The Voice - A Classic Case of the Motte-and-Bailey Doctrine — Dark Emu Exposed

Apr 20

Apr 20 The Voice - A Classic Case of the Motte-and-Bailey Doctrine

This post is an attempt to expose to our readers one of the rhetorical techniques used by socially progressive activists on the Left to push through controversial changes to our laws, our society and our country.

The technique is known as the Motte-and-Bailey Doctrine. This term was first coined by the philosopher Nicholas Shackel in 2005 (Note 1).

**Figure 1- A Medieval Motte and Bailey Castle form of defence. The Bailey is a *more desirable* but *difficult to defend* position - invaders and opponents find it easy to over-run the Bailey.**
**In contrast, the Motte is *more easily defendable* position but is *not that desirable* to permanently live in.**
In ideological terms, the Bailey represent those policy’s, which are desirable to the Progressive Left and where they want our society to live, but are somewhat crazy and difficult to defend when challenged. On being challenged, the Progressive Left initially abandon their position in the Bailey and retreat to the Motte where they claim the high ground based on some logic, ethics or morality. It is a less desirable position for the Left to occupy and once the threat from the Conservative Right to their policy passes, they return to the Bailey to re-establish their crazy, more desirable ideas.
If Conservatives want to win the debate they need to understand these dynamics and focus on exposing the real Bailey agenda of the Progressive Left and prevent the Left’s retreat to the Motte when challenged.

Shackel noted that the medieval Motte and Bailey castle was a system of defence in which a strongly defensible stone tower on a mound (the Motte) was adjacent to an area of fenced, farming land where the villagers lived (the Bailey), and which was a more ‘desirable’, but weakly defensible position.

When the Bailey was attacked by marauders, the inhabitants retreated to the less desirable but more defensible position on the Motte. Eventually the marauders gave up, and so the villagers returned to their more desirable but weakly defensible position in the Bailey.

Shackel used this as an analogy to criticize what he considered duplicitous processes of argumentation in works of academics such as Michel Foucault and other Post-modernists. Shackel suggests that we should view an idea that is obviously a lie, or a crazy idea, but which is an exciting ideological point (an ‘exciting falsehood’) as the hard to defend Bailey of the Post-modernists. He then suggests that an obvious, basic fact of life (a ‘trivial truth’) should be seen as the easier to defend position of the Motte.

In our opinion, the analogy has relevance today and can be useful in unpacking what is really going on in political battles between the Left and Right here in Australia.

In this post we will first illustrate an example of the use the Motte-and-Bailey Doctrine by considering one of the very contentious issues in the early 2000s, that of refugee boats, illegal immigration and the Pacific Solution. All the evidence is now available on what really happened at that time so we have all the facts available to us.

After we consider this example we will then use the Motte-and-Bailey Doctrine as a tool to try to understand what is unfolding before our eyes with The Voice Referendum proposal (see below).

The Ideology of the Pacific Solution

In general, the Political Left have favoured more open, ‘soft borders’ with regard to refugees arriving illegally into Australia. This gives rise to a position where the refugees themselves have a large say in deciding who can come to live in Australia. To the Left, such as the Australian Labor Party, this policy position is the Bailey - they view it as a desirable place to be, but politically it is very difficult to defend - the Australian voting public just hate this idea.

In contrast, the Political Right have adopted a more closed, ‘hard borders’ position, best summed up by Prime Minister John Howard, when he declared in his 2001 pre-election speech, “… we will decide who comes to this country and the circumstances in which they come.”

In September 2001 the Howard Government introduced the concept of third country, 'off-shore processing’ for specific migration purposes in order to discourage unlawful (without a valid visa) non-citizens from arriving unauthorised on Australia’s shores by boat. (Source).

So how did the Labor Party theoreticians hope to develop the ‘desirable’ (according to the Left) ‘open borders’ policy that necessitated ‘on-shore’ processing (and the closing down of ‘off-shore’ processing) of asylum seekers, while at the same time resisting the attacks by the Liberal Party who had ‘logic’ on their side by pointing out the craziness of encouraging people-smugglers and letting illegal immigrants arrive directly onto the Australian mainland?

What Labor did was to roll out Kevin Rudd with his Motte-and-Bailey Doctrine.

