Geoffrey Robertson KC intervenes from the seat of Sadiq Khan

Posted on 17 September, 2023 by C.L.
This entry was posted in International, Politics. Bookmark the permalink.

38 Responses to Geoffrey Robertson KC intervenes from the seat of Sadiq Khan

  1. C.L. says:
    17 September, 2023 at 2:36 am

    If the referendum is lost, all Australians will be losers.

    However much we may enjoy the spotlight on the world stage, the danger is that on October 15 and afterward, it will be interpreted by outsiders, whether we like it or not, as the vote of an ignorant and racist populace.

    What other country would frame its opposition to constitutional change with a heartfelt appeal to cluelessness: “If you don’t know, vote No”? If you don’t know, then you should have found out and might then have realised that the Voice is only a problem if you vote against it.

    The problem is that intelligent observers all over the world recognise that Indigenous people do have a right to address the government and the executive on matters in which they have a legitimate interest. This is entirely normal and uncontroversial and the least that should be vouchsafed to communities who have suffered genocide and displacement.

    In the USA, Canada, and several nations in northern Europe, Indigenous people are guaranteed their land and legal rights to petition the government. From New Zealand to Mauritius, they have their own seats in parliament.

    A UN declaration, celebrated this week on its anniversary, asserts the special entitlement of all First Nations. If Australians vote No, we will appear to outside observers as racist, in the sense of denying to an ethnic minority an opportunity for advancement to which they are entitled.

    Racism has tainted the Australian Constitution from the outset. The founding fathers (as a law student, I once read all their debates) spoke of Aboriginals as if they were kangaroos threatening the crops and were not entitled to any protection; not even a single reference in the Constitution.

    Alfred Deakin, three times prime minister, hoped they would all die out and erected a White Australia policy to ensure they would not be replaced by those he referred to as “tinted people” from abroad.

    They should not underestimate the toxicity that attaches to people connected, even inadvertently, to racism. This will tarnish Australians if this referendum, now publicised throughout the world, does not pass. It will open Australia up to charges of hypocrisy when its government complains of China’s discrimination against Uyghurs, and it will undermine the important efforts we are making to be a force for good in the Pacific.

    Ironically, Australia will have to lower its own voice to a considerable degree within the international community, and it will damage the chances of Australian candidates for international positions if they come from a country perceived as unfair to its Indigenous people. I doubt whether Mathias Cormann would have won appointment to the OECD had his candidacy come in the wake of a referendum defeat for the Voice.

    It might be worth risking international obloquy if there were anything of worth in the case for No. But all it offers are idle and pettifogging debating points – the Voice is “legally risky” (which it is not, entrusted to a robust High Court), “there are no details” (just thousands of pages of reports on how it will work), “it opens the door to activists” (no, it opens the door to a new generation of Indigenous leaders). The No case continues with a claim that “we all want to help Indigenous Australians” – but many of its proponents show no desire to do so. “It divides us” – but those doing the dividing for reasons of partisan politics of self-publicity, are the promoters of No.

    The best reason for voting Yes to my mind, is that the original constitution was drafted by deep-dyed racists and needs to be changed to accommodate a world that has moved on from the times of Deakin.

    The racist origins of the Constitution should be a matter of shame and a concern for all Australians, and we should be grateful to the Indigenous communities involved in the Uluru Statement for coming up with this idea of the Voice which will bring our Constitution into the 21st century.

    Of course, the Voice does not go far enough. The government should finally implement the recommendations of royal commissions to address the over-representation of Indigenous people in the criminal justice system, including children, and to put an end to deaths in custody which disproportionately affect First Nations peoples. But the Voice is a start to addressing the inequality embedded in our Constitution.

    Those inclined to vote No should think about how they would be regarded in later times: certainly as without pride or confidence in what Australia is capable of achieving. Future generations of Australians will castigate them for the simple reason that in 2023 they chose to give their country a bad name.

    I am old enough to remember a trip to Redfern with Faith Bandler, who led the Yes campaign for the 1967 referendum. To those who made the same objections to constitutional change that we are hearing today, she replied that the only way to achieve dignity was through a change in the national constitution. She had the support of all decent Australians.

