Megan and me
“We’re asking Australians to start a yarn,” Professor Megan Davis told Guardian Australia.
“Yarning with ordinary Aussies is critical because this is not about politicians, it’s not about government, it’s not about media. It’s about Australians working together and rising above politics.”
- Professor Megan Davis quoted in the The Guardian 19 Feb 2023
Figure 1. Professor Megan Davis is Pro Vice-Chancellor Indigenous UNSW and a Professor of Law, UNSW Law. Professor Davis was elected by the UN Human Rights Council to UNEMRIP in 2017. Professor Davis currently serves as a United Nations expert with the UN Human Rights Council's Expert Mechanism on the rights of Indigenous peoples based in UN Geneva and Professor Davis has recently been appointed Balnaves Chair for Constitutional Law. (Source)
Thankyou Professor Davis for an opportunity to ‘yarn’.
Here is my open ‘yarning’ letter to you, Professor, given that you are co-chair of the Uluru Dialogue and a member of the government’s referendum adviser group, as well as one of the architects of the Uluru Statement from the Heart.
Dear Megan,
I recently wrote an open letter to one of your colleagues, Thomas Mayo, who is on the government’s Referendum Advisory Committee with you, and explained to him why ‘yarning’ with his ideas in my head had turned my ‘soft YES’ vote into a ‘hard NO’ vote in the forthcoming referendum.
I have now spent the last few months reading and viewing a large amount of your commentary and writings on the subject of the Voice Referendum to see if your thoughts and arguments would be powerful enough to turn my ‘hard NO’ vote back into a YES.
I have particularly studied the details of your own political and personal ‘lived experiences’ during the Reconciliation journey which has brought you to your final destination as one of the prime-architects of the powerful manifesto that is the Uluru Statement from the Heart.
After having a ‘yarn’ with your ideology in my head as an ‘ordinary Aussie’, as you describe me, I am even further convinced that a NO vote is the morally, ethically and politically correct one for not only me personally, but also for my family, my fellow citizens - Indigenous or not - and for Australia as a whole.
Let me explain.
Isn’t ‘Cultural Uniqueness’ Just a Proxy for The Great Ugliness of Dividing Us by ‘Race’?
One of the main issues which I, and I suspect a great many other Australians also, have with your Voice proposal is that it will enshrine in our Constitution permanently procedures for our governance that involve a legal separation of Australians into one of two genetic or DNA types - those with claimed Aboriginal ancestry and those without.
Your Voice proposal will divide us by race, although I know that you will balk at this description.
You are of the school of thought that believes that ‘race is a social construct.’
You believe that ‘race’ is not ‘real’ because it is not supported by scientifically proven facts, which makes ‘race’ out-dated in the modern-world and thus it is not a valid descriptor for law makers and social commentators to use.
Instead, as you explain in the short film clip below, you say the Voice is about descriminating between Australians on the basis of the ‘cultural uniqueness of First Nations peoples.’
Your proposal is that this ‘cultural uniqueness’ of some Australians, who have ancestors who were here before 1788, gives them some sort of ‘natural right’, which you claim is ‘recognised in the common law’. This natural right, or entitlement, allows them to be treated differently within our Constitution from those of us who are descended from ancestors who only arrived on our shores after 1788.
You are claiming for yourself this label of ‘cultural uniqueness’ by virtue of the fact that you claim to have Aboriginal ancestry and thus a direct, ancestral link to a forebear who was here prior to 1788.
You thus want to assign to yourself a so-called ‘common law right’ that entitles you to be represented within our Constitution by a ‘Voice body’.
This constitutional ‘Voice body’ will have additional, powerful and elite advisory roles to government and the parliament, roles that will be denied to me and my family, and more than 25 million other Australians, because we lack an apical ancestor who was in this country prior to 1788.
Indeed, you yourself may have the rare privilege of being eligible to be a member of this elite, 24-member Voice body because you have, through no merit of your own, the pre-requisite genetic and DNA ancestry required as one of the qualifications to be a member.
