Thomas and me
An open letter to Thomas Mayo, signatory to the Uluru Statement from the Heart, author of the Voice to Parliament Handbook and member of the government’s Referendum Working Group.
Dear Thomas,
I started out as only a ‘soft’ Yes voter in the upcoming referendum. Sure, I wanted to formally ‘recognise’ that Aboriginal peoples had been on this wonderful nation-continent of ours for 50,000 years, but why I wondered, did we need a new ‘power sharing’ Chapter in our Constitution as well?
This doubt is what kept my vote as a ‘soft’ Yes.
After much reading and listening to the ‘voices’ in this debate, I have now become a very firm No voter.
What really convinced me that a No vote was the morally, ethically and politically correct one for me, was a deep study of your advocacy and your own ‘voice’ as you campaigned for a Yes vote in the referendum.
Your writings and speeches, as well as details of your political and personal ‘lived experiences’, are what finally convinced me that a successful Yes vote would be bad for me, my family, my fellow citizens - Indigenous or not - and bad for not only Australia, but for the world as a whole.
Let me explain.
Is Your Proposed Voice Racist or Just Ethnically Challenging?
One of the first responses by strong No vote advocates was that the Voice would be racist - see Andrew Bolt, Peter Dutton’s ‘re-racialization’ speech and the IPA’s ‘Race-has-No-place’ video amongst others.
Pro-Voice advocates are sensitive to this criticism. Both Noel Pearson and yourself have sought to deflect the ‘racism’ charge by claiming that the Voice is not about the ‘race’ of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people but rather about their ‘indigeneity.’ You and Pearson both stress the fact that ‘your people’ are different because they have ancestors who were here before 26th January 1788, at the founding of modern Australia.
Your collegue Noel Pearson wrote in 2019,
“Our opponents in the Institute of Public Affairs attempt to put a liberal philosophical sheen on Andrew Bolt’s argument that a First Nations voice would constitute separate treatment on the basis of race in the constitution,” he said. “This argument succeeds only if you ignore the truth that our claim is on the basis of our being indigenous to this country, not on the basis of race. Bolt and the IPA remain steadfastly obscurant on this.” - Source: The Australian, 4 Aug 2019
In the film clip below, you also adopt this ‘anti-race’ argument when you claim that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders are being selected to the elite membership of the Voice based on their ‘being indigenous’, and due to their having a long association with ‘this place’. You say, ‘it is not about race, it is about our indigenous heritage and culture’.
But this is where it gets confusing for an Australian citizen such as myself. The photograph below is of me standing on one of the hills of Athens, with the Parthenon sitting atop the Acropolis in the background. Athens is one of the few cities remaining in the world where the physical presence of the ancients, the Elders of our modernity, can still be felt all around. It is hard not to think of the birth of democracy when one visits Athens.
The Athenians ‘kicked-off’ the great democratic project of mankind, such that two and a half thousand years later we find ourselves in Australia with one of the greatest democracies in human history - a democratic project that Australia also contributed to by giving the modern world the ‘secret ballot’, that came to be known as the Australian Ballot, and a democracy that gave the vote to Aboriginal men and women in South Australia before ‘white’ women achieved the vote in other Australian states, the US, Britain and other European countries.
But now I find, after studing in depth what you are proposing with your Voice, that the great Australian Democratic Project will be threatened if the Yes campaign wins. Democracy in Classical Athens meant "rule of the people", in contrast to aristocracy, meaning "rule of an elite".
To my mind, it appears that you wish to insert a new ‘advisory of an elite’, as a new Chapter, into our Constitution.
This ‘elite advisory’ will be called the ‘Voice’ and it will consist of members who must have a certain ancestry or DNA, that of Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander, as a pre-requisite for membership. It will thus be ‘hereditary’ and it may easily become an ‘aristocracy’ given that only 3 percent of Australians will qualify for its membership. It will also be discriminatory in that 97% of Australia’s citizens will be denied membership, through no fault of their own, due to factors over which they have no control or influence such as their choice of DNA.
And so here is my dilemma with your Voice proposal.
Until now I was led to believe that, no matter what my ancestry or ethnic background, I had full and equal rights under the law compared to all the other citizens of Australia. We were all of equal citizenship, from the Prime Minister right down to the recently naturalised Sudanese refugee.