    ————–

    Geoffrey Robertson AO KC is a London-based Australian human rights barrister and founding head of Doughty Street Chambers. He is the author of Rather His Own Man: In Court with Tyrants, Tarts and Troublemakers.

  2. Albos Toss says:
    17 September, 2023 at 5:43 am

    What a pompous twat. Lords it on high about a referendum in a country he hasn’t lived in for 40 years. Surely his legal arguments are better written than this Swiss cheese essay. I can only guess he will point to this article out to all his chums in Londistan on Oct 16 and say I did all I could.

  3. Buccaneer says:
    17 September, 2023 at 6:11 am

    How deliberately obtuse does one need to be to not realise that the slogan if you don’t know, vote no, is intended to highlight that a corrupt elite is trying to ram through a blank cheque of division with no actual limit or detail as to how the thing will operate?

    Would someone hand Geoffrey a clue bat as to how slogans work?

    Just making hand waivey statements that there are thousands of pages of details, when the PM can’t answer simple questions like how many people will make up this voice, how people will be selected for it and what power does he propose to grant it in the legislation he will draft to form it, is just a dog whistle to all the people who really just wanted to call people they don’t agree with racist to start with.

  4. Petros says:
    17 September, 2023 at 6:18 am

    He thinks he is the world.

  5. twostix says:
    17 September, 2023 at 6:19 am

    My my, if the stakes were this high they shouldn’t have forced this abomination of an idea on us in the first place.

    Very irresponsible people!

  6. twostix says:
    17 September, 2023 at 6:21 am

    And then there’s this:

    Of course, the Voice does not go far enough

    The No campaign should plaster this on every leaflet and ad. “It will never be enough”

  7. Ragu Namatjira Bennelong Schwab says:
    17 September, 2023 at 6:53 am

    the Voice is “legally risky” (which it is not, entrusted to a robust High Court),

    the recommendations of royal commissions to address the over-representation of Indigenous people in the criminal justice system, including children, and to put an end to deaths in custody which disproportionately affect First Nations peoples.

    Yes, let’s trust a judiciary that can’t keep native recidivists off our streets until they maim or kill people (including the constabulary), and even then they get leniency because of the mitigating lie of ‘intergenerational trauma’ brought on by rape by family members and the white man’s booze.

    Here’s a question for Captain Bigbrain. Will the voice stop the youth in Alice Springs pretending they are Bloods and Cripps?

  8. Ragu Namatjira Bennelong Schwab says:
    17 September, 2023 at 6:59 am

    I was going to write ‘aping bloods and cripps’ but the swashbuckler of cremorne has a lock on hominid perjoratives

  9. twostix says:
    17 September, 2023 at 7:01 am

    The Voice puts unelected malevolent stooges and their handlers like Robertson in charge of the country forever.

    A total revolution. A coup.

  10. Buccaneer says:
    17 September, 2023 at 7:20 am

    I find it interesting that Geoffrey mentions Alfred Deakin but not Chris Watson, the first alp PM who helped draft and pass the white Australia policy and who was a bona fide white supremacist. Ironically, he was born Johan Cristian Tanck in Chile and had that been known at the time, would have made him ineligible to sit in parliament.

  12. calli says:
    17 September, 2023 at 7:34 am

    The problem is that intelligent observers all over the world recognise that Indigenous people do have a right to address the government and the executive on matters in which they have a legitimate interest.

    Geoffrey Robertson…the smartest person in the room.

    Perhaps he has failed to notice the plethora of Councils, Agencies and Offices already doing just this. So, like the definition of insanity, keep doing the same failed thing hoping for a different result.

    But he’s a smart man, with a commanding intonation pattern and what is understood in chinless circles as a cultured accent.

  13. Christine says:
    17 September, 2023 at 7:36 am

    Enjoying the spotlight on the world stage? Not us.
    That’d be Robertson talking about himself, on any stage.
    Shut up.

  14. Bruce of Newcastle says:
    17 September, 2023 at 8:01 am

    Ironic that Mr Robertson fought against apartheid in the seventies, and is now advocating for apartheid fifty years later.

