The supporters of the Indigenous Voice constitutional referendum in Australia in 2023 believe that it will enable the needs, difficulties, and opportunities for community help to be voiced. A conciliatory outcome is anticipated, and better inter-racial relations achieved. Few are arguing with the virtue of the intentions.

Those who doubt it are wary of how it will develop in practice when the indigenous have the means of continually asking for more, and the others must always either comply, or decline to do so.

The Voice will have no enduring function unless it can continuously ask for more beneficial treatment or find more or increased grievances and articulate their gravity. Unless it generates proposals for indigenous assistance it will not have a purpose, and since it is to be a permanent structure, this process will be a permanent one. How wearing may this process, extending through the rest of Australian history, become with the passage of time?

How long will it take before one side says “Methinks they do ask for too much” and the other “Methinks they do give too little”? And this altercation, if it happens, will be based upon race too. Whether the tussle is justice based, or racially based, offers very great prospects for invoking emotional recriminations.

Those indigenous who are the voice of the Voice, who operate and represent it, will never be able to say “We are now happy” without having their firebrands attacking them with the willing assistance of the woke media. Continuously asking for more must inevitably become asking for too much, but the only way for them to defend themselves will be to do it.

In respect to the Voice’s good intentions, perhaps two of my grandmother’s adages might be heard. There is many a slip twixt the cup and the lip, and especially the other one The road to hell is paved with good intentions.

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