Rudd and the Labor Party decided to retreat from their Bailey, founded on the crazy idea that illegal immigrants could just turn up on Australia’s shores, be processed and be given visas to be allowed to work and move freely in our community (as is the case in say, Britain, today). Under attack from the Liberals, Rudd retreated to the more defensible position of the Motte, which in this case was to appeal to the natural fairness of Australians as Good Samaritans and Australia’s commitment to human rights.

Rudd illustrated this change of tactic, as part of Labor’s 2007 election strategy, when he published the following:

‘Another great challenge of our age is asylum seekers. The biblical injunction to care for the stranger in our midst is clear. The parable of the Good Samaritan is but one of many which deal with the matter of how we should respond to a vulnerable stranger in our midst.

That is why the government’s proposal to excise the Australian mainland from the entire Australian migration zone and to rely almost exclusively on the so-called Pacific Solution should be the cause of great ethical concern to all the Christian churches.

We should never forget that the reason we have a UN convention on the protection of refugees is in large part because of the horror of the Holocaust, when the West (including Australia) turned its back on the Jewish people of Germany and the other occupied countries of Europe who sought asylum during the ’30s.

- Kevin Rudd, 1 Oct 2006. Here on his website, first published in The Monthly Oct 2006

Thus, when the Liberals attacked Labor on their policy of allowing illegal immigrants to arrive in Australia, and then undergo on-shore processing, Labor was no longer there defending it - they had abandoned the Bailey and were instead hold-up in the ethical and moral sanctuary of the Motte. If the Liberals attacked Labor on immigration, Labor claimed the Liberals were anti-UN human rights, un-Christian and uncaring, and hadn’t learnt the lessons of the plight of Jewish refugees fleeing the Holocaust.

During the 2007 election speeches, John Howard was down in the Bailey, steam-rolling Labor’s soft immigration policy, with his promise that,

‘We seek your mandate to maintain the strength of Australia, to maintain the strength of our alliances, to continue the protection of our borders, to continue to decide who comes to this nation…’ (Source)

But where was Rudd and Labor under this attack? They are nowhere to be seen because they had temporarily abandoned their Bailey and were safely ensconced up in the high-moral ground, inside the easily defendable Motte of Labor’s stand for UN human rights and the ‘ethical concern [of] all the Christian churches.’

Rudd in his pre-election speech in 2007 he did not mention at all, any of the words, immigration, refugees, asylum seekers, on-shore or off-shore processing, nor the Pacific Solution - nothing. Rudd gave the appearance of completely abandoning his Bailey and the crazy policy of soft borders.

Instead, Rudd’s speech was full of the ‘trivial truths’ of the Motte as he emphasised,

[Labor will provide] ‘a new Prime Minister and a new government who understand and respect the values upon which our nation has been built. Values of decency. Values of fairness. Values of respect. A new Prime Minister and a new government who believe that the great Australian value of a fair go for all has a future – and not just a past. Friends, Australians are a decent people … For Labor, fairness is in our DNA’ - (Source)

And so it went that Rudd won the 2007 election and within months Labor had burst out of the Motte to reclaim the more desirable (in Labor’s view) Bailey, with its hard to defend idea of soft borders.

The official Parliamentary website tells us in 2016, that,

On 8 February 2008, seven months after Kevin Rudd was sworn in as Prime Minister, the former Labor Government announced that the last remaining asylum seekers on Nauru had been transferred to Australia ending the Howard Government’s controversial ‘Pacific Solution’, which had begun in 2001 in response to rising numbers of asylum seekers arriving by boat.

However, by July 2010, then Prime Minister, Julia Gillard announced in her first major policy speech that the Government had begun having discussions with regional neighbours about the possibility of establishing a regional processing centre for the purpose of receiving and processing irregular entrants to the region. Whilst only 25 asylum seekers had travelled by boat to Australia to seek asylum in the 2007–08 financial year by the time Prime Minister Gillard made her announcement in July 2010, more than 5,000 people had travelled by boat to Australia to seek asylum (that is, during the 2009–10 financial year).

… Prime Minister Gillard … identified a number of reasons why the processing of asylum seekers in other countries was, again, considered necessary:

to remove the financial incentive for the people smugglers to send boats to Australia
to ensure that those arriving by boat do not get an unfair advantage over others
to secure Australia’s borders and create a fair and orderly migration
to prevent people embarking on a voyage across dangerous seas with the ever present risk of death
to ensure that everyone is subject to a consistent, fair assessment process
to improve the protection outcomes for refugees by establishing a framework for orderly migration within the region
to prevent overcrowding in detention facilities in Australia
to respond to increased numbers of unauthorised people movements in the region and around the world and
to acknowledge that irregular migration is a global challenge that can only be tackled by nations working together.

