The Voice: the search for equity

In order to thrive in a first-world economy they will need to be proficient in English and to embrace the ideas which have created the free and affluent society in which they wish to be active participants. They will not need to forego their knowledge and appreciation of Aboriginal culture to achieve this, but care should be taken to ensure that it is not an impediment to their success.

The second leg of my solution is secession.

We should acknowledge that in Australia today there are significant cultural norms that are not part of the Aboriginal way of life.

Two principles which have had a major influence on our culture are the rule of law – that we are created equal; and the principle of private property - that we have an absolute right to the control and ownership of our own body and the fruits of its labours.

Equality we can trace back to our Christian traditions. 2000 years ago St. Paul wrote: “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus.”

It was in the seventeenth century that John Locke articulated the concept of private property.

More recent proponents include philosophers Robert Nozick and Murray Rothbard.

We see the effect of these clearly when we contemplate the farmer clearing scrub land, planting pastures and improving them over time, ploughing and fertilising the fields, constructing farm dams, fencing the fields, adding livestock and gradually improving the breed, eventually investing in technology - machines to replace labour-intensive operations. The result is that he is able to produce enough to feed thousands of people, hundreds of times more than the land delivered to the hunter-gatherer. 

Thousands of examples throughout the economy similar to the above, explain why our GDP per capita has risen from $3 per day to $136 per day in two hundred years.

Rothbard makes the point that:

There are only two paths for a man to acquire property and wealth: production or coercive expropriation. Or as the great German sociologist Franz Oppenheimer perceptively put it, there are only two means to the acquisition of wealth. One is the method of production, generally followed by voluntary exchange of such products: this is what Oppenheimer called the economic means. The other method is the unilateral seizure of the products of another: the expropriation of another man’s property by violence. This predatory method of getting wealth Oppenheimer aptly termed the political means.

The danger of The Voice is that it will enable a privileged sector of the population to obtain wealth by political means.