That the Voice is in trouble is clear:
If given the chance, I will vote “yes” because it is largely harmless as an advisory body and might do some good.
To do so, I will ignore discomfiting implications of embedding race in the Constitution. The alternative position of ignoring indigenous heritage makes no sense to me.
However, as this analysis suggests, Voice is more “feel good and hope for change” than a substantial policy proposal.
Moreover, it has been prosecuted as a change largely based upon the abusive labelling of any opposition.
It is a typical “woke” undertaking with more symbolism than substance, as well as more ad hominem than argument.
Thus, I wonder if the tilt against the Voice is part of a broader shift in the polity towards a kind of woke counter-reformation.
We have already seen symptoms of this in the US, where consumer boycotts have destroyed huge brands following woke marketing.
In politics, too, Ron DeSantis won a Florida election landslide on the slogan “where woke goes to die”.
These episodes suggest a lot of anger towards woke in a liberal democracy.
Is it the same Downunder?
Consider the amount of feel-good, progressive, argument-free and abusive change pursued by the Albanese Government.
The nation is wracked by an inflation crisis centred around housing shortages. Everybody knows the real driver of the crisis is extreme mass immigration. Read the comments on any housing shortage story on any masthead.
Yet woke authorities – politicians and media benefitting from the housing shortage – refuse point blank to refer to the actual cause. It is a woke conspiracy of silence.
The real consequence is that local children are royally screwed, and parents know it.
The same argument can be made about falling real wages. The obvious and statistical fact that immigration suppress wages is wokewashed from public debate.
Yet the shock to living standards from real wage falls is the largest in recorded Australian history.
It gets no better for woke in the private sector.
Often promulgated by the big end of town, corporations leap into symbolic progressive reform, but nothing in their real-world behaviour changes.
Except it gets worse.
Disguised by woke platitudes, over-concentrated monopolists are increasing pressure on policymaking for more economic rent via public relations campaigns.
Like politics, woke at work has become a kind of mass gaslighting covering a merciless class war.
Then there are the social and psychological angles.
Woke sacred cows like trans-genderism and neuro-divergence are fine at the margin. But when preached through the myth and ritual of work, sport and education, they morph into mass hysteria.
Encouraging kids to identify as a cat, camera, or cross-dresser is not an issue of fairness for individual expression or development. It expresses abused children being swept into cognitive backwaters where they can drown in dislocated fantasy.
This is not to say that gender-divergent and neuro-divergent states do not exist nor have no rights. Of course, they do.
But have we just discovered that such identities are many times more common in children than we thought? Or are we creating them by casting a woke fog around normalcy?
When a woke institutional context represents all boys as potential predators and all girls as potential victims, ironically, persecuted minority status is the only safe place left!
Finally, I wonder if COVID is playing a role.
The post-COVID world has lost its innocence. Consumer lifestyles and goals that once had meaning were exposed as fragile at best and even illusory. There is an urge in the polity for more constructive change to restore purpose.
Yet, it is being frustrated and hijacked by disproportionate woke attention on the fewest possible beneficiaries of reform while enabling hugely destructive forces such as class wars to materially worsen for the majority.
This is the ultimate gaslighting of our time. Australians love their lifestyles. And they love a good old-fashioned punch-up about how to make them better. Instead, they are being “cancelled” as living standards and purpose fail.
This all adds up to a powerful concoction of woke reformation that nobody voted for. At home, school, work, our relationships, spirit, bank accounts and wealth. Much of it is for the worse.
We should expect a woke counter-reformation of force. Sadly for Reconciliation, Voice may be the tipping point.
