From ‘lucky’ colonisation to misinformation fears: Former PMs weigh in on Voice debate

Key PointsAustralia’s Voice to Parliament referendum continues to provoke heated debate.New Zealand Prime Minister Chris Hipkins was asked for his view on the Voice.Former Liberal PMs John Howard and Malcolm Turnbull also made headlines with their comments.

The upcoming

has triggered intense debate, with current and former political leaders among those voicing their opinions on the historic poll.

On Wednesday, New Zealand Prime Minister Chris Hipkins shied away from directly taking a position on Australia’s referendum but offered perspective on the importance of reconciliation with First Nations peoples at a press conference with Prime Minister Anthony Albanese in Wellington.

In response to questions from SBS News reporter Sara Tomevska about the Voice, and New Zealand’s experience of reconciliation, Hipkins said the referendum was “a matter for the Australian people, and I don’t intend to proffer a comment on that”.

But he did offer commentary on New Zealand’s experience on the “process of reconciliation” which he described as “overwhelmingly positive”.

“That doesn’t mean that there haven’t been bumps on the road. It doesn’t mean they haven’t been periods where it’s been very controversial. But when I look back on some of those controversies, many of which have happened during my lifetime and actually even during my adult lifetime, actually things moved on,” Hipkins said.

“Yes, they were controversial at the time. And now many people would look back on them and wonder what was so controversial about them, because the reconciliation process has ultimately been very positive.”

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese (left) with New Zealand Prime Minister Chris Hipkins. Source: AAP / Mark Coote

Both Hipkins and Albanese acknowledge that the landscape in New Zealand and Australia is very different when it comes to reconciliation.

Unlike Australia, which has no treaty with Indigenous peoples,

and is seen by many as New Zealand’s founding document.

“Our history is, of course, quite different. And the Treaty of Waitangi is New Zealand’s founding document,” Albanese said.

“One of the things that I say is that of Australia’s founding document, our constitution, of all the first world nations that were former colonies, we are alone in not recognising the First Nations peoples and that our history in Australia goes back before 1788 and that should be acknowledged in our nation’s founding document.”

Colonisation ‘the luckiest thing that happened to this country’: John Howard

On the other side of the aisle, former Liberal prime minister John Howard, who held the top job from 1996-2007, made international headlines this week with comments to The Australian newspaper in which he described colonisation as “the luckiest thing that happened to this country” as he doubled down on his support for the No vote.

“I do hold the view that the luckiest thing that happened to this country was being colonised by the British,” Howard told the News Corp masthead in an interview published on Tuesday.

“Not that they were perfect by any means, but they were infinitely more successful and beneficent colonisers than other European countries.”

The former PM predicted that the Voice referendum would fail, and said it would “create a new cockpit of conflict about how to help Indigenous people”.

“I don’t think the Voice is going to produce anything other than regular stand-offs between what the voice is asking for and what the government of the day is willing to do with a fair dollop of constitutional adventurism thrown into the mix,” he said.

‘Affront to democracy’: Malcolm Turnbull takes aim at Voice coverage

Another former Liberal prime minister, Malcolm Turnbull, has also weighed into the debate with an opposing view to Howard’s.

Turnbull, who served as prime minister between 2015 and 2018, has backed the Yes vote, and this week co-authored an op-ed for The Guardian with labour rights advocate Sharan Burrow, in which they took aim at Rupert Murdoch-owned media coverage of the referendum.

In the piece, the co-chairs of Australians for a Murdoch Royal Commission expressed concern about the launch of Sky News Australia’s 24-hour, seven-days-a-week channel devoted to the Voice, accusing the Murdoch-owned network of “spreading fear and falsehoods” in “an affront to Australian democracy”.

Former Liberal deputy leader Julie Bishop joined Turnbull in expressing support for the Voice this week at an address to the National Press Club.

Bishop, who exited parliament in 2019 and is now the chancellor of the Australian National University, said she believed the Voice to Parliament was a “step in the right direction” and urged the nation to “give it a chance”.

“My message to anyone who wants to listen to what I have to say is that I believe that it is a step in the right direction,” she said in the nationally-televised address on Wednesday.

“I sat through too many of those Closing the Gap speeches in parliament to sense that what we were doing was working to close the disparity and inequality between Indigenous and non-Indigenous populations.

“In some instances, the key measures were getting worse, not better, so it’s not a question of money, it’s not a question of politicians coming up with policies, it’s a question of giving Indigenous people the franchise to make decisions to implement policies that will work.”

Bishop, who served as Liberal deputy leader for more than a decade, refused to be drawn on whether she was disappointed with the party’s No campaign on the Voice.

Under Peter Dutton’s leadership, the Liberal Party has opposed the Albanese government’s push to enshrine a Voice to Parliament in the constitution at this year’s referendum.

Earlier this month,

what he described as the “most significant change that’s been proposed to our constitution in 120 years”.

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