The Voice? I'm over it!

The Voice debate - like many Australians I'm over it, and I decided a long time before pre-poll voting, it's a big NO from me.

I'm reminded of a question posed decades ago by American physicist and television personality, Professor Julius Sumner Miller, "Why is it so?"

There's an easy answer. The Voice is a move to enshrine an unelected advisory body in the Australian Constitution which will further divide our great nation on racial grounds. QED, Julius, to sum up: It's racist.

I can hear the howls of protests from the "Yes" camp, from PM Anthony Albanese and Minister for Indigenous Affairs Linda Burney down through Voice advocates and architects such as Noel Pearson, Thomas Mayo and Teela Reid.

But hang on, there's a clear message in our National Anthem, "Australians let us all rejoice for we are one and free…" It does not continue, "One rule for you and another rule for me …"

That will be the case if the Yes vote, backed by millions of corporate virtue-seeking dollars, finally wins. But despite that, The Voice has hit a flat note and support continues to lapse in recent polls.

Why is it so? Well it seems there are a lot of other Australians who are fed up with endless "Welcome to Country" and smoking ceremonies at every major sporting venue or new road opening, the tiresome lectures on TV whenever the PM spots a microphone, the empty promises that this will be a purely advisory body with no power to compel Parliament to act …

Does this make us racist? Not in my book. Most of us are more concerned with the escalating cost of living, power bills going through the roof despite Labor's repeated promise to reduce them by $275 annually, fuel, food and other essentials such as rents and mortgages also escalating, all in step with platitudes from Treasurer Jim Chalmers about his great "Wellbeing Budget". I'm not sure what parallel universe or time zone Dr. Jim's been visiting in his own model of the Tardis, but it seems far removed from real life here in real Australia.

Many of us are also aware of the duplicity in promises by Albo and Miss Burney that The Voice will be purely advisory, after he gave an assurance following his election victory he would adopt the Uluru Statement from the heart in full. That encapsulates Voice, Treaty and Truth, as displayed on a T-shirt he was shown wearing after a clash with Radio 2GB commentator Ben Fordham. After wrongly accusing Fordham of reading from a "No" campaign leaflet, he vehemently denied that a Treaty and reparations would form any part of The Voice.

"Compensation has nothing to do with what people will vote for in the last quarter of this year," he claimed.

But that's not what The Voice architects mentioned earlier, have said. Thomas Mayo has stated the Voice is a campaign tool to "punish politicians, abolish colonialist institutions" and "pay the rent, pay reparations and compensation.

"There is nothing that we can do that is more powerful than building a first nations' Voice, a black institution, a black political force to be reckoned with."