The Othering of the Citizen

A Constitutional and Theological Case for Repealing South Australia's First Nations Voice

This piece follows two earlier pieces I wrote for Australians for Better Government: Beyond the Campaign, which asked what that change meant for democratic legitimacy, and South Australia's Uluru Statement, which asked whether ancestry should alter the structure of political representation.

This piece asks the question underneath both: what happens to our understanding of citizenship when South Australia's First Nations Voice formally distinguishes between citizens according to inherited identity?

By “othering,” I mean something precise, not merely emotionally loaded: institutionalising a distinction in which one category of fellow citizens is placed in an enduringly different relationship with the state. I am describing a structural effect, not alleging malicious intent. Nothing in what follows should be read as a claim about anyone's motives.

1. What Has Been Built

In March 2023, the South Australian Parliament passed the First Nations Voice Act 2023. It established a standing statutory advisory body representing Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander South Australians, an institution created without a sunset clause, though the Act does provide for a statutory review (more on which below). South Australia became the first Australian state to legislate a First Nations Voice specifically to its Parliament.

It was not, however, the first elected First Nations representative body operating at state level: Victoria's First Peoples' Assembly had been operating since 2019 as the representative body for First Peoples in that state's Treaty process. The South Australian model therefore represented a distinct development—a legislated, identity-qualified representative structure with formal access to Parliament and government.

Eligibility rests on a three-part test set out in the Act itself: descent, which the Act defines biologically, self-identification, and acceptance by the relevant Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander community. Having set out that fuller test once, I will use the shorter terms “ancestry-based” or “descent-based” for readability through the rest of this piece, without meaning to conceal it. The Act also amended the Constitution Act 1934, inserting a formal recognition of the importance of First Nations voices into a new section 3 of Part 1, embedding the principle into the state's foundational statute through ordinary legislation rather than referendum.

The Act's own preamble states its purpose: to provide a platform so Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people can be better heard and have more say in decisions affecting their lives. Section 8 of the Voice Act goes further, stating that the Act is intended to be read alongside, and to complement, other legislation implementing measures to progress Truth and Treaty, as identified in the Uluru Statement from the Heart.

So, the Voice is not merely coincidentally associated with that wider agenda; the Act says so itself.

That wider framework is no longer merely prospective. The 2026–27 State Budget commits $8.5 million over four years to establishing a commission for statewide Truth-telling and Treaty activities. In August 2026, Aboriginal Affairs Minister Kyam Maher said the commission would be established over the coming months. Whatever one's view of those initiatives individually, the point for present purposes is narrower: the Voice sits within an expressly connected and still-developing program of Voice, Truth and Treaty, rather than operating as an isolated advisory experiment.

The eventual destination of that wider program remains substantially undefined. Terms such as Treaty, self-determination and agreement-making can encompass a broad range of institutional arrangements, and South Australians have not yet been told precisely what will or will not fall within the negotiating envelope. That deserves separate examination. For the purposes of this piece, however, my concern is narrower: the representative structure already enacted and the principle of citizenship it embodies.

I want to be clear about what I am not arguing. I am not arguing against the genuine desire for reconciliation that motivated many supporters of this Act. I am not arguing against the dignity of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australians. I am not disputing that injustices have occurred, or that their legacy continues to shape lives today.

I am asking whether the mechanism we built actually serves the people it claims to represent, and whether it can be reconciled with the foundational principles of equal citizenship that underpin our constitutional order.

2. The Origin of This Reflection

When I first wrote about the SA Voice, I examined it through the lens of legislative mechanics. I traced the history: the 2017 Uluru Statement, the 2023 federal referendum, and the subsequent state-level implementation.

The numbers remain important, and have only been reinforced by subsequent events. Electoral turnout for the inaugural SA Voice elections in March 2024 stood at approximately 8.7 percent: roughly 2,583 formal votes from an estimated 30,000 eligible voters, confirmed in the Electoral Commission of South Australia's own results. In some electorates, candidates were elected with as few as six first-preference votes.

In the second elections, held concurrently with the March 2026 state election, Electoral Commission SA figures show that participation remained below 11 percent of an estimated 32,342 enrolled First Nations voters, barely above 2024's result. In the Far North, four of the region's seven successful candidates were declared elected on between 15 and 23 first-preference votes each, with the remaining three drawing higher counts. In the West and West Coast and Yorke and Mid North regions, exactly as many women nominated as there were reserved seats for women, so six female delegates across those two regions were elected unopposed, without a contested ballot.

