan policy on Indigenous self-determination, rejecting the roadmap to reconciliation endorsed by the Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation (CAR) and later abolishing ATSIC. As recently released cabinet papers attest, the language levelled against the CAR roadmap — described as “divisive” and ill-suited to the “critical issues facing Indigenous Australians” — echo the phrasing Howard weaponised against the Bringing Them Home report.

“Reconciliation will not work if it puts a higher value on symbolic gestures [such as an apology] rather than on the practical needs of [Indigenous] people,” Howard memorably told the Australian Reconciliation Convention in May 1997, in what some construed as an attempt to reduce reconciliation to assimilation. “Australians of this generation should not be required to accept guilt and blame for past actions and policies over which they had no control,” he declared.

Compare Dutton’s sophistry on what he’s misleadingly called the “Canberra-based Voice”, which he claims holds out the promise of democracy’s demise, a dangerously altered way of government and entrenched racial divides. It’s also, so he claims, an impossibly elitist idea liable to give rise to a powerful group of city-based “academics” who are more likely to ignore “real” Indigenous disadvantage in remote and rural areas than they are to deliver practical outcomes to people “on the ground”.

Though most commentary is quick to point out the depths of disinformation at hand, commonly lost from discussion is the unconcealed sense of decay such lies and contortions over the Voice elicit, exhumed as they are from the graveyard of political ideas and culture wars of times’ past.

Indeed, the tenor of 30-odd years’ worth of Liberal Party objections to Indigenous reconciliation also finds reflection in the explanation Dutton offered for his infamous decision to boycott the historic apology in 2008, which he said owed to his belief it would not “deliver tangible outcomes to kids who are being raped and tortured”.

It’s true Dutton has since expressed regret for his absence. But it’s a position blunted by his not-so-subtle reliance on a political sleight of hand that deliberately conflates the question of a constitutional Voice with disputed claims of Indigenous child sexual abuse, which Dutton has described as “normal practice”.

Much like Howard’s children-overboard affair 20 years ago, the appeal to racist resentment here is as unrestrained as it is absolute, the sinister implication to voters being: “These people are not like you or me — they hurt children. How could you possibly trust them to have a say over policy?”

This almost unvarying consistency, this imbrication between the politics of old and Dutton’s opposition to the Voice, reveals the extent to which the modern Liberal Party has long abandoned the Burkean conservatism it claims to venerate but in practice denigrates.

The difficulty for the Liberal Party is that this epistemic closure, centred around paranoid appeals to racist resentment and division, has been found wanting by the long march of time. No longer is the majority of voters so easily hoodwinked by a politics so fundamentally opposed to even the hint of progress.

But it’s as though the Liberal Party knows this, hence the rapid political rise of Jacinta Nampijinpa Price, a Walpiri-Celtic woman whose Indigenous mother before her, Bess — another controversial politician — was likewise roundly rejected by the Indigenous communities she claimed to represent.

Like her mother, Price shares Dutton’s conviction that domestic violence appears to be an innate problem in Indigenous communities, citing it in her maiden speech to Parliament as one of the overriding reasons for the disproportionate incarceration of First Nations peoples in modern Australia. Systemic racism in this context, she claimed, was a false narrative.

In the same speech, she railed against “welfare dependency”, spurned the Welcome to Country and likened the Voice to a racist proposition from another “paternalistic government” that she said would racially divide the country.

She’s also aired various other falsehoods, lies and incoherent claims about the Voice, including the notion it has excluded or silenced the voices of rural and remote Indigenous communities, will dismantle democracy and will prove incapable of delivering practical solutions.

As a person closely associated with right-wing outfits, such as the Centre for Independent Studies, Advance Australia and Sky News, and schooled in their tactics of outrage, misinformation and division, none of this is surprising.

It’s instead, as Indigenous lawyer and academic Noel Pearson recently told RN Breakfast, the upshot of a “campaign in the making over the last three years”.

“Their strategy was to find a black fella to punch down on other black fellas,” he said. “The bullets are fashioned by the CIS [Centre for Independent Studies] and the IPA [Institute of Public Affairs], but it’s a black hand pulling the trigger.”

This is a sentiment shared by Indigenous academic Professor Marcia Langton, who ahead of Price’s unsuccessful tilt for the federal seat of Lingiari in 2019 said: “Jacinta Price is useful to politicians. She legitimises racist views by speaking them against her own people.”

The aim of the right, in other words, was always to find a compelling Indigenous person who could lend a veneer of legitimacy to its No campaign, thereby shielding it from accusations of racism in all its truculent power and disguising the party’s hardened ideological disdain for Burkean conservatism.

None of the right’s arguments against the Voice, it bears emphasising, survive scrutiny. And indeed, the only common thread that runs throughout, apart from their shared apocalyptic visions, is their underlying appeals to racism.

It’s certainly questionable, of course, whether Dutton and the right’s quest to “prepare the grave” for the Voice will succeed, if recent polling and the manifest divisions within both the Nationals and the Liberals on the issue are anything to go by.

But if it does, Dutton will be remembered as the Liberal leader who not only signed the death warrant of Indigenous reconciliation, but whose misguided understanding of Liberal tradition resigned his party to the fate of a shrinking reactionary movement hardened against change.