  15. Tel says:
    17 September, 2023 at 8:36 am

    So his whole argument is calling No voters racist and ignorant … but he thinks he’s a bit clever setting up some fictional French and Germans who supposedly call us racist … using Robertson as their conduit.

    That means of course that he has no real argument supporting the Voice, and presumably if the “Real Smart Man (TM)” can’t muddle around to find a sensible argument … probably there isn’t one.

    It’s weird that for a country that’s been called racist as many times as Australia has, there’s still a flood of people from all around the world with their hearts set on coming here. They obviously aren’t quite as worried as Robertson likes to pretend. How’s that French tourist industry going? Do a lot of people enjoy taking snapshots of themselves standing next to a burning car or burning cathedral? How’s that crime rate in London? Are the Germans happy with their industrial base getring closed down? In another 10 years there will be blond German guest-workers signing up for temporary visas to be allowed to do factory work in Turkey … just watch.

  16. Cassie of Sydney says:
    17 September, 2023 at 8:44 am

    Geoffrey Robertson, the boy from Epping who now speaks with a plum permanently stuck either in his mouth or his bum, dunno where it’s stuck but this grotesque creature deliberately altered his speaking voice back in the 1980s after he moved to London so that he could be a mover and a shaker in UK legal services. He was once married to the potty mouthed and very mediocre female by the name of Kathy Lette, he’s the father of a ‘debutante’ who, when she isn’t gracing the pages of Tatler, back in 2019 she campaigned for the Jew hating Jeremy Corbyn, and she’s now a UK Labour councillor for some inner-city London burrough. My God, my God, you just gotta laugh at the stinking verminous hypocrisy of the likes of plumarsed Robertson and his ilk.

    Further to Robertson, Brendan O’Neill from Spiked has nailed the likes of Lord Geoffrey in the weekend Oz. Worth a read.

    I wrote the other day on Dover’s Cat that Karl Marx wasn’t right about much, BUT he was right about one thing, and that is that at the end of the day most societal/cultural conflict IS about class warfare, except Marx would be somewhat bewildered at what’s happened across the West over the last two decades, where his class conflict has been taken up by the wealthy. We’ve seen Brexit and November 2016, and here is Oz, because we’re always late to the party, this VOICE referendum IS our Brexit, it IS our November 2016. But further to Marx’s bewilderment, it isn’t the working or middle class who’ve adopted Marx’s philosophy so enthusiastically, NO, NO, NO, it’s the haves, the urban smug elites of our cities who despise the have nots, the plebs, the uppity ordinary, and make no mistake, if this referendum goes down the drain (and that scenario is looking increasingly likely), we uppity plebs will be punished, severely, for our disobedience, for our refusal to kowtow to the plumarsed elites of our major cities.

    Well, I will not kowtow to them. Living in Wentworth, I see who’s out spruiking the Voice, middle aged, older and very WHITE women (there are some men), all of whom live very privileged lives here in Australia’s wealthiest electorate, who are clueless about ordinary working and middle class Australians and who are very clueless about indigenous Australians. By the way, if they were serious about making a difference, they’d be out campaigning in electorates like Fowler, Lindsay, Macquarie or the similar electorates in Melbourne, Brisbane, Adelaide, Hobart and Perth. But no, they’re these very white progressive activists but worse, they actually haven’t a clue about the Voice or its ramifications, it simply feel good progressivism. Confronting one of these bulldust artists a few weeks ago on Oxford Street here in Sydney, I asked her that if she was serious about this referendum, then wouldn’t it be better if she went out to a western Sydney shopping centre to campaign. It was a genuine question and I was polite. Well, the look on her face, it was like she’d developed sudden onset bells palsy, her face suddenly drooped, and she said to me “But I live in Wentworth”.

    So there you have it, our Wentworth radicals are too lazy, too insipid, too spoilt, to put in the hard yakka. Say what you like about those evil revolutionaries of old, Stalin, Lenin, Hitler, Mao, Pol Pot, Castro and others, these evil men did put in the hard yakka for their various causes, and they all spent time in prison. Our very white Wentworth revolutionaries, like their comrades in in Kooyong, Grayndler, North Sydney, Warringah, etc, are even too chicken to climb into one of their electric cars and drive fifteen miles to a less salubrious Sydney suburb to spruik their beloved Voice. Perhaps we could entice them out West by saying that it’s on the way to Perisher or Thredbo.

