The Indigenous Voice to Parliament Has Already Won
Whatever the outcome of the Voice to Parliament referendum in October, the majority of Australians — and increasingly, people around the world — will rely more and more on the voice of First Nations people for their future well-being. Indeed, for their very survival.
I say this as someone who has spent 30 years building knowledge sharing technologies designed to help give a voice to people with real expertise — as opposed to just generating eyeball counts, “likes”, communities of “followers,” vanity-casts and so forth.
Not that a flying squirrel faking its death beneath a broom handle doesn’t have intrinsic value (have you seen that video? Was it trained?). It’s just that as a cultural tool, the Internet has always offered something more. With all the absurdity and chaos of tech innovation — deep fake beer commercials, driverless cars with traffic cones on their hoods — it’s hard to believe that real expertise is actually gaining value.
But in fact, in the near future, our phones, our computers, our wearables will amplify and reward the voices of people with deep knowledge and insight. We will depend on them.
Which is why the voices of First Nations people are rapidly gaining economic value.
To take an example: Over the last decade, my company has focused specifically on the biodiversity crisis. We’ve developed technology that amplifies the voice of nature (a US$ nine trillion market) by tapping into the expertise of those most connected to it. What we discovered was that the biodiversity crisis was not just about species counts and extinction rates. It was about an inability for Indigenous custodians to have a voice in how their nature assets are valued.
It’s simple, really. Biodiversity includes our engagement with it. Its health is different at different locations, for different people. Measuring it requires unique metrics, set by those most connected to the location.
Attempts to impose universal formulae on local land will no doubt result in biodiversity loss for the people who live there. Not just in terms of which species to protect, but in terms of practice. Of how the biodiversity is protected. Trees planted by drones shooting saplings into the ground, for example, are not the same as birth-trees planted with ceremony. They may be the same species, but they have a different value.
In this way, addressing the biodiversity crisis is not a question of biological science. Of statisticians in Cambridge or San Francisco. It’s a question, rather, of who gets to decide? Who gets a voice?
Many people find it hard to understand this, including well-trained biologists, ecologists, taxonomists, naturalists, people long dedicated to conservation. My colleagues and I also came late to this realisation.
But First Nations people have been making this point for a long time. The land is ancient, powerful, infused with tens of millions of years of complexity and wisdom. The more deeply connected you are to it, the more you will understand its language and stories, and the more you will integrate biodiversity into your culture, your communications, your technologies.
Similarly, the concept of a country — of a nation called Australia — requires an Indigenous voice. An ancestral history of its land. Without that, it’s an empty shell.
That’s not to say a Voice to Parliament would fill that void. In fact, I don’t mean to take a position on the referendum. Although Australia’s people and its land have been authoring my life for almost 15 years (and I, to some small degree, mostly through our company, have been authoring theirs); and although it’s the country I’ve most closely explored and deeply felt, I have no voting rights in Australia. As an American-Kiwi citizen, I have no voice to Parliament of my own.
Even were I a citizen, I lack authority on the matter. As in authorship. Auctor in the Latin. To lead, to change, to grow. What’s 15 years compared to 60,000?
Then again, what’s 250 years of occupation compared to 60,000?
When it comes to authority, over 96 percent of Australia’s population can claim less that one percent of total custodial time on the land. They are like first year college students — or rather first day, first hour freshers eager to write the school’s fight song while still looking for the orientation BBQ and figuring out the vending machines.
It’s not exactly like that, of course. The newcomers are more like transfer students, really, each with their own unique qualifications, experiences, cultural wisdom. Many of the early arrivals came against their will, like being sent to boarding school, only with shackles and shipwrecks. Some arrived with powerful intellects, curiosity, the sensibility to respect their seniors and seek out advice.
For others, however, Australia is nothing more than the citizenry who inhabit it at this very moment. We of the living. The dead are somehow discounted — even by the same people who quote dead philosophers, dead politicians, dead artists; people who worship, every year, the voice of the unknown soldier of Gallipoli.
It’s something we all agree on: The dead are always with us. We couldn’t survive without their voice.
A uniquely Australian phenomena, this battle for authorship. Sure, many countries around the world, including the US, are engaged in civil battles over authority. Who gets to speak, who gets heard. But in few countries is the conflict so deeply rooted, so stark and existential (and so categorically absurd) as it is in Australia.
Australia’s property agents, developers, mining companies, banks — their fortunes depend on a land without voice. What an exhausting and expensive enterprise to occupy a land this way, to suppress 60,000 years of voice in order to fulfil one’s dream of owning a house with a pool, two cars and an investment property. Like trench warfare. Day after day of digging in, protecting one’s domain, keeping the voice of the continent at bay.
In this way, a “yes” vote on the Voice to Parliament is more like a plea. As in, please take the wheel for gods sake. Our wayward nation won’t survive without your stewardship. Whereas a “no” vote seems more apocalyptic in nature, heroic in a way, like a helmeted Ned Kelly determined to die on his own terms.
Or (as the American part of me thinks of it) Captain Ahab taking the entire Pequod down with him in pursuit of his White Whale. Even these nation- defining characters, these works of art — Moby Dick for America, Picnic at Hanging Rock for Australia, Keri Hulme’s The Bone People for New Zealand — these tapestries of a nation’s character, they could not exist without the Indigenous voice.
But here’s the thing: Over the last several years, I’ve seen First Nations agricultural technologies, blockchain solutions, crypto communities, data ventures, housing innovations, online education, AR and AI tech, new kinds of social networks, legal frameworks, citizen tokens, regenerative finance and much more. The Voice to Parliament may not pass, but that won’t stop a rising Indigenous Voice to science, to the economy, to mental health, food security, law, entertainment and just about every aspect of civil society.
The world today is not what it used to be. First Nations people don’t need to ask for permission. They can start their own modern countries, with their own borders.
In the face of so much Indigenous innovation and nation-building, the Voice to Parliament can seem both incredibly momentous and remarkably trivial at the same time. Momentous in the way an eclipse of the sun can seem momentous. A once in a lifetime event that makes us feel bound to forces beyond our control. And trivial because Parliamentary representation is just a single frequency of the First Nations voice, a voice which only increases in volume — in Australia and around the world — the more it’s ignored.
Whatever the outcome of the referendum, the Uluru Statement from the Heart is a monument of human achievement, a feat of intellectual engineering that will stand forever. It follows in the tradition of William Cooper’s petition in the 1930s, the Larrakia petition in 1972 — respectful attempts to address the grave mistreatment of First Nations’ peoples, the countless years of life and freedom stolen from them. But it’s also, conversely, a gracious offering from Indigenous people to believe in Australia, to provide a young nation with the expertise it requires to face such existential threats as climate change, the biodiversity crisis, energy and food security.
If the Australian people are not interested in this expertise, there’s a good chance there won’t be an Australia left to govern. The parliament could stop being relevant, as the voice of this country carries on without it, creating a new and more sustainable future for those who value the most valuable asset of the land — the knowledge of its people.
