Don’t vote YES or NO to “the Voice” – it only encourages them.

Both sides have offered no PLAUSIBLE argument for voting either way. Each merely hopes that voters will be more disgusted with their opponents.

The YES camp stresses that the Voice will have no power to do anything anybody might not like but has a really good vibe, is supported by lots of celebrities and anybody not voting as they are told is a racist.

The NO camp pretends that the Voice could do something terribly dangerous and divisive.

Neither side offers any answers to the usual questions anybody should have about their arguments:

• What is it that they fear or welcome?
• Who is going to do it?
• When are they going to do it?
• Why are they going to do it?
• How are they going to do it?

Apart from a small minority of racists, most Australians think something should be done about the abysmal failures in Aboriginal policy.

Some think a “Voice” would at least be a nice gesture.

Others don’t.

The rest of us are wondering WHY these idiots are bothering us with their ridiculous “controversy”.

The law requires:

35 Vote to be marked in private

               Except as otherwise prescribed, a person voting at a polling booth at a referendum shall, upon receipt of a ballot‑paper:

                 (a)  retire alone to an unoccupied voting compartment at the polling booth and mark, in private, his or her vote on the ballot‑paper;

                 (b)  fold the ballot‑paper so as to conceal his or her vote and place it in the ballot‑box; and

                 (c)  leave the booth.

"Referendum (Machinery Provisions) Act 1984, Part III

Writing the capital letters WHY in the box complies with this requirement to ensure voters do not leave blank ballot papers for others to complete and that bribed or intimidated voters can easily disregard any unlawful instructions they are given without fear of retribution. It also frustrates any attempt to falsify the voters intention by altering a ballot paper to pretend that it could be a vote for YES or for NO.

Even if a majority in any State or the whole of Australia marks their ballot paper this way those ballot papers will not be counted as formal votes and the result will be determined by those who did vote either YES or NO.

It is highly unlikely that the overall result could be changed if enough people did switch from YES or NO to WHY. There just isn’t enough time or interest to mount a decent campaign.

But if YOU spread the word it might catch on enough so that the current clear majority for NO in every State instead becomes just a majority either way that could have been different if only their opponents had managed to come up with better arguments to persuade people who refused to vote in support of either side.

Then the people smugly convinced that they won because Australians are conservatives taken in by coalition fearmongering about the “dangers” might at least think there could be some other explanation.

Likewise the people smugly convinced that they lost because Australians are conservative and racist unlike the virtuous celebrities might at least become a bit less smug about it.

That could only happen if you also emphasize that the people you are spreading the word to should also spread the word to and convince the people they convince to also spread it.

Many of the people in each camp won’t think even if WHY got a majority.

But there are a lot of people disgusted with “both” sides and likely to not vote for either of them anyway. The more that do so, the more people are likely to start thinking.

Trees have roots, people have legs

Full disclosure: if I did have to vote, I would vote NO rather than appear to join in celebrating the Uluru “Statement from the heart”:

… the ancestral tie between the land, or ‘mother nature’, and the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples who were born therefrom, remain attached thereto, and must one day return thither to be united with our ancestors. …

The word “thither” has a sort of Biblical biblical ring to it:

All the rivers run into the sea; yet the sea is not full; unto the place from whence the rivers come, thither they return again.

At least Lutheran or King James, though even most modern translations don’t use it. Ecclesiastes 1:7

But it isn’t comparing Aborigines to rivers. It is explicitly declaring, as a matter of faith, that Aborigines are part of Australia’s native flora – vegetation.

Even sessile animals such as molluscs that spend most of their lives attached to the land typically have some period of mobility.

Of course a “generous” interpretation would not take the words literally. They are meant to assert the importance of “roots” in the sense of ancestry and lineage rather than a literal claim that indigenous people, like trees, are born from the land, remain attached to the land and must one day return “thither”.

I’m for modernity, and mobility not “roots”.

Australia has one of the easiest to amend Constitutions. We don’t amend it often because the politicians only propose stuff that means nothing.

The last time they offered anything as preposterously silly as this stuff it included “Freedom of Religion” which had been won centuries earlier.

Naturally it was rejected by nearly 70% including majorities in EVERY State and even the ACT from “whence” it came.

This one is also going down. Let’s not give them any excuse for thinking it is due to conservatism.