    Further to the plumarsed Robertson, remember this, this hideous man dumped Nigella Lawson for the potty mouthed mediocre Kathy Lette.

    Finally, for those who say that we on the NO side must always be “civilised and respectful” in this debate, despite a week where we have seen the usual gaslighting from the left, and we’ve seen and heard Marcia Marcia Marcia, whose nose and mouth permanently streams snot (can someone please send her a box of tissues or give her some handkerchiefs coz it’s sooooo revolting), calling me racist and dumb. Well, I say NO, the gloves are off. You started this, I’ll end it.

    Early morning rant, apologies!

  17. Ragu Namatjira Bennelong Schwab says:
    17 September, 2023 at 9:02 am

    “But I live in Wentworth”.

    With all the other racists

  18. and says:
    17 September, 2023 at 9:06 am

    Geoff Blobertson seems to be a toff, quasi-man version of Farcia Clangton. He’s real suffisticated.

  19. C.L. says:
    17 September, 2023 at 9:17 am

    …Marx would be somewhat bewildered at what’s happened across the West over the last two decades, where his class conflict has been taken up by the wealthy…

    They take up these causes to protect themselves and their wealth. They’re terrified of the big revolution. Long-term, this never works. Eventually, a generation comes along that doesn’t remember your support for the Voice in 2023. They just want you out of your Point Piper pile and lining up for soup with the rest.

  20. C.L. says:
    17 September, 2023 at 9:20 am

    I for one, though, fully support Robertson playing a role in the Voice campaign.

    The public needs to hear more from this larrikin son of Eastwood.

  21. Cassie of Sydney says:
    17 September, 2023 at 9:27 am

    They take up these causes to protect themselves and their wealth. They’re terrified of the big revolution. Long-term, this never works. Eventually, a generation comes along that doesn’t remember your support for the Voice in 2023. They just want you out of your Point Piper pile and lining up for soup with the rest.”

    Absolutely.

  22. Tel says:
    17 September, 2023 at 9:32 am

    If you don’t know, then you should have found out and might then have realised that the Voice is only a problem if you vote against it.

    People tried to find out … they went through the many pages of background from the Ularu Statement, they went through various public statements from the Yes campaigners to puzzle out what their intentions might be, and many questions about various details have been fielded by journalists. The general conclusion is they appear to want a Treaty, but they won’t say upfront that they want a Treaty. When pressed on this question they call you racist, then they call you conspiracy theorist, then they say shut up and stop reading any more of the background material.

    There’s no way to implement this without constructing a parallel political system in Australia. The Yes campaign have never put forward what this will look like or how it will work. We don’t know to what degree this will bypass state governments, just to put out one example. Rather than talk about the “robust” High Court (whatever that means) or talk about “thousands of pages” while not even providing one page as an example … perhaps it might be more productive to consider the issue rather than calling names like a primary school kid?

    Besides that, it’s the responsibility of anyone selling an idea, to be the one who makes it very clear what is being sold … and normally along with some binding guarantees. When you have a salesman offering a used car, the customer might be asking a few questions, and they sure as heck don’t expect to be told they are somehow a bad person for wanting to take a look under the hood.

  23. Buccaneer says:
    17 September, 2023 at 9:36 am

    They just don’t get it, most average people seem to have a pretty good handle on the idea that you simply don’t make amends for past racism by creating more of it in the present. This is the reason that Langton’s behaviour is so terrible, she supposedly objects to racism but is totally comfortable with throwing it around if someone dares disagree with her. Shut up racist, it’s the lazy language of intellectually corrupt leftists everywhere.

  24. C.L. says:
    17 September, 2023 at 9:44 am

    When you have a salesman offering a used car, the customer might be asking a few questions, and they sure as heck don’t expect to be told they are somehow a bad person for wanting to take a look under the hood.

