Many different arguments for and against the Voice to Parliament have been heard in the lead-up to this year’s referendum in Australia. This has included some media and politicians drawing comparisons between the Voice and South Africa’s apartheid regime.

Cory Bernardi, a Sky News commentator, argued, for instance, that by implementing the Voice, “we’re effectively announcing an apartheid-type state, where some citizens have more legal rights or more rights in general than others”.

As legal scholar Bede Harris has pointed out, it’s quite clear Bernardi doesn’t understand apartheid. He said,

How the Voice could be described as creating such a system is unfathomable.

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Comparisons to apartheid
Apartheid was a system of racial segregation implemented by the South African government to control and restrict the lives of the non-white populations, and to stop them from voting.

During apartheid, non-white people could not freely visit the same beaches, live in the same neighbourhoods, attend the same schools or queue in the same lines as white people. My wife recalls her white parents being questioned by police after visiting the home of a Black colleague.

The proposed Voice will ensure First Nations peoples have their views heard by Parliament.

It won’t have the power to stop people swimming at the same beaches or living, studying or shopping together. It won’t stop interracial marriages as the apartheid regime did. It doesn’t give anybody extra political rights.

It simply provides First Nations people, who have previously had no say in developing the country’s system of government, with an opportunity to participate in a way that many say is meaningful and respectful.

Apartheid and the Voice are polar opposites. The Voice is a path towards democratic participation, while apartheid eliminated any opportunity for this.

Evoking emotional responses, like Bernardi attempted to do, can inspire people to quickly align with a political cause that moderation and reason might not encourage. This means opinions may be formed from limited understanding and misinformation.

“Whether you vote yes or no in the coming referendum, your choice deserves respect.” #CharlesSturtUni constitutional law expert has challenged claims made by a SKY TV host likening the proposed Voice to Parliament to an apartheid-type state.https://t.co/EePzMcIksO

— Charles Sturt University (@CharlesSturtUni) May 9, 2023

Misinformation doesn’t stop at apartheid comparisons
The Institute of Public Affairs, a conservative lobby group, has published a “research” paper claiming the Voice would be like New Zealand’s Waitangi Tribunal and be able to veto decisions of the Parliament.

The truth is the tribunal is not a “Maori Voice to Parliament”. It can’t veto Parliament.

The Waitangi Tribunal is a permanent commission of inquiry. It is chaired by a judge and has Māori and non-Māori membership. Its job is to investigate alleged breaches of the Treaty of Waitangi.

The tribunal’s task is an independent search for truth. When it upholds a claim, its recommended remedies become the subject of political negotiation between government and claimants.

The Voice in Australia would make representations to Parliament. This is also not a veto. A veto is to stop Parliament making a law.

We need to raise the quality of debate
Unlike the apartheid and Waitangi arguments, many objections to the Voice are grounded in fact.

Making representations to Parliament and the government is a standard and necessary democratic practice. There are already many ways of doing this, but in the judgment of the First Nations’ people who developed the Voice proposal, a constitutionally enshrined Voice would be a better way of making these representations.

Many people disagree with this judgment. The National Party argues a Voice won’t actually improve people’s lives.

Independent Senator Lidia Thorpe says she speaks for a Black Sovereignty movement when she advocates for a treaty to come first. The argument is that without a treaty, the system of government isn’t morally legitimate.

Other people support the Voice in principle but think it will have too much power; others think it won’t have enough.

Thinking about honest differences of opinion helps us to understand and critique a proposal for what it is, rather than what it is not. Our vote then stands a better chance of reflecting what we really think.

Lies can mask people’s real reasons for holding a particular point of view. When people’s true reasons can’t be scrutinised and tested, it prevents an honest exchange of ideas.

Collective wisdom can’t emerge, and the final decision doesn’t demonstrate each voter’s full reflection on other perspectives.

Altering the Constitution is very serious, and deliberately difficult to do. Whatever the referendum’s outcome, confidence in our collective judgment is more likely when truth and reason inform our debate.

In my recently published book, Indigeneity, Culture and the UN Sustainable Development Goals, I argue the Voice could contribute to a more just and democratic system of government through ensuring decision-making is informed by what First Nations’ people want and why.

Informed, also, by deep knowledge of what works and why.

People may agree or disagree. But one thing is clear: deliberate misinformation doesn’t make a counter argument. It diminishes democracy.

Dr Dominic O’Sullivan,  adjunct professor, Faculty of Health and Environmental Sciences, Auckland University of Technology, and professor of political science, Charles Sturt University.  This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons licence. Read the original article.

