I Want a Yes Case
Please convince me that I should vote Yes. I don't want to be on the side of Dutton or Abbott, but at the moment I think I am.
This is part of a series which follows my developing understanding of the Voice referendum. My updated thoughts are here and some thoughts on guilt, owing and treaty here.
Right at the top I want it out there that I’m genuinely not trying to convince anyone about anything here. I really want to be convinced that I should vote Yes to The Voice Referendum. If anything I want some Nays to join me as a Nay in swaying to the Yays. I don’t find the No case presented by Team No to be particularly compelling, but the Yes case is far less so. What I plan to do in this post is outline my current thinking in the hope that one of you smart people out there will show me which bits I’m thinking about incorrectly. I will do this to
specific claims that I'm unsure about which might be wrong. My best case scenario is that some of the main points will be refuted and I’ll flip to a Yes.
I’m lifting some of the main points of each case out of the pamphlet all Australian households got sent, referred to here as “the pamphlet”. I’m also referring to arguments in both directions I’ve heard made when I’ve asked friends to please convince me to vote Yes.
Also at the top, I’m a logos person: I tell myself that logic is what persuades me. I am allergic to pathos arguments (about status or authority) and ethos arguments (emotional appeal). It absolutely feels like I should vote Yes, that’s why I’m writing this. It feels like it's the right thing to do to help people that need help when clearly things that we have been trying are not working very well. But feels is not enough.
This post is long.
Contents
1. Contents
2. Overview of what the arguments need to do.
3. The Proposal
4. The No case: what’s compelling, what’s not and why not
5. The Yes case: what’s compelling, what’s not and why not
6. Other points I find compelling
7. What the Yes case should have done and why didn’t they?
Overview of what the arguments need to do.
If there’s a referendum to change the constitution, the Yes argument needs to persuade people and the no case doesn’t. No is the default. That’s why it needs an absolute majority. The Constitution is a big deal, changes should be rare and absolutely necessary. Less dramatic solutions should have been tried. The proposal should be sound, well thought out and have strong evidence for being successful.
The Proposal:
“Chapter IX Recognition of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples
129 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice
In recognition of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples as the First Peoples of Australia:
there shall be a body, to be called the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice;
the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice may make representations to the Parliament and the Executive Government of the Commonwealth on matters relating to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples;
the Parliament shall, subject to this Constitution, have power to make laws with respect to matters relating to the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice, including its composition, functions, powers and procedures.”
The No case: what’s compelling, what’s not and why not
There are no details.
To say I don’t really pay attention to the news is an understatement. I deliberately avoid it. I think I have good reasons for this. I will outline them in a future post (which I’m currently trying to write). I only found out about the Voice maybe two months ago. People told me it was a big deal, so I tried to find out what it actually was. I couldn’t. I still can’t. I ask Yes people and they can’t tell me. I read the words of the amendment and I think “that’s not a big deal”, then the No case outlines some of the consequences which seem bad, then the Yes case doesn’t say those consequences aren’t realistic. If anyone has more detail about exactly what the Voice would be and what it would and wouldn’t have the power to do, please point me towards those resources. This is probably the main thing preventing me from voting Yes.Time matters. Sausage making is a messy business. We don’t get a bunch of stuff done because the people that can do things are flat out. Adding friction to that process has a cost. Spending time has an opportunity cost.
Permanent. Irrelevant. If the Voice is good, permanent is good, if the Voice is bad, permanent is bad. Permanency has no valence alone.
How would the Voice be chosen? I mostly don’t care about this one. If Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders decided they wanted to pick by little toe length because that’s the way they do things, I have no ground to go against that. I’m not an expert on anything to do with the way Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders decide things. If you can’t choose your Voice how you want, what have you got?
It will divide us by race. Kinda. I’ve addressed this more in 6d below.