    Albo Motors’ principal (kicking a tyre): “It’s a generous offer.”

  25. MatrixTransform says:
    17 September, 2023 at 9:55 am

    Albo Motors

    …. ‘Look at the size of that trunk‘

  26. Boxcar says:
    17 September, 2023 at 10:00 am

    This entire circus has evolved just like the Republic Referendum.
    Once someone scraped the surface, it was game over.
    Robertson’s diatribe reads like a high school debate essay, and looks like Swiss cheese.
    Every sentence either assumes or is ignorant of ignorance.

  27. Rabz says:
    17 September, 2023 at 10:35 am

    Robertson is quite possibly the most preposterous numptie I’ve had the misfortune to be aware of in my life.

    He’s the self parody’s self parody.

  28. Old Lefty says:
    17 September, 2023 at 11:33 am

    Geoffrey Robertson who wanted the UK police to arrest Pope Benedict despite being a lifelong bestie of the ABC’s pin-up pervert Richard Neville. The police had the good sense to ignore him.

  29. Lee says:
    17 September, 2023 at 12:08 pm

    Robertson’s gaslighting for the Voice has utterly convinced me that I am right to vote “No.”

  30. and says:
    17 September, 2023 at 12:27 pm

    They must think they’re in a Starsky & Hutch episode. Vasco Da Garma must think he’s hip, groovy… oh so cool, man. Droll and Da Garma are going back to the “hood”.

    Two old mates take their message of hope back to the ‘hood’
    Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and Indigenous leader Noel Pearson went back to the “hood” on Saturday to promote the Yes campaign and rail against ‘controversy bombs’.

    Paywalled at the Daily Telegraph.

  31. and says:
    17 September, 2023 at 12:33 pm

    Droll & Da Garma be jive talkin’

  32. Shy Ted says:
    17 September, 2023 at 12:34 pm

    Khan is also a yooman rights lawyer. In short, you don’t have any.
    GR AO KC needs to remarry Kathy Lette as punishment.

  33. and says:
    17 September, 2023 at 12:51 pm

    Another interesting piece from yesterday (must be after Droll & Da Garma hit the “hood”). Droll is now playing a sort of “lerv guru”. In the article there’s much huff, puff, fluff, and slogans. But no detail. The “yes” spruikers avoid detail like the plague

    https://www.news.com.au/national/nsw-act/news/indigenous-leader-noel-pearson-slams-divisive-politics-in-voice/news-story/b722353e3c5de4c94548504776cd46c4

  34. Tel says:
    17 September, 2023 at 1:02 pm

    Paying attention to details … we all know that really means “acting white” … only the opressor class would ever ask to know the details.

  35. Cassie of Sydney says:
    17 September, 2023 at 2:22 pm

    “Geoffrey Robertson who wanted the UK police to arrest Pope Benedict despite being a lifelong bestie of the ABC’s pin-up pervert Richard Neville. The police had the good sense to ignore him.”

    Robertson should have asked the Victorian police. They would have done his bidding.

  36. Megan says:
    17 September, 2023 at 3:35 pm

    Is there no end to this insulting, patronising, bull shit from these pretentious wankers? Inveterate self pleasurers who think all we plebs need to see the light and vote yes, is a long winded blather fest from the pen of our intellectual superiors. In their opinion, of course.

    Listen, you snotty nosed, parody of an upper class twit. You’re the type that GK Chesterton ridiculed with such cutting and clever dissection of their pompously vacuous existence. Go and hang about with your equally vacuous companions and bemoan the lost cause of racist Australia. We know who the actual racists are and it ain’t us.
    I’m voting NO. Suck on that!

  37. Jannie says:
    17 September, 2023 at 7:16 pm

    He is not that smart, he is an actor. He is just privileged so he got good gigs all his life.

  38. jupes says:
    18 September, 2023 at 6:13 pm

    The problem is that intelligent observers all over the world recognise that Indigenous people do have a right to address the government and the executive on matters in which they have a legitimate interest.

    Paraphrased: Agree with me or you are dumb.

    I’m with Rabz. Robertson is the most pompous git on the planet.

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