The go-to defence of pretty much everyone who is entangled in the scandal of former Australian prime minister Scott Morrison’s self-appointment to five ministerial portfolios other than his own is that no laws were broken.

But this alleged legality — which remains unclear — is barely relevant to any judgement that might be offered on the affair.

Australia’s system of government would cease to function without its actors being willing to observe conventions that do not have the status of law. It is no defence of one’s behaviour to say that no law was broken as a result of it.

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Australia has a written constitution, but any casual reader of its text would gain little idea of how the political system actually works. Ministers hold office “during the pleasure of the Governor-General”.

The document does not mention the office of prime minister. It does not speak of a cabinet.

The lifeblood of the system is convention and practice. They are not to be found in the ink of the Constitution. Many of these conventions and practices were inherited, and then adapted, from Britain.

In Australia, following developments in Canada in the late 1830s and 1840s, this agreed practice was sometimes called “responsible government”.

‘Westminister system’
“Responsible government” was a colonial adaptation of a model that was also evolving in Britain. That is why we use the term “Westminster system” as a catch-all for Australia’s system of parliamentary government.

The most famous and influential account of the Westminster system appears in Walter Bagehot’s The English Constitution (1867). Its central feature, he said, distinguishing it from the more drastic separation of powers and antagonism between branches of government characteristic of the presidential system of the United States, was “the close union, the nearly complete fusion, of the executive and legislative powers”.

The lower house of a Parliament, ostensibly elected to make laws, would in practice find “its principal business in making and in keeping an executive” that “should be chosen by the legislature out of persons agreeable to and trusted by the legislature”.

Under Westminster convention, a cabinet required the confidence of the popularly elected chamber which, in turn, was the mechanism for the government’s accountability to the nation.

Morrison did not apparently see that in secretly having himself sworn into a range of portfolios, he was misleading Parliament and preventing the accountability that Bagehot saw as the essence of the system.

Instead, in seeking to justify his behaviour, he used a phrase that US President Harry S. Truman had as a sign on his desk: “The buck stops here”.

In this vein, during his press conference yesterday, Morrison referred multiple times to the popular expectations of him. He was responsible for “every drop of rain”. Morrison seems to imagine the public believed government started and ended with him.

No apology to Parliament
Morrison has since apologised to cabinet colleagues for not having told them he signed up to their portfolios in secret. But it is telling that he has not apologised to the Parliament for misleading it, nor to the Australian people for misleading them.

There was a time, not all that long ago, when phrases such as “individual ministerial responsibility” and “collective ministerial responsibility” were meaningful. The first was the principle that ministers were responsible to Parliament and therefore to the people for what went on in their portfolios.

They could not pass the buck to advisers or public servants, even if an error or misdeed had occurred in those quarters.

Collective ministerial responsibility referred to cabinet’s responsibility as a body for its own decisions. If a minister felt so strongly opposed to a decision agreed by cabinet that they could not publicly support it, the solution was clear. They would need to resign.

These were textbook concepts in high school Australian politics classes. It was widely understood that they were ideals and theories, that they would be applied differently according to context.

But they were understood as Westminster conventions with genuine force and importance, even if an abrogation of convention did not carry the same consequence as a breach of law.

In contrast, we now seem to have a system in which it is considered a legitimate defence of one’s highly unconventional behaviour to say that no law was broken. But this is not a legitimate defence in a system of parliamentary government that rests substantially on convention.

People who claim that Morrison’s multiple portfolios were not illegal miss the point.

As @fbongiornoanu (@ANUmedia) + @EmilyMillane (@MelbLawSchool) write, the conventions in the Westminster system can’t be set aside without serious effects. #auspol https://t.co/QaLbSw9AOG

— The Conversation (@ConversationEDU) August 18, 2022

Menace to democracy
It is rather a serious menace to democracy.

The electorate’s concerns with institutional integrity were manifested in this year’s federal election result. But Morrison’s highly secretive, underhanded accumulation of power would likely not be the fodder of a federal anti-corruption commission.

This is all the more reason to be concerned at his “nothing to see here” attitude.

When the agreed way in which our politics is conducted is eroded, what happens then? Conventions are enforced by their usage. As the parliamentary practice guide notes, “conventions are subject to change by way of (political) interpretation or (political) circumstances and may in some instances be broken”.

But they cannot simply be set aside without serious and detrimental effects on the way we are governed.

Dr Frank Bongiorno is professor of history, ANU College of Arts and Social Sciences, Australian National University and Dr Emily Millane is a senior fellow, Melbourne Law School, The University of Melbourne. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons licence. Read the original article.