A turnout this low was, as the Liberal Opposition put it, “a clear vote of no confidence from the very people the body was designed to serve.” The Voice's own supporters have disputed that framing. The facts above come from the Electoral Commission's own published results; the interpretation belongs to the Opposition.

Low participation cannot, by itself, tell us why people did not vote. Documented concerns about candidate information, advertising, signage, and voter awareness have been raised after both elections, and Electoral Commission SA disputes some of that criticism. An independent review of the 2026 election's conduct and administration, led by former Australian Electoral Commissioner Tom Rogers AO, remains underway; its findings should be read alongside the figures above once published.

But whatever the causes, two elections involving only a small fraction of the eligible constituency leave an unavoidable question about representative breadth. That question now has a clear future test. If awareness and access improve and participation rises substantially at the next election, the legitimacy concern eases. If turnout remains near ten percent once the administrative problems identified above are corrected, the concern strengthens.

Yet the most recent Closing the Gap data, released by the Productivity Commission on 29 July 2026, found South Australia improving on most targets while worsening on three: youth engagement, adult imprisonment, and children in out-of-home care, indicators of disadvantage the Voice was said to help address.

A standing statutory body was established, and then implemented, without a referendum of the people of South Australia.

Those are the facts. But facts without reflection are merely data. The question before us, the question I believe every South Australian should be asking, is what this structure means for how we understand citizenship, dignity, and the relationship between the individual and the state.

3. The Problem of Genesis

Every institution has a genesis. The SA Voice was born in a particular way, and that way matters.

The First Nations Voice Act 2023 was assented to on 26 March 2023 and commenced two months later. The federal referendum on a national Voice to Parliament was not held until October 2023, when 60.06 percent of voters said no. South Australia itself recorded a No vote of 64.17 percent, the second-highest of any state, behind only Queensland.

South Australia, then, did not enact its Voice in defiance of a referendum that had already occurred. The sequence runs the other way: the state legislated first, and its first election followed the federal result. But after almost two-thirds of South Australians rejected a related proposal at the national level, implementation of the state model continued regardless, without the state electorate ever being asked whether it supported that separate structure. Electoral Commission SA's own 2024 material told voters plainly that the federal referendum result would not affect the SA Voice's establishment.

I want to be careful here. I am not alleging that the state government was being deceptive. Many supporters of the federal Voice genuinely believed that a state-level body was a legitimate vehicle for advancing reconciliation regardless of the national result, and the two were, legally, separate questions — a distinction the Voice's own website still draws today, describing the state Voice and the federal referendum as “separate but related initiatives” that both trace back to the Uluru Statement from the Heart.

But they were not politically unrelated. The state government proceeded with a structure that a large majority of South Australians had just told the nation, in the clearest vote available to them, they did not want, at least not in that form.

South Australia's Constitution can be amended by parliamentary vote without a referendum, subject to entrenchment requirements that apply to a narrower set of specified matters. That legal authority exists. I am not disputing it, and I am not claiming a referendum was legally required. But when structural changes alter representation itself, the question becomes not merely what is lawful, but what is legitimate.

This is what we might call a consent gap. The body exists. It has statutory powers, set out in detail below. And it was established, and then implemented, without the direct consent of the wider South Australian electorate ever having been sought on the state model itself.

4. The Theological Question

As a Christian, I do not begin my analysis of political structures with the premises of modern liberalism. I begin with the conviction that every human being is made in the image of God.

This is not a decorative belief. It is the foundation of everything. Scripture does not hand us a model constitution for South Australia. It gives us something more fundamental: an account of the human person, and moral limits by which political arrangements must be judged.

Two principles follow together, and both matter. First, all people possess equal worth because all bear God's image; that worth is not conferred by the state, not earned through ancestry, not accomplished through achievement, and not allocated according to group membership. It is intrinsic, universal, and non-negotiable.

Second, Scripture repeatedly commands particular care for the poor, the oppressed, the stranger, and the vulnerable. Christianity therefore gives me no reason to oppose additional assistance simply because a community experiences additional need.

The question is whether remedy requires changing civic standing.

Equal Dignity Does Not Mean Identical Treatment

If Aboriginal Australians have experienced distinctive historical injustice and continue to experience disproportionate disadvantage, doesn't justice sometimes require treating their circumstances differently? Yes.

Equal human worth does not mean pretending unequal circumstances do not exist. Justice may demand additional resources, locally designed programs, culturally appropriate services, and sustained assistance where particular communities bear particular burdens. My objection begins at a different point: when differential need becomes the basis for differential political standing.