The Yes case: what’s compelling, what’s not and why not
At the top here, a bit of consequentialism that’s important for what I’m about to say:
All that’s important is the experience of things which experience. That’s where everything cashes out. If I drop my favourite mug and it breaks, the only way in which that matters is through the experience of people that it affects. My mood is down for a bit. Maybe I kick the dog later when I’m frustrated about something else and it has a sore rib cage for a bit. There is nothing inherent about the mug breaking that matters, it’s just how it affects things that experience.
I don’t think groups experience in a way that isn’t totally encapsulated by the experience of the individuals in the group. Their experiences are linked by causal factors which affect the whole group, but everything still cashes out at the level of experience. For example, if Collingwood win the Grand Final, their supporters as individuals in a group feel happier for a while, but the group itself doesn’t feel anything. If the government starts to systematically murder redheads, then redheaded individuals would rightly start to feel terrified, but redheads as a group don’t have the capacity to “feel” anything.
Community consultation is good. There are a bunch of feel good stories told in the pamphlet about how consulting with community worked wonders for those projects. The examples were in Health Services, Education and Indigenous Rangers.
I’ve been getting into rationality and “good science” lately and these examples are dicey, particularly the education one. What does “strong school attendance rates and better results” mean with no numbers attached? How many similar programs did they run with worse results? How many with better results? Presumably none, or they would be the examples used. So in the best situation they found results they couldn’t even tell us except to say that they are “strong” and “better”. There’s a way to measure attendance. Everyone does it. They could even use the percentage increase and leave out the absolute numbers. If they are impressive, why not put them in? What does “better results” mean? You can quantify that in a bunch of ways, so why not do it? It’s super suspicious that their measure is that some kids participated in a robot competition.
If community consultation is a good thing to do, why only for one group? If one group needs more representation because they are underrepresented in Parliament why not another? We apparently have 11 Indigenous members and senators, but how many poor members and senators?
If you say this stuff works, then just do more of it. No referendum required. There is already the National Indigenous Australians Agency (NIAA) with the explicit vision and purpose of consulting with the community. They were founded in 2019 under a Liberal government, so they’ll likely continue to exist for a while. I imagine it would be a political mistake to get rid of them. They are flooded with money ($2.5b annual budget). How is this not an open and shut case which involves them doing their job in the way that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people want them to. Also, the CEO is Indigenous. The two ministers are Indigenous. It’s run by Indigenous people (not exclusively). So if you have the means and the will, what’s missing? Just do the thing you want to do. Consult with community. What is stopping this from just happening? It would be more effective because it can be targeted to the communities affected by specific programs, rather than having a group which allegedly represents Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people across the nation.
Are you on our team? It seems like the difficult question of "do you want this specific referendum to pass" is being replaced with another question that is, "do you support Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, and are you on our team?" I kind of wanted to annotate the whole Yes argument in the pamphlet with how vacuous it was and how many times they effectively just asked "are you on our team?" Once your filters are on and you’re seeing it, it’s infuriating.
Gives people a say in what affects them. Does it even do this? “A national voice cannot speak for country.” (Nyunggai Mundine). The way I see it, there is no number of people on the Voice that makes sense. You’d need 200 for it to represent Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders nationally. At least. If you have more than 50, each individual is not looking at most of the things the group passes. Maybe that’s just how it works. I can see a future where a bunch of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders say “The Voice came in and we still weren’t represented." The Yes case is written as though there is one Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander community. There isn't. There never has been. Nobody "speaks on behalf of". There's no committee of fewer than 200 people that could pretend to claim that.
Other points I find compelling
What's the downside in voting yes? A few people I spoke with had a general sentiment of “why not vote yes?” What is there to lose? What are you worried about? It seems like we should do something, why not give this a crack? I’ve addressed most of these above (time, friction, perception that people have a say but many are still disenfranchised). Here are some more reasons.
Moral licensing. I first heard about this on the first episode of Revisionist History, Malcolm Gladwell’s podcast. The general idea is that when you overtly signal something, you feel it gives you permission to act against that idea. The US elects a black President then a bunch of people who didn’t even vote for him can say “America isn’t racist, we voted in a black President.” The example in the podcast is Julia Gillard. It literally brought me to tears. The fear is this: if we have a Voice, we’ll think a job has been done, when really a tool has just been built. People will say “don’t we have the Voice for that?” If the Voice works in the best possible way I can imagine, then it won’t be an issue, because solvable issues will be being solved. But if it doesn’t work that well - which is the specific scenario the “what is there to lose” gang are talking about - then we’re actually worse off than before.