No matter how hard I, or any other non-Aboriginal Australian works, we will never qualify for a position in our own constitution’s Voice body, because we don’t possess, through no fault of our own, the correct ancestry, genetics or DNA.
We can all strive to become members of any of the other bodies that are open to all of Australia’s citizens within our Constitution - as a politician, a High Court judge, even Prime Minister or the Governor General - but not your Voice body. For that we need Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander ancestry and DNA or, dare I say it, the correct ‘racial profile.’
This by definition is raw ‘racism’ in action.
According to the Australian Human Rights Commission -
Racism is the process by which systems and policies, actions and attitudes create inequitable opportunities and outcomes for people based on race. Racism is more than just prejudice in thought or action. It occurs when this prejudice – whether individual or institutional – is accompanied by the power to discriminate against, oppress or limit the rights of others … Racism adapts and changes over time, and can impact different communities in different ways, with racism towards different groups intensifying in different historical moments …
Racism includes all the laws, policies, ideologies and barriers that prevent people from experiencing justice, dignity, and equity because of their racial identity … racism also exists in systems and institutions that operate in ways that lead to inequity and injustice.
What is the Difference Between Being ‘Indigenous’ and Being Just an ‘Ordinary Aussie’?
Yet, in my opinion, I fail to see any real distinction between your ancestry, heritage, ‘lived experience’ and citizenship when compared to my own.
If you expressly say that membership to the Voice is not about race, but is based on ‘cultural uniqueness’, are you and your culture really any more ‘unique’ than mine?
From what I can see, you and your family are as Australian as me and my family. Sure, some of the cultural and ancestry sources that make up your heritage are different to mine, but I see these as just different ‘spices’ which vary the flavour of our shared ‘main-meal’ of both being Aussie.
Watching the ABC Australian Story of you, your lovely mum and your siblings reminds me of my own extended family - sport loving Aussies in typical working/lower middle class homes. The documentary didn’t seem to depict anything like a ‘unique Aboriginal culture’ in the your life. In fact, your lovely, Aussie mum brought you up pretty much like my mum did me.
My Aussieness has a solid European heritage; yours is also pretty solid European with the addition of some Aboriginal and South Sea Islander to spice up your heritage and lived experience.
So just how “indigenous” are you Megan, when compared to me?
I describe myself as being throughly ‘indigenous’ [lower caps “i”] to Australia, as is my right to self-identify, now that my Aussie ancestry spans nine-generations (on my mother’s side) from my own grandchildren back to my English convict ancestor, John Parker who arrived in NSW in 1823.
Even your Uluru Statement co-author, Noel Pearson agrees that Australians like me, whose ancestors were born here and returned to the soil with each dying generation, do have a ‘connection’ to this land as well, a connection that he says is recognised by ‘Aboriginal laws and customs.’
Pearson goes further and admits that even, ‘in a real sense the [Andrew] Bolts are becoming indigenous to Australia’ (See film clip below of his oration).
Thus Pearson is only stating the obvious - that ordinary Aussies who have been here for multiple generations are also indigenous Australians in their own way.
Furthermore, I note that my mother’s branch of my family arrived in Australia in 1823, two-generations before your paternal South Sea Islander ancestors turned up on our shores in the 1870s.
Your ancestors on your mother’s side were British settlers who all arrived in Australia after my own mother’s convict ancestor. If we are to reflect on Noel Pearson’s notion that settlers to Australia can, over generations, become indigenous, the branches in my family tree that pre-date yours are thus ‘more indigenous’ than yours.
I can see all these comparisons between our families when I look at your alleged family tree, constructed by our genealogist(s) at Dark Emu Exposed.
Figures 2 and 4 depict your alleged paternal Family Tree and Figure 3 and 5 depict your alleged maternal Family Tree.
I recognise your family trees as being pretty much like my own - we both have that multi-ethnic mix of an Australian ‘mongrel’ ancestry, due to immigration from many parts of the world.
The only difference between you and me is the estimated 12% of Aboriginal ancestry that you have inherited via one of your eight great-grandparents.