I am not arguing against recognition of Aboriginal difference. I am arguing against making that difference constitutive of citizenship.

I am not arguing that the SA Voice was created with malicious intent. Most of its supporters, I believe, genuinely want to see better outcomes for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australians. But intent is not the question. The question is what the structure makes fallen people capable of doing.

Need may justify differential assistance. It does not automatically justify differential political standing. That is the hinge of everything that follows.

5. What the Structure Makes Possible

Every institution, built by fallen people, inherits that fallenness in its design. That is not an argument that the Voice in particular will become self-serving. It is a broader claim: no institution should be trusted without external accountability, Parliament, corporations, churches, unions, and the Voice alike.

The Act gives the State Voice, specifically, a defined set of statutory rights of access, distinct from the Local Voices that feed into it. The State Voice must be given notice of Bills introduced to Parliament. It may address either House concerning a Bill, with seven days' notice in ordinary cases. It makes an annual report and an annual address to a joint sitting of Parliament. It must meet with Cabinet at least twice yearly, and receive briefings from selected departmental chief executives at least twice yearly. It holds an annual engagement hearing at which specified ministers and chief executives can be questioned about operations, expenditure, budgets, and priorities (ss.38–46).

It has no legislative vote and no veto. That is worth stating plainly, because the point of this article is not that the Voice governs South Australia. The point is narrower, and I think more important: the Act creates a standing statutory pathway into Parliament, Cabinet, and the senior bureaucracy, open to a representative structure whose franchise is identity-qualified.

A permanent structure like that creates a class of citizens whose relationship to Parliament and Cabinet runs through a statutory channel of access that ordinary citizens and non-statutory advocacy organisations do not possess as of right; a channel that operates alongside, rather than through, the ordinary channels of democratic representation; and, in statute, the principle that some citizens stand in a different relationship to the state than others, which is a different thing from saying that some citizens have different needs.

One further provision deserves attention. Section 44 of the Act gives communications prepared for or provided to Cabinet by the State Voice a particular status: they are deemed to have been specifically prepared for submission to Cabinet. The effect is significant because documents specifically prepared for submission to Cabinet fall within the Cabinet-document exemption in Schedule 1 of the Freedom of Information Act 1991, subject to that Act's own exceptions.

I am not suggesting these documents are automatically secret, or that this treatment is improper; Cabinet documents generally attract this kind of protection, and Cabinet confidentiality is not unique to the Voice. The interesting fact is not that government consultation with the Voice occurs behind closed doors, most government consultation does, but that this particular deeming provision exists in statute at all, bringing communications with a body that sits outside government itself within reach of that same exemption. I raise it because transparency around any statutory relationship this close to Cabinet deserves attention, consistent with everything else I have written about accountability.

The Act also requires a statutory review, under section 50, to be completed between the third and fourth anniversary of commencement, which on the Act's own commencement dates places that window before 12 May 2027. The review is conducted by a First Nations person or body, appointed by the Minister, on the recommendation of the State Voice itself, and both the Minister and the Voice may specify matters the review must consider. The resulting report must then be tabled in both Houses of Parliament within six sitting days of the Minister receiving it.

I want to ask a constitutional question rather than allege a compromised process: is it sufficient for an institution whose representativeness and continued existence are themselves contested to have a review in which that institution participates in recommending who reviews it, and may shape what it examines?

I do not think the answer is obviously yes. Whatever the answer, an independent assessment of the Voice should measure participation, representativeness, cost, advice provided, government responses, policy changes, and public accountability, not simply whether the Voice itself judges its own engagement a success.

That question is narrower than it might sound, and it is worth being precise about it. The Act is not silent on financial accountability: under section 35, the Auditor-General may audit the State Voice's accounts at any time and must do so at least once a year, entirely independent of the Voice itself. What section 50 puts in the Voice's hands is narrower and different: a formal role in recommending who assesses its institutional effectiveness, and in shaping what that assessment covers. Financial oversight of the Voice is robust. Independent oversight of whether the Voice is working is not yet tested.

Two different reviews are underway, and they are easy to conflate. The Rogers review, discussed above, examines how the 2026 elections were administered: awareness, access, polling-day conduct. The section 50 review is a different exercise entirely: it examines how the Act and the institution itself are operating. The Voice's own 2025 annual report says its members have already begun collating feedback for whoever conducts that second review. As of my most recent check, no reviewer had yet been publicly named.