Precedence. Not legal precedent, I don’t really understand that. More that if this shambles that makes no sense can pass based on more than 50% of the population reasoning that agreeing with Dutton and Abbot definitely makes you a bad person, then what is a referendum worth? How many proposals like this will come through? I hope none. Maybe because everyone knows it’s a shambles, even the Yes folks, everyone will be turned off referendums for a few decades.
Why not do a trial?
I can’t think of a downside of trying out a Voice for a year, then having a referendum. It would give time to iron out details and any issues. People would be more comfortable with it if they knew what it was and how much power it would have - ie. they would actually know what they’re voting for. It could surely fit within the NIAA budget, else have a budget of its own - the referendum is already costing $75m, so I’d be happy to pay for a trial to make it not totally useless.What on earth were our representatives thinking? I thought Parliament was a group of people that at least understood politics. How did they look at this and think “yeah, that’ll do”?
To group or not to group? If I’m the wokest mf out there, am I supposed to group or not? It seems like I am when it suits me, but I should call it out when it doesn’t. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders as a group need specific help, so for the Voice we’re grouping. But we should be judging people as individuals, not as members of a group when looking at job applicants or something. At the end of the day I see every person as a person (see 5a.), so I’m almost a “never grouper” I say be careful grouping, and if you are going to group because you’re sure it’s a good idea, group according to what you really want. The way I see it, if you’ve got a breadline white family and a middle class Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander family and you’re to decide who deserves an extra something, it’s mighty unfair to give it to the middle class folk regardless of their heritage. If you want to help people, ask who you really want to help. You know who I want to help? People that need help. That’s the criterion. Do some groups face unique disadvantages? Absolutely. But will the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people that need help be disproportionately advantaged by policies that help people that are up against it? Of course. Just be careful if you want to bake skin colour into your laws. I know a bunch of poor non Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander folk and they certainly don’t seem to me like successful oppressors. I can’t speak to how they feel, but if I were them, I’d be feeling a bit hard done by. The graph below is just to illustrate a point: on average there is a gap between Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders and non Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders. This does not mean that all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders are worse off than all non Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders. If you ask people that outright, they immediately say it’s true, but it seems to get lost a bit. If the blue line represents Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander income/health/wealth/outcomes (it doesn’t, this is just a demonstration) and the red line is non Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders, we can see that there’s a 10 point gap in outcomes on average. And yet, the median Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander is better off than 16% of non Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders (another reminder that these are made up numbers to demonstrate the principle - if I could find the real numbers, I would use them instead. If anyone can find them for any measure, please direct me there so I can update). The group difference is bad. There’s something to “fix” there. If we could move the blue distribution to the right 10 points for free, we would. But given that there is a cost to everything, would we spend resources trying to get the “blue” at 80 across to 90, rather than pick up a red at 30 and get them to 40? If you think yes because they’re Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander then we’re working from such different base points that I’m surprised you’ve read this far. If you think no, obviously it’s better to help the poor person, then why factor in colour at all? If we just help everyone to the left of the black line, we’re targeting what we care about and disproportionately helping blues.
