“The past was alterable. The past never had been altered. Oceania was at war with Eastasia. Oceania had always been at war with Eastasia.”

George Orwell, 1984

The Statement from the Heart is 1 page; it was always one page.

26 pages? Memory holed.

The past is alterable - at least for some.

mhaze,

Just like the people who were prosecuted for peddling the false Hitler Diaries, they must have been genuine diaries. Agree? I've got a few Picasso's going cheap, they're fakes so there's no chance of being prosecuted.

We are now getting the scare campaign from the YES camp, that a NO Vote would put Australia in the bad Books with the rest of the World. Yes, the rest of the World would see us in a bad light because we are not adopting the New World Order of Communism. Which Thomas Mayo, Marcia Langton, and Thea Reid want to impose on Australia with their Voice.

The 'rest of the world' has its own problems. It has no interest in what Australia does. Unless you crawled out from under a rock, you had parents who, when you played up, exhorted you to think what 'other people' would think about your behaviour.

It's that same paternalistic, ineffectual nanny-knows-best nonsense that the domineering, tinpot dictators of the Yes side are trying to bluff us with now. How pathetic!

I'm sure there are genuine concerned citizens advocating for a 'NO' vote, folk who don't have a racists bone in their body. Its just a bit hard to tell the genuine from the bigoted, race hating kind, who also advocate a 'NO' vote.

Lenore Taylor points out that "Australians have six
weeks to make a decision on the Voice. It needs to
be based on facts, not fear."

Unfortunately, the modest proposal that our Indigenous
Australians be recognised in the Constitution and is
empowered to advise policy makers on issues affecting
them is tangled up in polarising attacks and unrelated
allegations that threaten to derail the decades of work
towards reconciliation.

Taylor points out that when our Prime Minister announced
the proposed wording at Garma 2022 flanked by then
Opposition Indigenous Affairs Spokesman, Julian Leeser,
"in a spirit of bipartisanship", it was hard to imagine
just how politicised and divisive the "debate" would become.

Taylor tells us that at first the questions raised were
genuine points of discussion. Some Constitutional
Conservatives fretted that a Constiutionally embedded Voice
would open the door to legal challenges. A legit point to
examine as Taylor says.

However, this was countered by a majority of Constitutional
Law experts and the Solicitor-General. Others like Lidia
Thorpe railed at the plan being "ineffective" and not going
far enough. But when Peter Dutton locked the Coalition
against the Voice - people of the NO campaign as Taylor
says - "appeared to take the advice of Frank Underwood -
the fictional President in the TV drama - The House of
Cards."

When things weren't going his way - he said - "If you
don't like the table, turn over the table."

Taylor validly argues that "the modest straight forward
referendum questions were stripped of context and meaning
and conflated with unrelated, racially charged assertions,"
the end result being that the actual pros and cons were
lost in the confusion.

cont'd