The Voice: How a Sloppy Australian Conspiracy Unraveled in Just Two Weeks
A real-life anatomy of a failed plot in Australia
Just four weeks ago, I reported how a prediction by Australian “conspiracy theorists,” falsely debunked by the press, became reality in just three months.
That story was about certain Australians who predicted that the government would move their country to become a “cashless society.” Those people were resolutely debunked and called crazy right-wing conspiracy theorists by the Australian press. Then, three months later, the Australian government decided to move towards a cashless society, indeed.
At the time, I thought that three months from a conspiracy theory being debunked to the same theory coming true was fast.
Boy, was I wrong! Australia just outdid itself.
The Voice - Proposed Australian Constitutional Change
The Labor Party of Australia and other forces are championing a referendum to change the Australian Constitution. The proposed change will create The Voice, a new body representing indigenous people. The Voice (fully named Indigenous Voice to Parliament) will have a say in law and policy development in Australia.
The proposal is vague and calls for creating a novel structure — almost a new branch of government — with unclear responsibilities and an undefined process of selecting its members.
Uluru Statement From the Heart
The vague proposal crucially depends on a statement from representatives of Indigenous people called the Uluru Statement from the Heart.
Officially, here it is, a one-page document highlighted by me:
I used blue to circle the part of the document that is the introduction: a short statement on what the document will discuss.
What is missing from this page is the conclusion. The one-page document also completely misses the prescriptive part (specifics of its proposal). This one-page text ends abruptly without a logically complete culmination and details and seems incomplete.
People smarter than me noticed that and said this is only the first page from a larger document. They publicly stated that Australians are being misled and the underlying policy-setting documentation is MISSING and is not presented to the Australian people, who will vote on The Voice proposal in a referendum - without access to the details of what is being proposed.
So, they explained, Australians do not even know what they will be voting on! Citizens will vote on a proposal in which all but one page of the most important document are kept secret.
Storm of Official Denials
The allegation that the pages from the Uluru Statement were withheld from the public caused a storm among the supporters of The Voice referendum!
Australian fact-checkers published a sternly worded debunking of what was called a conspiracy theory:
The verdict False. The Uluru Statement is a one-page document comprising just 440 words, as confirmed by the statement’s authors. Papers released under FOI contain the statement, but also include 25 pages of minutes of meetings held with Indigenous communities in 2016 and 2017, which are not part of the Uluru Statement from the Heart. The claim that the FOI documents reveal that the Uluru Statement of the Heart is 26 pages long and contains policies such as reparations for First Nations peoples is false.
Australian Labor PM, Mr. Anthony Albanese, said that the “26 pages” is a QAnon-style conspiracy that is so stupid as to not even qualify as a theory:
The rebuttal of RMIT fact-checkers and a strong statement by the Australian PM was enough to make Facebook, a foreign organization, censor all statements by Australians questioning the Uluru statement.
The social media discussion was censored, and Facebook accounts were deleted. But the story only began!
The Lies Unraveled
Australian PM Anthony Albanese lied about the Uluru statement being one page. The paper actually is 26 pages long - and has pages neatly numbered!
The document in question was obtained from the government via Freedom of Information. It contains the Uluru statement.
The Uluru statement is a set of twenty-six numbered pages. For those who want to check my words, open the FOI’d document and go to page 87 (saying Document 14 on top).
The discovered pages 2-26 make perfect sense and complete the Uluru statement. These pages contain the history, the demands, and the roadmap to implementing them. They mention historical injustices, reparations for the indigenous people, and more. Without pages 2-26, the first page is like a locomotive without a train.
The leading proponent of The Voice, Megan Davis, told fact-checkers that the Uluru Statement is only one page:
A spokesperson from the National Indigenous Australians Agency (NIAA) told RMIT FactLab in an email, “the Uluru Statement from the Heart is a one-page document, [as] confirmed by the authors Noel Pearson, Pat Anderson AO and Professor Megan Davis.”
Megan Davis was caught in a lie: Australians uncovered an old video by Prof. Davis, where she openly stated that the Uluru Statement was a multi-page document:
The brazen lies by the fact-checker RMIT were too much even for Facebook, which was forced, by the public outcry, to fire them:
The good news is that the lies by the proponents of The Voice referendum were too obvious and were thus discovered.
This was a Classic Conspiracy! (Australian Style)
Let’s look at this story more closely:
A proposal to alter the Australian Constitution to create a new governmental body with a vaguely defined structure and unclear but far-reaching responsibilities was put forward by the Labor Party and a cluster of behind-the-scenes “progressive organizations.”
The new body would likely be influenced by various unaccountable shadowy committees (which is likely why it was promoted.)
Any attempts to question this proposal were declared “right-wing propaganda” by the press.
The government (Prime Minister Albanese) lied. (see above)
The proponents of the referendum lied about its most fundamentally defining documents. (see above)
Activist, politically engaged fact-checkers lied. (see above)
The official Australian “science” somehow got involved in politics (sounds familiar?) and demanded a YES vote.
Facebook censored any opposition to The Voice at a critical moment. (see above)
As with most conspiracies, this one would likely have succeeded if not for some luck uncovering the underlying Uluru document and Professor Davis’s earlier video admitting its length.
The conspirators were sloppy and got caught.
The Labor Party Force-Vaccinated and Imprisoned Indigenous People in COVID Quarantine Camps Just Two Years Ago
The Voice proposal is often presented as a favor to the Indigenous people by the Labor Party. This party wants to look like a champion of Indigenous people, to be seen at the forefront of listening to the voice of Indigenous people.
Listening to the indigenous voice and respecting their wishes is good. Right?
However, just two years ago, the Labor Party completely ignored the resistance of the indigenous people of Australia and conducted a campaign of terror and coercion to force-vaccinate the unwilling indigenous Native Australians. Native Australians were famously unwilling to get vaccinated for various reasons, including their religious views, but also due to common sense that the native people retained due to closeness with Nature.
Chief Minister of Australia’s Northern Territory, Michael Gunner of the Labor Party, led the most shameful campaign of coercion, intimidation, and imprisonment of Indigenous people to force-vaccinate them against their will.
Watch this desperate plea of terrified unvaccinated indigenous people of Northern Territories, who were arrested, imprisoned at home, and deported to Covid quarantine camps by the ruthless representatives of the Labor Party’s led government of Northern Territories:
Click here to watch the heartbreaking video. EDIT: Jessica Rose wrote a great, poignant report about that story two years ago - check it out.
Does that sound like a party wishing to respect Indigenous voices? Not to me!
I am Not Telling Australians How to Vote
I am not an Australian citizen. I have never visited that beautiful country. My post is not about telling the people of Australia how to decide on possibly the most important poll they will be voting on.
I am not considering the merits of The Voice proposal or whether the indigenous people of Australia, who suffered greatly in the past and even two years ago, deserve more than just a vote at the ballot box like all other Australians. This question is not up to me to answer!
This substack post aims to show how a typical conspiracy involving dissembling government, politicized science, lying fact-checkers, powerful foreign corporations, the corrupt press, and “democracy activists” works.
This funny YouTube video is a summary of The Voice story:
What do you think?
This has been a real low point in Aus politics. On the upside, it exposed the 'fact checkers' for what they are - activists on Meta's payroll.
So far, support for the Voice is failing, mainly due to the behaviour of the Yes campaign, with their semantic games and such:
https://news.rebekahbarnett.com.au/p/support-for-the-voice-is-failing
Thanks for covering this Igor. To even question this in Australia online results in immediate branding of ‘racist’!