The architecture is also still maturing. In August 2026 the State Voice opened nominations for four advisory committees covering Elders, Youth, the Stolen Generations and Native Title, with nominations closing 30 August. Committee members will be paid to attend meetings, supported by the Voice Secretariat, and will report to the State Voice.

These committees are not an expansion invented after the fact; they were contemplated by the original Act, and the Voice's own 2025 annual report describes their governance framework being developed and finalised throughout 2025. Their establishment nevertheless illustrates something worth keeping in view: what South Australia created is not a small, static advisory panel but a statutory representative structure that is still becoming fully operational.

The Voice's own annual report adds a further wrinkle worth stating fairly. It describes the Voice as independent of direction or control by the Crown or any Minister, while also saying its resourcing remains constrained and speaking of pursuing greater “legitimate independence.”

That may be an entirely reasonable position from the institution's own perspective; a newly established body will naturally identify ways that more resources or autonomy could improve its work. But it is also exactly why the statutory review matters: Parliament's responsibility is to weigh those requests against the purpose, cost, representative legitimacy and constitutional place of the institution as a whole, not simply to grant them because the institution has asked.

Persistent low participation across two elections raises a serious question about representative breadth. It does not, by itself, establish why eligible voters stayed away; the Rogers review will need to be allowed to test how much of that result reflects awareness, access and administration, and how much reflects disengagement from the institution itself.

6. When Good Intentions Become Structure

I want to address a concern I have seen raised in response to my earlier writing.

Some Christians, people of goodwill, have asked: “Mark, if you are concerned about the dignity of Indigenous Australians, why oppose a mechanism designed to give them a voice? Why not support it and work to make it better?” That is exactly the objection I ought to answer.

Political theory has a name for the distinction this question turns on. The political theorist Hanna Pitkin drew a systematic line between descriptive representation, which asks who the representatives are, and substantive representation, which asks what representation actually accomplishes for those represented. A structure can satisfy the first while leaving the second an open question.

The disagreement can now be stated more precisely. In May 2026, the 46 elected Voice members argued against repeal on the basis that “First Nations people do not have equal civic status,” pointing to persistent disparities in health, incarceration, housing and child removal, and calling for “seats at every table.” Those disparities are real and demand serious attention.

But this is precisely where I draw a distinction the Voice's own argument appears to collapse: unequal social outcomes do not necessarily mean unequal civic status. A citizen can stand equally before the law and the institutions of government while living with profoundly unequal circumstances. Those circumstances may justify particular assistance, even substantial and culturally specific assistance. They do not, by themselves, establish that equal citizenship requires a separate statutory representative pathway.

The Voice's response, read fairly, is that formal equality means little when communities remain persistently unheard by the institutions exercising power over them. That is a serious argument, not a rhetorical one. The question it leaves us with is not whether disadvantage is real, but whether the remedy should be improved access within a common civic structure, or an enduring representative structure defined by identity.

Here the Voice's own record cuts against easy dismissal. Its 2025 annual report records that it was notified of around 60 Bills, engaged with ten of them, and provided formal submissions or written and verbal advice on five, including the Children and Young People (Safety and Support) Bill and the Statutes Amendment (Recidivist Young Offenders) Bill. It reports an engagement hearing with Cabinet on justice, policing, and incarceration that fed into a government commitment on Aboriginal-designed bail and remand accommodation in Adelaide's north. The Voice cannot fairly be dismissed as purely ceremonial. Its own reporting indicates genuine, specific instances of access and policy influence.

That makes the constitutional question more important, not less. If this pathway does influence government decision-making, by what principle should access to it be allocated, and how should its effectiveness and accountability be measured against that influence?

The evidence on participation is harder to read generously. Two elections with turnout remaining near or below 11 percent suggest limited ownership by the very communities the body claims to serve. The Voice has pointed to advice given on a limited number of Bills and to specific recommendations such as bail accommodation, and those contributions should be acknowledged. Yet the same period has seen South Australia's performance worsen on three Closing the Gap indicators: adult imprisonment, youth engagement, and children in out-of-home care.

At least one of those, youth engagement, is measured using data that predates the Voice's establishment, so these figures do not by themselves establish that the Voice has failed. What they demonstrate is the scale and persistence of the problems against which any claim of institutional effectiveness will eventually need to be tested, ideally with metrics matched to the period the Voice has actually been operating.

Access is an output. Better policy and better lives for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander South Australians are outcomes. The Voice's own reporting shows genuine access and some policy influence: the first of those two things. It is still too early to judge the second, and longer-term outcome measures will need to be matched to the period the Voice has actually been operating, not to the whole span of Aboriginal disadvantage in this state.