I was led to believe that my solid European ancestry - with my mother’s heritage going back to an English convict arrival in 1823, and my father’s back to his post war immigration from Germany - would secure for me the exact same Australian citizenry rights as someone like yourself, who claimed to be Australian, but with Torres Strait Islander heritage.
Australian Citizen - Roger Karge
This European ancestry of my family’s Australian story is reflected in my DNA (Figure 1).
Figure 1 - Origin of Roger Karge’s family by DNA
So here are my questions to you, Mr Mayo.
Why should your claimed ‘indigeneity’ provide you with greater citizenship rights than myself?
Shouldn’t we both be equal citizens under the law and equal voters under our democracy?
Why should you get ‘special’ democratic and political rights as a citizen, based solely on a condition - your DNA and ancestry - over which you have no control and which I cannot change in myself should I wish to obtain those same rights?
To explore the differences between us both, a professional genealogist has undertaken a study of your family tree based on the publicly available records and information that you and your other family members have provided publicly. The results of this alleged Family Tree are shown in Figure 2 and I fail to see how your alleged family ancestry should give you any additional democratic and citizenship rights compared to me.
With all due respect, your family’s heritage looks pretty much like an ‘immigrant’s’, as mine does. The majority of your father’s ancestors appear to be from Malaysia, the Philippines, Nuie, Vanuatu and Singapore. You also even appear to have German ancestry, just like me.
And, like my own mother, your mother appears to be of solid European heritage with ‘Polish, Jewish and English ancestry’, as you have publicly claimed.
Now, I am not denying that the records do seem to suggest that a small number of your 3X great-grandparents on your father’s side may be Indigenous Torres Strait Islanders, but our genealogist could not locate any definitive proof that this is the case.
Australian Citizen - Thomas Mayo
Figure 2 - Alleged Family Tree of Thomas Mayo[r] based on the publicly available records and information from Thomas Mayo[r] himself and other family members. Download File.jpg here or File.pdf here
In the preparation of your alleged family tree in Figure 2, research notes running to 58 pages were compiled. These research notes, which can be downloaded here, suggest that your family history in most ways is not that different to that of many of us non-Indigenous Australians.
Your father’s ancestors appear to be largely ‘colonising immigrants’ from the Philippines and Malaysia who colonised and settled in the Torres Strait Islands in the late 1800s, when the islands were part of the Colony of Queensland. These ancestors of yours appeared to have expressed their own agency by freely coming to the islands while identifying as Filipino or Malays, and who later freely became naturalised as Queenslanders in the 1880’s and later still, swore to, ‘well and truly serve our Sovereign Lord, the King, in the Military Forces of the Commonwealth of Australia’ as soldiers during WWII.
Other members of your family came as indentured labourers from the Pacific Islands, just like my father did from Germany in 1951 under his assisted passage, work-contract.
I do hope, Thomas, that you can now see my point of view - that your Voice proposal is deeply unfair to your fellow citizens.
The only real difference between you and me is that you claim that some of your distant ancestors were Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islanders and therefore you want to claim special citizen rights.
This will inevitably result in ‘push-back’ by many Australians who will clamour for a firm, legislated definition of ‘who is Indigenous’, especially given the apparent rise in the number of ‘fake Aboriginals’, many examples of whom you will find on this Dark Emu Exposed website.
As the astute legal commentator Chris Merritt has observed,
‘the last thing we want in this country are race laws, race tribunals determining who is an Aborigine and who is not. I don't think we want to go there … you take a wrong turn and you abandon the equality of citizenship and you hit all this nonsense. Race laws are just an abomination and they should form no part of the Australian statute.’ - (Listen to Chris Merritt in the film clip below).
Thomas, do you really want Australia to progress to the next logical step of DNA testing (see Figure 3) to determine indigeneity, given that the benefits of being a member of the Voice and its bureaucracy will most certainly lead to an influx of fakes?
How are we going to identify and weed-out these fakes otherwise?
The Voice proposal is un-Australian, wrong in principle and contrary to all that we, as equal citizens of a free democracy, have achieved since Federation.
You would be very wise Thomas to reconsider your advocacy for the Voice.
Yours sincerely, Roger Karge
Editor, Dark Emu Exposed website
Figure 3 - Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander DNA testing is possible at Ancestry.com
Update of 14 August 2023
See Bolt in Herald Sun here