Though it took another two years for her Government to secure the statutory and practical arrangements for asylum seekers to be sent to third countries, people began to be transferred to Nauru on 14 September 2012 and to Papua New Guinea (PNG) on 21 November 2012.

Two months before the 2013 federal election, and in the wake of growing support for the Opposition’s (Liberal’s) tougher border protection policies, newly appointed Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd made a surprise announcement on 19 July 2013 that Australia had entered into a Regional Resettlement Arrangement with PNG. Under the Arrangement, all (not just some) asylum seekers who arrive by boat would be transferred to PNG for processing and settlement in PNG and in any other participating regional State. He subsequently made a similar Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with Nauru.

Notwithstanding Prime Minister Rudd’s announcement, the Australian Labor Party was unable to secure another term in office and, on 7 September 2013, the Liberal and National parties were voted in to form a Coalition Government, led by Tony Abbott. The current Coalition Government, led by Malcolm Turnbull, continues to implement the former Government’s offshore processing arrangements…’

Needless to say, Rudd’s Bailey policy of 2008 turned out to be an ‘exciting falsehood’ and ultimately a disaster that could not be defended politically, as many conservatives, and many in the Labor Party too, had predicted.

The moment Rudd abandoned the Motte and its ‘trivial truth’ of the Pacific Solution - the truth that once on-shore processing was reinstated, the illegal immigrants would flood in and deaths at sea would skyrocket - Labor’s dynamic duo of Rudd and Gillard were hit in the face by reality - 50,000 illegal arrivals and 1200 deaths at sea under Labor ‘s policy ( Source: Conversation Fact Check).

Figure 2 - Under the Liberal’s Pacific Solution (years 2001 to 2008) illegal arrivals plummeted, compared to Labor’s policy for 2008 to 2013 when both illegal arrivals and deaths skyrocketed. So much for Rudd’s Christian compassion and his support for human rights. *Source* *Wikipedia*

The VOICE Referendum Viewed as a Case of the Motte-and-Bailey Doctrine

Voters in the upcoming referendum on the Voice might find it instructional to view the debates through the lens of the Motte-and-Bailey Doctrine.

In our opinion, what the Albanese Labor Government is offering with their Voice proposal is a classic Motte-and-Bailey approach to a policy that, as political commentator Paul Kelly says,

‘endorse[s] a maximalist voice, thereby guaranteeing a fundamental change in Australia’s system of parliamentary and executive governance and making a contentious referendum even more contentious.’ (Source).

In this case, the Bailey is the ‘desirable’ Progressive position of the Albanese Government that an ethnic minority of Australians - 3% of Australia’s people who identify as Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders - should be recognised, along with a set of defined powers, within our Australian Constitution.

This is a very contentious proposal that is actually ‘hard to defend’ as it is prima facie racist and goes against Australia’s long standing commitment to equality for all, and our one-person-one-vote form of liberal democracy. It is a policy that will ultimately (after implementation of the Uluru Statement, Treaty and Truth-Telling) lead to co-sovereignty within Australia - two separate ‘states’ and differing governance for Aboriginal and Torres Strait islander people and the rest of Australia. Australians just need to look across the ditch to Aotearoa/New Zealand to get a sense of what co-sovereignty in Australia might look like (See Winston Peters’ commentary here).

When critics point out these deficiencies in Albanese’s model, he, the Labor Government and their Aboriginal supporters, retreat to the Motte with claims that the critics are themselves being racist for questioning Indigenous aspirations to ‘Close the Gap’ and ‘have their Voices heard’, both which even conservatives agree are worthy, defendable positions.

Fortunately for democracy, it appears that the Liberal Leader Peter Dutton has seen through this ploy by Labor to conflate the worthwhile defendable goals (the Motte) of improving outcomes for Indigenous Australians and being ‘heard’, with the indefensible (the Bailey) aim of inserting racial preference into positions of power within our Constitution.

Thus, Dutton has come out point blank to say that he supports the recognition of Indigenous Australians in the Constitution (the high, ethical and moral ground of the Motte) without going so far as to enshrine within the Constitution any special powers to those Australians identifying as Indigenous (the crazy Apartheid idea of dividing Australians by race within our founding document - Albanese’s Bailey).