Closing the Gap with a Similar Group. This is more of a question/wondering/plea for pointers than an argument. Working out how your school is performing compared with other schools is a tricky business. One tool the Department throws us is a comparison school. This is not a real school, but one theoretically constructed to have students coming into it identical to the ones coming into ours. Their outcomes are theoretically calculated, then compared with our outcomes. It’s better than comparing with the mean or median, because if Queenstown (remote) is below on those measures and Taroona (wealthy suburb) is above, it doesn’t tell you anything useful. What’s the point? Well I want to know the difference in outcomes for a similar population to the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander population. Or even specific Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander populations. If you pick an Indigenous group in WA and compare them with a population of people with similar inputs (remoteness, access to healthcare, parental income, etc.), then what is the difference in outcomes? Ie. Are the outcomes bad because people in the group are Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders, or are they just the same as anyone’s outcomes if they grow up in that situation. If that’s the case, then why can’t we just say we want to help people who have less opportunity, rather than saying we want to help Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders who have less opportunity. Effectively I’m saying we will never close the gap between two groups if one is disproportionately growing up poor in a remote place and the other is growing up with more access in the city. It’s just a more difficult logistical situation to provide anything to remote areas than densely populated cities. So let’s stop pretending about what the problem is, address the actual issue and front up to the fact that some things are more difficult than others.
Expected Value Theorem. (EVT is the thing where if you took a bet 1000 times, would you be ahead? For example if you flip a coin and win $10 on a head and lose $10 on a tail, the expected value is $0 - if you did it 1000 times, you would expect to be about even. If you win $100 on a 5 or 6 on a 6-sided die, and lose $60 on a 1, 2, 3 or 4, the expected value is -$6.67 - if you made this bet 1000 times, you would expect to lose $6.67 each time on average.) I can totally see a way the Voice could succeed. 100 people are chosen, they consult with various communities around the country, they make representations based on this, they make comments on things which affect them, they don’t make comments on things that don’t affect them, the Parliament doesn’t make laws giving them extraordinary powers, their representations lead to laws/bills/programs that are effective in improving the lives of Indigenous Australians. I can see a tonne of ways it can be more cost than benefit. If we run the simulation infinite times, would we be likely to be better off on average? Considering how bungled the process has been so far, surely not. At a minimum it’s going to be messy. I’m not afraid of mess, but mess has an opportunity cost.
Changes to the Constitution are important.
I don’t know if this one is real. People I trust say things about the Constitution being important. It seems important. It doesn’t really matter much, because this point is only useful in that it makes me think we shouldn’t make changes unless that’s the only way to do the thing.The Law vs The Done Thing. One of the many ways in which Donald Trump is different to normal politicians is that he doesn’t care for The Done Thing. His insane actions have shown us that The Law doesn’t restrict US Presidents as much as The Done Thing does. I think there’s a good chance that having the Voice could technically legally open a big can of worms (Parliament passes a bunch of laws saying the Voice only has one person, that they choose the person, that the person can do whatever they want), but that The Done Thing will prevent that kind of thing from happening.
What the Yes case should have done and why didn’t they?
A big part of the issue is not what the Yes crew say, but what they don’t say. Specifically what they don’t refute that the No case says. It would seem on first pass that a lot of the No case is BS, but the Yes case isn't saying that it’s not BS, which is a huge red flag telling me that it might not be BS. They are instead appealing to emotion. It’s like someone responding when you say “but isn’t sugar bad for your health” with “sugar tastes great and will make you feel good”. So the first thing that should at an absolute minimum be in the Yes case is a rebuttal of the No cases points which seem insane. Their absence lends so much credence to the No case.
The normal process is to have a constitutional convention where the specific proposal is discussed by the people who want to get it through so they can fine tune it and add enough information to persuade the public to vote for it.
The result of this not happening is that we have something that's poorly thought out and presented because non Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people were scared to change what Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people came up with. It's not bad because Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people came up with it, it's bad because it didn't go through a decent review process. Review is the best thing in the world for making things good. Most people hate doing it (I certainly do), but at the end of a review, nobody thinks it wasn’t worth it. In short, the Yes case didn't consider the point of view of the voter, those who they were trying to convince. What the shit? The whole purpose of this thing is to consult with community then have that point of view heard by politicians, and they clearly don't understand consulting or point of view.
So there it is. Reminder than I would love to be convinced to vote Yes. Please comment with any points you disagree with (feel free to agree too). Be as specific as you can be - I know not all points are specific. Also share with people who might be able to speak to the specifics of how things work - or just people that might be interested. Thanks to those who contributed to this by discussing this topic with me before now.