Figure 2 - Excerpt of the Alleged Paternal Family Tree of Professor Megan Davis showing the Family Tree branch where Professor Davis believes her Aboriginality arises. (Read in conjunction with Full Alleged Paternal family Tree below)
Your mother’s family, the Burns/Byrnes, is solidly British with her, and thus your, ancestors coming from Ireland, England and Scotland.
Figure 3 - Excerpt of the Alleged Maternal Family Tree of Professor Megan Davis showing the Family Tree branch where Professor Davis believes her European heritage arises from her mother’s side. (Read in conjunction with Full Alleged Maternal family Tree below)
The Great Unfairness of The Voice Proposal
To people like me, it seems very unfair and even selfish that Voice proponents such as yourself would be willing to politically weaponise the existence of your one great-grandparent in order to get a special place within our Constitution, for yourself and your family, at the expense of the rest of us, your 25 million Aussie fellow citizens.
The Voice proposal, in my opinion, is thus deeply unfair.
The case you are making Megan is that you think that by having some 12% Aboriginal ancestry you have the right to self-nominate as a member of this new ‘elite advisory’, to be known as the Voice body, which will be inserted into a new Chapter within our Constitution.
This constitutionally enshrined ‘elite Voice advisory’ will require its members to have a certain ancestry or a specific type of DNA, that of Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander, as a pre-requisite for membership.
Membership to the Voice will thus be deeply ‘racist’, ‘hereditary’, and it may easily become an ‘aristocracy’ given that only 3 percent of Australians will qualify for its membership.
The Voice body will also thus 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 enshrining your Voice into our Constitution.
Although I fully agree with the complete right of Australians to have themselves identified in whatever way they choose - in your case as a ‘‘proud Cobble Cobble Aboriginal woman’ - I just cannot agree that ‘identity’, whether it be racial, ethnic, cultural, socio-economic, sex or gender-based, should give its holder any different citizenship or voting rights compared to any other Australian.
The fundamental question in this referendum Megan, is why should you and your family have special citizenship and voting rights just because you carry some 12% of Aboriginal ancestry and you self-proclaim that you are ‘culturally unique’?
Why should Australians vote YES to a proposal that is fundamentally against our successful and modern system of governance, underpinned by a one-person-one-vote and a one-person-one-value democracy?
Why should Australians vote YES to a proposal that fundamentally requires Australian citizens to be differentiated based on race, descent, cultural uniqueness, or when they, or their ancestors, arrived here?
The Voice Proposal is on the Wrong Side of History
Your Voice proposal goes against the last two-and-half thousand years of a progressive history of mankind, from the dawn of democracy in Ancient Greece, through the Christian concept of the equality and sacredness of all humans as individuals of equal value, through the abolition of slavery, to the full, equal, electoral franchise of all adults in Australia without qualification.
The regressive, and indeed repugnant, nature of your Voice proposal is eloquently described in the following three short film clips by the political and legal commentators, Greg Sheridan, Chris Merritt and Jacinta Nampijinpa Price.
If your Voice Proposal is passed at referendum, it will set Australia back onto a regressive path to an unequal democracy for its citizens.
We will start heading in the direction of other states where democracy has already faltered, such as Fiji, Lebanon and Hong Kong, or others where there are signs of initial distress such as New Zealand and Brazil.
I am old enough to remember the demonstrations of the 1970s where we fought to overturn the Apartheid system of South Africa. And that is why I am stunned that an intellectual such as yourself, Megan, would flirt with a political and governance proposal that is the first step in establishing a “separateness” [“apartheid” in Afrikaans] system within our Australian constitution.
I hope you reflect on the magnificent and generous words of South African anti-Apartheid campaigner, Steve Biko, who paid with his life so the world could be free of the political evil that was South Africa’s Apartheid.
What could be the Reason for Your Advocacy for the Voice?
So why Megan, would you want to promote a change to our Constitution that more than half of Australians now find unacceptably either racist, repugnant or ineffective?
It is my speculation that you might have dedicated your professional life to achieving some sort of Indigenous power-sharing body [now known as the Voice] within our Constitution just for the glory of your own career, and for the opportunity of luxuriating in the benefits that being a senior member of this Voice aristocracy will undoubtably bring.