Instead, Dutton appears to have been aware enough to realise he needs to expose Albanese’s argument for what it is - an attempt to slip through a very radical change to our Constitution under a smoke screen of being a ‘gracious and generous offer’ to fix Indigenous disadvantage.

Albanese, like Rudd before him on the Pacific Solution, preaches from the high moral ground of the Motte when he claims that,

“the Voice is about two things: recognition and consultation. It’s an opportunity for all Australians to unite and move our country forward.” (Source Guardian).

Voters would be right to be wary of Albanese’s claims - if the Voice proposal is so desirable and the solution to the problems of Indigenous Australians, why didn’t his government legislate the Voice the day after winning government? The reason is that many Australians, and probably Peter Dutton as well, suspect that Albanese is going for an enshrinement of a power body within the Constitution as his prime aim. His secondary aim is to have a federal body (the Voice) that works on fixing Indigenous disadvantage.

Albanese’s real aim is ideological - to split Australia from its colonial past, decolonise and eradicate the British inheritance as much as possible so as to achieve Indigenous co-sovereignty at a minimum, or more preferably, a new Indigenous separate State, or even a UN recognised Nation, for Aboriginal Peoples in Australia.

As a conservative, Dutton appears to have recognised this assault on the legitimacy of the Australian state. Instead, he has attempted to separate, de-conflate, the two big issues here.

He wants the voting public to see, and reject, Labor’s Bailey - their desirable position that will radically alter our Constitution. He needs to carefully manoeuvre politically to claim the high moral ground, up on the Motte along with Albanese, by supporting the perfectly understandable mechanism of regional and remote Voices from an Indigenous perspective, but via legislation and not via the Constitution. (See Guardian)

Summary

The centre-Right and conservatives in Australia are feeling overwhelmed at the speed and extent of the Progressive Left’s onslaught on our society, culture and country. While they have been busy with their own family lives, getting on with business and enjoying life, a clique of deep thinkers on the Left have been spending long hours in meetings working on ideological strategies to change the meanings and political impact of words such as - First Nations, Welcome to Country, De-colonisation, Slavery, Racism, Marriage, Reconciliation, Co-sovereignty, Stolen Generations, Aboriginality, Indigenous Science & Knowledges, Reparations, et al.

These ideological strategies then manifest themselves in political campaigns and movements such as The Voice, Black Lives Matter, Pull the Statues Down, Trans-women are Women, Teenagers Can Undergo Sex Changes, De-colonisation, et al.

The aim of this post was to try to help readers unpack and understand one of the techniques used by Progressive Left to push their crazy ideas - the Motte-and-Bailey Doctrine.

Once a reader really understands what is going on, the crazy ideas don’t seem so bewildering and overwhelming. Opponents can then unpack the craziness and mount a logical critique to push back.

As we finalised this post, a Commentary article by Thomas Mayo, a leading proponent of The Voice, appeared in The Australian of 20 April 2023 which only proves the point of what we have been saying here about the Motte-and-Bailey technique of Progressive Left. We invite our readers to critique his article and with this in mind (our comments are in the footnotes).

**Editor:** Mayo heads straight to the high moral ground in the Motte. How could any moral ethical Australian not love their children, their country and wish for a better future for family health for generations to come? Don’t worry about the details of the Voice down in the Bailey, nothing to see there, let’s all just vote Yes. *And because he knows it is ‘emotional blackmail’, he tells his readers “I am not using emotional blackmail to convince you to vote Yes.”*

**Editor:** *Politically,* Mayo can’t overtly say what the policy of the Bailey represents - enshrining a provision within our Constitution to differentiate Australian citizens by race. Instead he retreats to the Motte and pronounces that, “we”as Indigenous peoples are “distinct” - as a group and in the challenges we face. “Distinct” is a softer way of saying, ‘separate,’ ‘different’, ‘the other’ or ‘not the same’. To No voters fighting down in the Bailey this sounds like ‘Apartheid’ [separate-hood in Afrikaans]. And actually, in Thomas Mayo’s case, how ‘distinct’ is he really? Isn’t he just an ‘ethnic mogrel mix’ like most of us other Australians, as he related to Phillip Adams in a radio interview:
“*I am a* ***Torres Strait Islander,*** *have a* ***Filipino*** *great-great-grandfather and a* ***Malaysian*** *great-great-grandfather,…Borneo,* ***Dyak*** *man indigenous of that place…and a* ***Jewish Polish*** *post-war immigrant…he worked on the Snowy River project when he came over here…and he married a young* ***English*** *woman’. - Thomas Mayo(r) interviewed on ABC Late Night Live, June 1, 2020 :* ***listen from 01:55 to 02:40***
Sure, he claims he has some Aboriginal and Melanesian ancestry from the Torres Strait Islands, but should that small part-ancestry give him higher citizen rights and power within our Constitution compared to other Australians? (See ***here***).

