And the 2023 voice award goes to...the Scots!

In the following century, the Scots inventions of penicillin (Alexander Fleming), the telephone (Alexander Graham Bell) and the television (Logie Baird) assisted greatly in medicine and communications for regional and remote Australia.

So why am I telling you how wonderful the Scots are? As a constant travelling Scottish history enthusiast I have stood beside the statues and portraits of Livingstone in Africa, Glover in Japan, Cochrane in South America and I come from the same small town in Scotland as Logie Baird and Alexander Fleming and I proudly reflect that all those nations benefitted greatly from the Scots.

My own endeavours in assisting Aboriginal communities throughout the DAA (Dept of Aboriginal Affairs) and ATSIC (Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission) were an eye opener, both good and bad. Read my columns of that period in Baird publications. I was a key part in the 30-year Mawa success story in the small transhipping port of Bing Bong NT.

Now the slack leaders of Cape York communities, whom I know, used to like and respect, are singing along with our misguided Prime Minister, claiming "we can make things right" with The Voice and that those white invaders, yes including the Scots, "Don't care".

I'll care about the greenhouse gases when the misinformed green ecoterrorists who have pervaded every level of our government and are deeply concerned about rare species of everything except our youth, do something constructive. Our kids, including our aboriginal kids need jobs, not mental health centres or handouts. They need to learn how to work.

Only work creates wealth and a healthy community, nothing else.

I'll care when our leaders wake up to the fact that building solar farms and wind turbine highways the size of Victoria around our nation, will not reduce our power bills, or allow us to manufacture anything.

After naming Perth, the Stuart Highway, the MacDonnell ranges, Campbelltown, Fraser Island and hundreds of other famous Scottish named landmarks, including many eateries, we Scots don't need any further thanks, neither do we need castigating.

Should our well-recognized towns and islands be renamed by faceless bureaucrats in an effort to change history? Captain Jamie Fraser and Eliza Fraser were shipwrecked on an island where he died, but she continued to live for a few weeks. Was the island named after him, a well esteemed Master Mariner? Or was it named after Eliza and her scribblings? Ian Frazer the Scottish inventor of a cancer vaccine deserves to have an island named after him, so a one letter change wouldn't be as confusing. Let's call it Frazer Island.

The decline of Christian church attendance in Australia including those in aboriginal communities is inversely proportional to the increase in crime, domestic violence and drug abuse. Go figure!

I am an Australian who was born in Scotland, my sons are Australian as are my grandchildren. That goes for my mates, John the Pom, Gino from Italy, Horst from Germany, Jan from Holland, Robbie from Ireland, Nick from Greece and Brother Brian my aboriginal mate from Redfern. We are all focused on our Australia, this great land where our parents chose to settle - and NO, we don't need any group to have the last word in OUR future.