My belief that this might be the case is because, just like you, I come from a poor, Australian working class background.
I know what is like to go to a cafe or restaurant and peruse the menu down the right-hand side until you find a price that you can afford and then look across to see what meal that is.
In my case, I can still remember being a 19-year-old Melbourne University student, mixing with very well-off students from private school backgrounds, where one of my prime financial goals in life was to be able to walk into any restaurant and order what I liked without having to think about the cost. It took me until my mid-forties to achieve that, but once there, a whole new world of the ‘gourmet class’ was revealed to me.
Is it possible that you too might like be a member of the ‘new elite gourmet class’ which, when coupled with Business and First Class travel, is a wonderful ‘mob’ to be a member of?
Let me explain.
I suspect that given you have, ‘served a lengthy diplomatic career in the United Nations for 18 years in Geneva, as well as 5 years with the UN in New York (2011-2016)’ you probably know how beguiling the diplomatic, five-star lifestyle can be.
You most likely during your UN years dined at a range of very flash eateries, stayed in 5-star accommodation and flew up in the ‘pointy-end of the plane.’
I probably don’t need to remind you how good it is in First Class, flying across the globe, and how easy it is to fall into that self-righteous trap of convincing ourselves that our work is so important that ‘we deserve to be there.’
In my case, at least I’m paying for my own $17,000 ticket to Europe, but once the Voice gets enshrined in the Constitution, I suspect I will be competing for a seat in rows 1 to 10 with members of the Voice body and their attendant bureaucrats, with the tax-payer footing their the bills as they jet off to their important UN Indigenous People’s Conventions in Geneva and New York.
Currently lots of Indigenous Australian politicians and Land Council members already make the annual pilgrimage to the UN and other Indigenous gatherings.
Once the Voice bureaucracy is in place, I predict that there will be even more heading off overseas in First Class.
Truth-Telling Up in The Pointy End of The Plane
In the interests of Truth-Telling, let me describe for our readers what it is like up in Qantas/Emirates First Class.
Each of the First class individual pods are fitted with a seat that converts to a full length bed and mattress, a large screen TV and a refrigerated bar, and an on-demand, gourmet menu (100grams of Russian Beluga Caviar being the popular starter). There are also two huge bathrooms with showers and supplied pyjamas.
Figure 4A - Russian Caviar on demand in First Class Qantas/Emirates (DEE Editor supplied 2022)
Figure 4B - First Class Bathroom Qantas/Emirates - Front view (DEE Editor supplied 2022)
Figure 4C - First Class Bathroom Qantas/Emirates - Rear Shower view (DEE Editor supplied 2022)
Coming out of a 20 hour flight never felt better after a good nights sleep, a full feed of caviar and a shower.
Once the Voice is in place, with its huge bureaucracy, the 24 senior Voice members will all be signing up for their Tier 1 Status under the Commonwealth’s Travel Rules, and then its First Class all the way, at the tax-payer’s expense!
And I know this because, over the years, I’ve seen them in the First Class lounges and on flights - the senior government employees and politicians, a judge, as well as the assorted ‘elite’ sports and business people that today are extolling (bullying?) us to vote YES. No expense is spared when other people are paying.
Figure 5A
Figure 5B - International Travel First Class All the Way for our Tier 1 Voice Bureaucrats (Source)
So Megan, I will be casting my single, important vote as a NO in the upcoming referendum because I don’t buy your argument that the Voice is all about ‘justice’ and improving the lives of real, disadvantaged Aboriginal people. I’ve seen too much of the business and political world to know a ‘con’ when I see one.
But that is not to say I don’t respect your right to vote YES - I won’t call you a racist, a ‘snake-oil salesman’ or a carpet-bagger and I respect your right to cast your vote anyway you think fit, no matter how misguided, or self-centred your thinking may be.
That is the current beauty of our unique, Australian democracy, held in place by the frame-work of one the most successful constitutions in human history. Let’s hope Australia keeps it that way by making the NO vote prevail.
Yours sincerely, Roger Karge
Editor, Dark Emu Exposed website
