In a recent essay on the threat of civil war in Western societies, Professors David Betz and MLR Smith write that our countries have been made ripe for internal strife by a political elite that has caused a “collapse of legitimacy” by repeatedly refusing to respect the will of the people.
They warn:
Governments can survive policy failures; they rarely survive the public perception that democratic choice is irrelevant. The consequence is a political culture no longer defined by Left and Right, but by something starker: a belief that politics itself is theatre, with real decisions scripted elsewhere, beyond scrutiny or correction. In this sense, the central political belief of liberal democracy—the conviction that voting matters—has withered away.
The authors use the example of Brexit, but in Australia we’ve seen a similar erosion of faith in democracy due to the Covid-era lockdowns and vaccine mandates which no one voted for, and decades of mass immigration that a majority has never been in favour of.
But Victoria’s new treaty – which establishes a powerful new chamber of parliament exclusively for aboriginals, who now get one more vote than everyone else – is set to shatter what illusions remain that our choices at the ballot box mean anything at all.
Left-leaning Victorians rejected the Voice to Parliament in 2023, which despite the Labor state government’s claims to the contrary is exactly the same as the treaty in the eyes of ordinary people.
It also arguably goes even further than Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s proposal, but with no public debate.
It’s telling that no opinion polls on the subject were conducted, by either side of politics, until the treaty bill was already introduced to parliament with its passage into law a foregone conclusion.
And when the IPA finally conducted a poll earlier this month, just 37% of voters were in support.
Of course, the political elites and their mindless supporters are insisting there was a mandate because a treaty was apparently part of the government’s policy platform at the last state election – never mind that the election was in November 2022, a year before the Voice.
This is exactly the type of arrogant argument that makes the public realise, sooner or later, that they’ve been lied to and their votes have become meaningless.
Everyone knows that winning an election does not mean the party with the majority of seats can do every single thing it brought to the election no matter what the public thinks, that election promises are broken all the time, and that major changes to the structure of government itself need to go to a referendum.
Everyone also knows, no matter how rudimentary their knowledge of the political system, that in a democracy all citizens should get equal votes, regardless of who they are.
Victoria’s treaty makes a mockery of this by creating a whole new branch of government, paid for by all but elected by a small minority, that has power over the other branches of government that everyone else gets to elect.
To make matters worse, a sizeable proportion of this small minority is driven by resentment towards the Anglo-Celtic founding stock of Australia, and many are militant far-left activists who want payback for supposed colonial wrongs.
Anti-Australian senator Lidia Thorpe, for example, who despite being more White than aboriginal, will be among those who get to elect the “Gellung Warl” – and her vote will carry a lot more weight than ours do, as she is one in about 40,000 indigenous voters in Victoria.
She will also get a regular vote, which will be one in 4.5 million.
One would think that Labor and the political elite in general (the Liberals also want to create their own indigenous body), for all their talk of “social cohesion” and liberal democracy, would think twice before passing such a legitimacy-destroying bill, but no, they just went ahead and did it anyway.
They did it because they don’t really believe in real democracy either – if they did they wouldn’t have forced us to get experimental gene therapy or accept millions of immigrants we didn’t want – to them it’s just a system that allows them to do whatever they want once they’ve been elected.
They think the know better than you, they think they know what’s good for you, and they won’t let your pesky votes get in the way.
Betz and Smith, in their twelve policy suggestions to limit the prospect of civil war, call for a re-legitimisation of democratic authority, and urge the governing order to “end practices that teach voters their choices don’t matter”.
But they also point out that this is near impossible, as it would “require elites to abandon the very stratagems—lawfare, technocratic evasion, disdain for popular mandates—by which they have secured their power”.
This treaty should remove all doubt about the status of democracy in Victoria, and the prospects of our ruling class course correcting before it’s too late.
And in coming years, when “social cohesion” worsens and our society fractures even further, don’t let them forget that they caused this, not us.
Header image: Aboriginal activists celebrate after being given their own branch of government (Jacinta Allan – Facebook).
