The resounding defeat of the Voice referendum demonstrates, once again, that far too much of day-to-day life in Australia is being dictated by remote and disconnected from the population elites.

Corporate Australia must be held to account by shareholders who were never properly consulted by a seemingly all-knowing managerial class which determined to expend significant amounts of those shareholders’ funds on a lost cause which they supported in a bonfire of virtue signaling vanity.

However, the most apparent in their total lack of understanding or knowledge of Australia and Australians are the Canberra based privileged class of bureaucrats and other hangers-on in various quangos and institutes and consultancies who pontificate regularly to Australians about what is good for them, treat most Australians with intellectual disdain and operate mainly to promote their own interests and power. Their jurisdiction was the only jurisdiction which voted to support the referendum. A telling sign of their lack of synchronicity with the majority of Australians.

Australia must return power and decision making to the people. Australia must disempower the elites which have hijacked Australian democracy and imposed unwanted policies, derived from irrelevant and elitist philosophies, upon an unwilling population.

Interestingly, those areas of the country which most strongly supported the referendum were the wealthy, removed from the coal face, segments of society who, for the most part, would never have been impacted by what the referendum proposed. This was very much a case of ‘all care, no responsibility’ by a privileged few making an easy choice and promoting their own virtue – at no cost to themselves.

The big lesson from the recent referendum is that people want to make their own decisions. They do not need ‘help’ from the elites, who know nothing about how life actually transpires in most of Australia.

The very location of Canberra, a compromise worked out in order to enable the formation of the federation to proceed, makes it an utterly inappropriate location for making decisions about anything other than issues of truly national and international relevance. The areas of interest, and power, provided to the Commonwealth through section 51 of the Constitution are these :

51. Legislative powers of the Parliament

The Parliament shall, subject to this Constitution, have power  to make laws for the peace, order, and good government of the Commonwealth with respect to:

(i) trade and commerce with other countries, and among the States;
(ii) taxation; but so as not to discriminate between States or parts of States;
(iii) bounties on the production or export of goods, but so that such bounties shall be uniform throughout the Commonwealth;
(iv) borrowing money on the public credit of the Commonwealth;
(v) postal, telegraphic, telephonic, and other like services;
(vi) the naval and military defence of the Commonwealth and of the several States, and the control of the forces to execute and maintain the laws of the Commonwealth;
(vii) lighthouses, lightships, beacons and buoys;
(viii) astronomical and meteorological observations;
(ix) quarantine;
(x) fisheries in Australian waters beyond territorial limits;
(xi) census and statistics;
(xii) currency, coinage, and legal tender;
(xiii) banking, other than State banking; also State banking extending beyond the limits of the State concerned, the incorporation of banks, and the issue of paper money;
(xiv) insurance, other than State insurance; also State insurance extending beyond the limits of the State concerned;
(xv) weights and measures;
(xvi) bills of exchange and promissory notes;
(xvii) bankruptcy and insolvency;
(xviii) copyrights, patents of inventions and designs, and trade marks;
(xix) naturalization and aliens;
(xx) foreign corporations, and trading or financial corporations formed within the limits of the Commonwealth;
(xxi) marriage;
(xxii) divorce and matrimonial causes; and in relation thereto, parental rights, and the custody and guardianship of infants;
(xxiii) invalid and old-age pensions;
(xxiiiA) the provision of maternity allowances, widows’ pensions, child endowment, unemployment, pharmaceutical, sickness and hospital benefits, medical and dental services (but not so as to authorize any form of civil conscription), benefits to students and family allowances;
(xxiv) the service and execution throughout the Commonwealth of the civil and criminal process and the judgments of the courts of the States;
(xxv) the recognition throughout the Commonwealth of the laws, the public Acts and records, and the judicial proceedings of the States;
(xxvi) the people of any race for whom it is deemed necessary to make special laws;
(xxvii) immigration and emigration;
(xxviii) the influx of criminals;
(xxix)external affairs;
(xxx) the relations of the Commonwealth with the islands of the Pacific;
(xxxi) the acquisition of property on just terms from any State or person for any purpose in respect of which the Parliament has power to make laws;
(xxxii) the control of railways with respect to transport for the naval and military purposes of the Commonwealth;
(xxxiii) the acquisition, with the consent of a State, of any railways of the State on terms arranged between the Commonwealth and the State;
(xxxiv) railway construction and extension in any State with the consent of that State;
(xxxv) conciliation and arbitration for the prevention and settlement of industrial disputes extending beyond the limits of any one State;
(xxxvi) matters in respect of which this Constitution makes provision until the Parliament otherwise provides;
(xxxvii) matters referred to the Parliament of the Commonwealth by the Parliament or Parliaments of any State or States, but so that the law shall extend only to States by whose Parliaments the matter is referred, or which afterwards adopt the law;
(xxxviii) the exercise within the Commonwealth, at the request or with the concurrence of the Parliaments of all the States directly concerned, of any power which can at the establishment of this Constitution be exercised only by the Parliament of the United Kingdom or by the Federal Council of Australasia;
(xxxix) matters incidental to the execution of any power vested by this Constitution in the Parliament or in either House thereof, or in the Government of the Commonwealth, or in the Federal Judicature, or in any department or officer of the Commonwealth.

There is nothing in the list of powers delineated above which refers to water, irrigation, climate change, electricity transmission, education, health, agriculture or an array of other areas in which the Commonwealth now operates. The over stepping of the Commonwealth into areas rightly the province of State governments must be wound back. Numerous federal departments and agencies must be deconstructed, and their activities devolved to the States. Consideration must be given to making Local Government a third arm of government, recognised in the Constitution.

A guide for this way forward can be obtained from the 1975 Federal Election Policy Speech of Malcolm Fraser, which formed the basis of the successive policy of Federalism activated by the Fraser Government :

We will provide a sound basis of financial independence and responsibility for the States and Local Governments with the most significant reform of the federal system since Federation.

Our policy has been hailed around Australia by State and Local Governments.

• It will give power and responsibility to State and Local Governments.
• It will make them answerable to their own people.
• It will also ensure equality between richer and poorer States and areas.
• These will establish an independent council for Inter-governmental Relations, designed to resolve problems between the levels of Government. It is the greatest advance in Federal-State relations since Federation.

The Council for Inter-Governmental Relations morphed into the Council of Australian Governments (COAG) which was peremptorily terminated by the Morrison Government on 29 May 2020 and replaced by the somewhat undefined ‘National Cabinet’.

A new, streamlined COAG must be created, empowered to activate the process of devolution of power from the Federal Government back to the States and to Local Governments.

The first area of policy in which this process of devolution should occur should be indigenous affairs.