Look like the innocent flower,
but be the serpent under ’t.
Macbeth,
Act One, scene five
I will wear my heart upon my
sleeve
for daws to peck at.
Othello,
Act One, scene one
The Parliament has established a Joint Select Committee (link
here)
to examine the provisions of the Bill titled Constitution Alteration (Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice)
2023 (link
here).
The Committee is presently considering submissions from interested parties
before finalising its report to the Parliament, which is due by 15 May 2023.
On 12 April, I contributed a submission indicating my extremely
strong support for the Voice, but proposing a minor amendment to the proposed
section 129 (ii). The effect of my proposal would be to require representations
by the Voice to both the Parliament and the Executive Government to be in the
public domain. The bulk of my submission presents a detailed rationale for my
proposal.
The conclusion of my submission serves as a useful summary
of the arguments I have made to the Committee, and I reproduce that summary
below:
I
have identified seven key reasons in support of incorporating a transparency
requirement into the constitutionally enshrined remit of the proposed Voice:
· Advocating for policy reform is best
achieved by building a network of mobilised stakeholders which will inevitable
need to extend beyond First Peoples to ensure reforms are robust;
· In the context of confidential and secret
policy development processes within the Executive, the Voice will be
structurally weaker than competing special interests;
· The Executive Government will have an
incentive to seek to co-opt the Voice and its members, leading to policy
outcomes that are not in the public interest, and this will be facilitated by
secret engagement and discussions;
· Public support for the Voice will be
essential to its long term effectiveness, and this is most likely to flow from
public representations and advocacy rather than secret engagement with the
Executive;
· Transparency and accountability are core
democratic principles, and should be embedded within the Voice’s
constitutionally enshrined remit;
· Counter-intuitively, a requirement for
public representations by the Voice will force the Executive Government to be
more democratic than it would otherwise be, but will not disincentivise
engagement by the Executive; and
· Requiring the Voice to make
representations in the public domain will not preclude other Indigenous peak
bodies and advocacy groups from engaging confidentially with the Executive if
this is seen as necessary or desirable.
Transparency
is essentially a binary issue, that is, the Voice is either fully transparent,
or its transparency will be vulnerable to progressive degradation.
The
best way to ensure full transparency and thus maximise the Voice’s
effectiveness as an advocate for First Peoples over the long term is to include
a requirement within the proposed amendment to the Constitution for the
representations of the Voice to be public.
I recommend interested readers
read the full submission as it provides a detailed and referenced argument in
favour of what many may take to be an unnecessary constraint upon the powers of
the Voice. While my proposal appears to be such a constraint, it is in fact a
much more significant constraint on the power of government over the long term to
use secret dealings to shape and ultimately undermine the force of First
Peoples’ advocacy.
The submission is available on
the Joint Select Committee’s webpage (link here),
and is listed as submission 65.
For those interested, listed
below are links to previous posts on this blog and one academic publication
that address aspects of the processes leading to the Voice proposal:
https://refragabledelusions.blogspot.com/2022/11/mitigating-embedded-contradictions.html
https://refragabledelusions.blogspot.com/2022/06/an-innovative-design-idea-for.html
https://refragabledelusions.blogspot.com/2021/02/an-indigenous-voice-two-make-or-break.html
https://www.blogger.com/blog/post/edit/2569477019586958075/2926273130244404688
https://www.blogger.com/blog/post/edit/2569477019586958075/676203355330052323
https://www.blogger.com/blog/post/edit/2569477019586958075/6561642021255341344
See also this CAEPR DP,
particularly at pages 19 to 22: https://caepr.cass.anu.edu.au/research/publications/codesign-indigenous-policy-domain-risks-and-opportunities
No comments:
Post a Comment