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Chelsea Szabo

Yes and No: Christians’ perspectives on the Voice to Parliament

Updated: Nov 1



Photo credit: Pexels (Brett Sayles)

Tim Van der Veen is a Christian father of four and business owner. He is passionate about the Voice to Parliament.


While making coffee on the stove on a Sunday afternoon, Tim discusses slowly and decidedly why he is voting ‘no’.


“[The Voice] does nothing, in my opinion, to eliminate or relieve systemic racism, it's actually quite the opposite. It's embedding it into our Constitution,” he says.


The father of four says it is “dangerous” to draw special attention to “one subgroup of a nation” in the country’s most important document.


Tim learnt Warlpiri and spent several days in an Aboriginal community as part of his schooling.


The cultural understanding included in his education gives him more exposure to Aboriginal people than most “big city” Australians or “white fella”, he says with a chuckle.


Though he says this exposure is small, he points out he’s still sceptical despite this educational background.


Continuing to move about the kitchen, Tim compares reading the Ten Commandments without understanding their context, with reading the Uluru Statement without understanding the context its accompanying documents provide.


“All of the accompanying documents and papers bundled together with the Uluru Statement of the Heart [sic] all provide valuable context and tone to which the statement is being made,” he says.


Tim says our “beloved leader” Anthony Albanese, has tried to convince Australians that the Uluru Statement is “summarised on a one-pager”.


These documents, released by the National Indigenous Australians Agency (NIAA) via freedom of information (FOI) requests this year, have sparked debate.


The 26-page document, said to be the “complete Statement” by Sky News host Peta Credlin, was published in 2017 as part of the Referendum Council Final Report and is included in the FOI documents released by the NIAA.


“We've been called to reconciliation for a long time and there have been lots of measures that have been put in place,” he says.


“Until someone will actually say ‘this is what reconciliation looks like, this is when we know we've achieved reconciliation’, there's no end point to it.”


Tim says calling for reconciliation but not defining what it looks like, gives him “no confidence to vote for anything”.


“There have been so many different advisory organisations that have failed,” he says.

Because the Voice will be enshrined in our constitution, the business owners says, “there’s no giving it a go.”


“So, there’s a lot of questions I have and I’m not convinced from the stuff that I’ve read that it’s going to deliver on any meaningful change.”


Julie Bell is a Christian mother of four and business owner, with a background in nursing and mission work.


She is also passionate about the Voice.


On a sunny Saturday morning, Julie sits in her home in Melbourne’s outer-east discussing why she’s voting 'yes'.


“I think if I could come up with a reason to vote ‘yes’, more than anything, it would be with the word ‘listen’. And that is the thing that Aboriginal people have asked for in the Uluru Statement from the Heart, is to be listened to,” she says.


The Statement is about Makarrata, the “coming together after a struggle” to “listen heart to heart with one another”, says Julie.


The Uluru Statement was written and presented at the First Nations National Constitutional Convention in May 2017, by 250 Indigenous Australians.


The Statement calls Makarrata the “culmination” of their agenda and calls for a Makarrata Commission to “supervise a process of agreement-making between governments and First Nations and truth-telling about [their] history”.


Julie says if you can’t tell the truth about the “atrocities that were committed” without being gaslit or dismissed, there “can’t be reconciliation”.


“Reconciliation takes repentance and repentance takes truth,” she says.


Julie believes Christians are called to the “ministry of reconciliation” talked about by Apostle Paul in the Bible.


Claiming the Uluru Statement is 26 pages and if the Voice goes through “it’s going to mean bad things for white people” is a mean-spirited mentality, she says, and not in the heart or “spirit of reconciliation at all”.


“If there has been racism, and you try to correct that and bring reconciliation and healing, if you call that racism, you're flipping it. And you're reversing victim and offender which is a bullying tactic called DAVAO and it's very well understood in domestic violence treatment circles,” she says.


Julie begins to tear up as she says the lack of listening and the idea there’s nefarious intent behind the Uluru Statement, is “a continuation of white violence” and “really disgusting”.


Julie grew up in New Zealand and says their Treaty of Waitangi “really does secure some bedrock constitutional rights from the First Nations people of New Zealand”.


“We need treaty in Australia. We don't have treaty, but the voice is a start,” she says.

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