The first nations peoples' voice to parliament made people think about a noble task - to support our original Australians, but as with other marginalised groupings, nobody could show the way forward.
When it came to answers for first nations people, the referendum did not do any better than the state and federal elections throughout the past 12 months or so. The recent vote on the voice reminded me that nobody could get hold of data, which described socioeconomic problems, on a region-by-region basis, right around Australia, so that we took into account data from all those marginalised communities, based on race and poverty.
At one point throughout the Voice campaign, they found a first nations community in a remote area, which did not know the referendum was underway. How then would the government understand their problems?
First nations people divided their land into names such as Garigal, Wullumedegal and Darramurragal. English colonialists divided these places into local, state and federal electorates, such as Bradfield or Hunters Hill, but I have not seen data specific to all the many local regions around Australia, based on this sort of categorization, whether the issues were first nations people or other groups who experienced poverty.
It is true that there is Census data, but that is every five years. Some of it is revealed in 100 years or never, depending on how respondents treat the privacy options. All sorts of important information about people and their problems, on a local basis, could be gathered at polling places on election day, via the electoral rolls, but it never happens.
I don't agree that the fourth estate worked effectively in the Voice to Parliament Referendum. The newspapers give us national and international news and there has been every effort to destroy anything which tries to tell a local story, because nobody can see any money in it these days. Rich news companies have discontinued local news services.
The disintegration and defunding of media meant news organisations could not pinpoint the problems which required funding in all the specific first nations regions, whether they be Darramurragal, Wullumedegal or Garigal areas, or the traditional tribal locations to the north and west of Australia. The problems could differ vastly as they are investigated throughout Australia. Future such votes or plebiscites could well be plagued with the same problems. If we cannot or will not mine the data to show precisely what the problems are and where they exist exactly, through extensive use of grassroots data, then convincing the electorate to vote in favour of fixing the problems is difficult.
A man well known for his contribution to first nations media Michael Meadows, wrote a piece entitled A Return to Practice: Reclaiming Journalism as Conversation. Mr Meadows was for the idea that it should be possible to reform journalism so it could be "for and of the public" and that journalism needed to be viewed as a "cultural practice". He believed that "culture or imagining should be part of the news." He said these things more than 20 years ago and the world has changed substantially since then, but I completely agree with him.
Local, state and federal governments seem incapable of mining data, to see clearly which demographics take advantage of certain aspects of our society. Ask the government bureaucrats about industries and jobs within those industries for older workers and they don't know. Get a bit clever and ask them for psychographic stats and the government bureaucrat will probably call security to kick you out of the building! As a society, we need to understand the human race, and not just in terms of nonsense bureaucratic framework and the need to have a blasted federal election every three years.
I do have one suggestion. While we are not a republic, Australia has the Governor General. If we become a republic, we will have a president. Surely we can give the Governor General's Department or later, the President's Department, a decency budget to run ongoing research on local problems in all local government and first nations tribal lands, right through Australia and then run the resulting local news organisations, which publish the stats.
Get Buckingham Palace on the job. They would do a stunning job on this for the entire Commonwealth. Princes Diana and the former Governor General Sir William Deane showed the general public that Vice Regal duties could be used to serve those less fortunate. With the death of Princess Diana in 1997 and Sir William's term as Governor General finishing in 2001, I feel that the new century has not learnt the lessons these people tried to teach.
I'm a tad more likely to vote for a republic rather than a monarchy, but if the republic is a bankers republic, I will not vote for it, but I would gladly vote for a monarchy which can take away our social problems, with a decency budget. Just remember the Australian electorate is too mean to give to our elected politicians a decency budget and so it should be taken out of the hands of the electorate and given to the Head of State, behind the backs of a greedy electorate. Just imagine all the problems we could fix. We could end poverty - end unemployment - end violence - stop drug and alcohol abuse - the possibilities are endless ― Joseph Walz