First, they seem unaware, or, at least, are unwilling to admit that, they already have a voice.

As it happens, a ubiquitous and thunderingly loud voice. Everywhere you go now, everywhere you look, everything you hear, promotes our first peoples.

OWNERS

I attended a graduation last week. What felt like the first ten minutes of the occasional address – given by the Governor of NSW, as it happens – were taken up with eulogies to the traditional owners of the land on which we were all doing whatever we were doing.

It was a turbo-charged acknowledgement of country. Even supposedly Right-wing premiers now feel the need to plonk Aboriginal flags atop national landmarks like the Sydney Harbour Bridge.

Even when they themselves have, as recently as 2018, described such histrionics as blatantly self-serving virtue signalling.

When you have a conservative Right-winger in the palm of your hand already, why a Voice?

The other week, I had the bright idea to visit Mt Warning (near Murwillumbah in northern NSW) for some bushwalking.

Only to find that you aren’t now allowed to climb Mt Warning (named, alas, by Captain Cook and inevitably now called Wollumbin). Sacred site.

Every time you watch network television, it seems you see adverts for some celebration of Indigenous culture or achievement, or of an upcoming “healing” event, like NAIDOC Week.

Don’t even start on our national broadcaster, which has become little more than a walking promotion of all things Aboriginal.

The football codes have their Indigenous rounds. And so on. It strikes me that, for a voiceless group, they are already in fine voice.

They have achieved every last bit of this advance, if it can remotely be thought of as an advance in light of the appalling problems faced by Aborigines not on the radar, without a “voice” in the Constitution or “to” the Parliament.

MISTAKE

The second mistake made by the Voice advocates is thinking that the parliament is still the vehicle for “being represented” or the fulcrum for effecting beneficial change.

That, if you want to reform systems, improve outcomes or advance cultures, you best do it by electing members of the Parliament or “voicing” to them.

This idea is simply ridiculous. We have had a Party in the parliament for seventy-odd years that is there, it says, purely and simply to defend individual freedom.

That Party has, in the past two years, overseen the complete destruction of freedom in this country, without blinking.

There is another Party in the Parliament, which now happens to be the government, that says it is there to promote the interests of the working class. It is not.

It loathes the working class and its values. It actively seeks to dud the working class at every turn. It is there now merely to advance the interests of what David Goodhart has called the “anywheres”, rich, green, globalist, footloose progressives who think there are 64 genders and cannot comfortably and in public define “woman”.

One of these Parties – the one that “won” the recent election – scored 32 per cent of the primary vote. The other Party, the one that lost, achieved 35 per cent.

That leaves a third of Australians who do not remotely feel they have a “voice” in or “to” the Parliament.

The Greens and their “teal” friends have seats, of course. They can do preference deals. They have the media and the elites on side.

They have a voice (a little like the Indigenous Voice, it is very loud and echoes without cease around the boardrooms, campuses and the better dinner parties of the nation). They have representation in the Parliament.

On the other hand, the million and a half outsiders, the so-called “somewheres” generally of suburban or regional abode, who still cherish traditional values and who voted for Right-of-centre minor and micro parties, do not.

They are the true voiceless in this country, patently without influence. They make up nearly one third of the people of Australia.

Perhaps they educate their children in religious schools. Maybe they are unjabbed and remain COVID dissidents.

I am guessing they value freedom and patriotism. Resent woke corporatism. Feel that customer service no longer exists. Are ashamed of what is happening to our culture. Cheer on battlers and champion small businesses.

They may unfurl an Aussie flag on Australia Day. Fear the coming digital surveillance State. Mourn what we have lost.

For all of these reasons, they are resented, sneered at and ignored by the two Parties who, respectively, say they stand for freedom and for the working class. Alas, it is they who have no veto over evil, harmful legislation.

EVIDENCE

Once upon a time, when Edmund Burke was still recognised as the doyen of theorists of representative democracy, and frequently quoted as such, citizens rejoiced at their representatives leaving their electoral and ideological baggage at the door and proceeding to decide the affairs of the nation through reasoned and reasonable debate and what we might, these days, term evidence-based policy.

It was a time when the now obsolete description of our decision-makers as “rational actors” actually meant something.

The true voiceless have nowhere to turn in Australia’s evolved and utterly degraded parliamentary democracy, now presided over by a Lib-Lab duopoly in the service of unelected creatures of the administrative State, the medical establishment, big corporates and funky tech companies run by woke, overweening millennials.

For all practical purposes, the only way now to break up the major Party cartel is to have a hung parliament. And any joy derived from such an outcome would, most likely, be short-lived, given the make-up of the current crossbencher class.

I don’t see much prospect of we-the-outsiders getting the attention, let alone the sympathy, of the climate botherers.

I am all for having a voice. It is just that I would start with a different bunch than those who are currently in such favour, recognition-wise.

It turns out the chosen voiceless don’t actually need yet another megaphone. They already have one. The truly voiceless are the unfashionable outsiders of every hue. They do need a voice, but having one wouldn’t do them much good anyway. Why not?

Sadly, the nation’s woes go much deeper than voicelessness in the Parliament, whichever identity group you think is in most need of a voice.

Yes, the Parliament itself is now a mere shadow of the institution that once steered the nation on safe paths.

But what is far worse is that we have experienced what might be called a closing of the Australian mind, at just about every level and across all of our major, public-facing institutions.

Why create a voice when you don’t have a mind? Rational actors, we no longer have.

SELF-INTEREST

COVID has shown that. The political class is driven by power and self-interest. It no longer even listens to evidence-based argument, or cares less about getting policy right. It is happy to be ruled by the woke mob.

Politics have become simply another branch of marketing, and trade in its preferred tools of propaganda and narrative maintenance.

Many among the elites snigger at the very notion of truth. At the same time, the voting class no longer knows what it doesn’t know, since it has been denied access to information on so many issues by corruption and deliberate censorship.

The persistence of idiotic and now embedded nostrums such as the belief that governments can control the climate or stop the spread of viruses shows just how far our collective critical skills have shrunk.

Our rulers seek endlessly to solve non-problems they cannot solve in any case, and to avoid real issues that rational policy might actually address. And they pursue utopian dreams like creating an Indigenous “voice”.

We now inhabit a clueless polity where both producers of policy and consumers of it have simply stopped listening to reason and truth, and have suspended thinking.

Where there is no point in attempting proper debate, trading in facts and, you know, evidence. Where ideology trumps reason. Where appearance is all. Where minds are shut closed.