**Editor:** Mayo here is doing is preaching from the Motte about issues we all agree on and are easily defendable - transparency, improving the lives of disadvantaged Indigenous Australians, holding politicians to account. But what he has abandoned publicly is his real aim - the harder to defend policies of the Bailey - enshrine in the Constitution a power for himself that cannot be overturned ever by a democratically elected government. Vote Yes and he will have such a powerful Voice that ‘parliament and government should be [forced] to do it [what he says] as a matter of course.’

When conservatives moved to critique the Bailey of the Progressives by pointing out that a marriage between a man and a women had a much deeper spiritual, cultural, religious, biological and historical context than a ‘civil partnership between any two consenting adults, of any sex’, the Progressives abandoned their Bailey and retreated to the Motte with cries of, “Love is Love” (echoing the master of the Motte-and-Bailey Doctrine, US President Barrack Obama).

In Australia, conservatives failed to explain their case that marriage is a lot more than just love, which is only one of its components. The plebiscite was successfully carried, 62% to 38%.

Interestingly, since being made legal in 2018, only some 4.3% of marriages in Australia have been between same-sex couples (Source).

Even more interestingly, many of the nations of Indigenous peoples in our immediate Pacific region have quite a different ‘Voice’ on the desirability, or even the legality of, Same-Sex Marriage.

**Figure 3 - Countries recognising Same-Sex Marriage as being legal - only Australia and New Zealand. Other Indigenous peoples do not recognise it as valid, and some consider it illegal.** *(Source Wikipedia)*

The Trans Debate

Many activist Trans-women want the rest of us to validate their dellusion that they are in fact ‘women’. Their 'Bailey position - that they are ‘real’ women - is hard to defend because it is crazy and scientifically incorrect.

Nevertheless, the Trans activists have been somewhat successful to date because every time their Bailey position is criticised, they retreat to the moral high ground of the Motte where they proclaim their ‘trivial truths’ that are difficult to argue against - everyone has a right to their own identity, people facing difficult life issues should not be overly criticised or bullied, saying “trans-women are not women” is ‘hurtful’ to some people, etc.

As an illustration, consider the chorus of protest – and some support – that has greeted an article by the UK broadcaster Jenni Murray, presenter of BBC Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour, that questioned the claims of transgender women to be considered “real women”.

Murray, writing in the Sunday Times magazine, said that she was “not transphobic or anti-trans” and called for respect and protection from bullying and violence equally for “transsexuals, transvestites, gays, lesbians and those of us who hold to the sex and sexual preference assumed at birth”.

However, the piece appeared under the less nuanced heading: “Jenni Murray: Be trans, be proud – but don’t call yourself a ‘real woman’. Can someone who has lived as a man, with all the privilege that entails, really lay claim to womanhood? It takes more than a sex change and makeup”.

Murray wrote: “I know that in writing this article I am entering into the most controversial and, at times, vicious, vulgar and threatening debate of our day. I’m diving headfirst into deep and dangerous waters.”

The response was swift. In a blog post, Rachel Cohen, campaigns director of Stonewall, condemned her views as hurtful and said Murray had no right to question anyone else’s identity.

“Whether you are trans or not, your identity is yours alone. I do not question your identity, Jenni, and in return I wouldn’t expect you to question mine – or anyone else’s. What right would you have to do so? My experiences of being a woman are undoubtedly different to yours. However, their differences do not make them in any way less valid.

“Trans women have every right to have their identity and experiences respected, too. They are women – just like you and me – and their sense of their gender is as engrained in their identity as yours or mine.

“Being trans is not about ‘sex changes’ and clothes – it’s about an innate sense of self. To imply anything other than this is reductive and hurtful to many trans people who are only trying to live life as their authentic selves.”

But on Twitter Debbie Hayton was among many who supported Murray, writing: “I’m transwoman and I get this.” (Source)

This debate is still very much ongoing and the trans lobby appears to have won the debate so far - ‘real” women, feminists and the public in general have not yet found the intellectual ability to dislodge the trans-lobby from the safety of their Motte.