The Socialist Equality Party urges workers and youth to reject both the Yes and the No cases presented by the ruling political establishment and calls for an active boycott campaign to oppose the referendum itself.
The in-person and livestreamed meeting explained the geo-strategic and class-war considerations underpinning the Albanese government’s promotion of the Voice and how the working class should respond.
“The government is talking about giving Aboriginal people their rights back, but when the Palestinian people demand their rights, they are denounced as terrorists.”
“The Labor government is not working class, it is an elite group of people, setting up a puppet called the Voice.”
“The Voice is not about helping indigenous people. Governments should be going out to these communities, listening to what they need, and providing it.”
The referendum will solve nothing. The key issue is building a movement against the the entire political establishment, and its program of war, austerity and dictatorship.
Socialist Alternative’s analysis of the referendum is an attack on the working class, exposing this organisation as a rightward moving representative of privileged layers of the affluent upper middle-class.
The Voice voting patterns demonstrate the intensifying hostility of working-class people to the entire political establishment.
The result is not the outcome of widespread racism and hostility to indigenous people. Instead it demonstrates the growing hostility of working people to the entire political establishment.
The Voice is a top-down initiative, birthed in the corridors of power without any involvement from the vast mass of oppressed Aboriginal people.
The on-the-spot reports laid bare the destructive impact of the “intervention” on the already shocking conditions of Aboriginal communities.
The NT intervention initiated by the Coalition government of John Howard, with the bipartisan support of the Labor Party, demonstrates all too clearly the regressive agenda of both the Yes and No camps in the current Voice referendum.
ATSIC’s record underscores the fact that such advisory bodies have done nothing to resolve the enormous social crisis afflicting ordinary Aborigines, as well as how such organisations work to elevate and enrich a narrow layer of the indigenous elite.
In 2000, the widespread popular disgust and anger at the continuing appalling conditions of most Aboriginal people was channelled behind a pro-business agenda that has benefited only a small layer of wealthy indigenous entrepreneurs, bureaucrats and academics.