7. The Stewardship of the State

I have argued elsewhere that Christians are called to be faithful stewards of the nation in which God has placed them, not unquestioning loyalists, but responsible stewards. As I wrote in South Australia's Uluru Statement, reconciliation is strongest when grounded in unity, shared nationhood, and equal dignity, not in structures that reintroduce division. Everything in this piece follows from that same conviction, read now through the lens of stewardship.

Stewardship asks a specific question: how can I faithfully care for the inheritance entrusted to me?

For a citizen, that inheritance includes the constitutional order. It includes the principle of equal citizenship. It includes the rule of law, representative democracy, and the conviction that every person stands before the state with dignity and worth.

The SA Voice, as currently structured, is a departure from that inheritance. It divides citizens. It undermines the principle of equal standing. I do not believe this particular structure can be reconciled with the conception of equal civic standing that follows from the Christian anthropology I have set out above.

This is why I believe the Act should be repealed.

I want to be clear: repeal is not opposition to reconciliation. Repeal is opposition to mechanism. The purpose of remedy should ultimately be restoration to a fuller common life, not the indefinite institutionalisation of difference itself. We can pursue genuine reconciliation through structures that respect the equal dignity of every citizen, that operate within the ordinary channels of democratic accountability, and that do not depend on permanently categorising people by ancestry.

8. Practical Alternatives

Repeal does not mean silence or neglect. It means returning to approaches that treat every South Australian as a citizen first, while taking need seriously wherever it is found.

That does not mean the alternative must be identity-blind in every particular. Remote location, cultural needs, historical dislocation, the structure of Aboriginal communities, and particular health or justice patterns can all justify Aboriginal-specific interventions.

The principle I would apply is this: target the demonstrated need as directly as possible, measure the outcome, and maintain a common civic standing. Aboriginal-specific services are entirely compatible with that principle; a permanent, ancestry-based representative institution is not.

A rough figure on what the Voice costs to run is on the public record. At the June 2024 Budget Estimates hearing, Attorney-General and Minister for Aboriginal Affairs Kyam Maher told the parliamentary Estimates Committee that the Voice's running costs were budgeted at “somewhere in the order of $1½ million a year”: approximately $699,000 for the Voice itself, covering travel, accommodation, meeting facilities, ICT costs, and sessional and annual member fees, and approximately $680,000 for the Voice Secretariat that supports it.

That figure was not intended as a one-year allocation. The original 2023–24 Budget Measures Statement provided $1.5 million per annum, indexed, for the Voice's ongoing operations, with the forward estimate rising to approximately $1.57 million in 2026–27. The current 2026–27 Agency Statements confirm that support for the Voice and its Secretariat is continuing, although they do not separately itemise the full combined operating cost in the same way as the earlier Estimates evidence.

In June 2026, ABC News likewise reported that the Voice receives about $1.5 million in state government funding each year, at the same time as Voice representatives were seeking greater resourcing and the Government said it was open to funding changes. This operating funding is separate from the $8.5 million over four years committed to the Truth-telling and Treaty commission discussed in Section 1.

Practical alternatives already exist and can be strengthened: competitive, transparent funding for community-controlled organisations that demonstrate measurable results; focused parliamentary committees that report publicly and operate under the same rules of accountability as every other parliamentary body; evidence-based interventions in health, education and justice that target disadvantage wherever it is found; and local, voluntary forms of consultation that do not create permanent parallel institutions.

The Liberal Opposition's own 2026 policy points in one direction consistent with this: replacing the Voice with a reconstituted Parliamentary Aboriginal Lands Committee, and proposing to redirect $750,000 in Voice-related funding toward targeted programs such as the Community Constables and Shooting Stars initiatives. I am not endorsing every detail of that policy. I use it only to establish that the choice is not between the Voice and nothing.

The persistence of poor outcomes across several Closing the Gap domains underscores the need for rigorous, needs-based evaluation of what actually works: work already being undertaken by independent researchers examining scholarships, remote employment programmes, and recidivism reduction.

Whatever replaces the Voice should be held to explicit standards: locality, voluntariness, transparency, measurable outcomes, public reporting, independent evaluation, and a genuine sunset or review mechanism, the same kind of accountability this article has argued the Voice itself should be held to.

These pathways respect the dignity of individuals, preserve the equal standing of citizens before the law, and keep decision-making within the ordinary channels of representative democracy.

9. The Question Now Before Parliament

This is a live legislative question, not a hypothetical one. A First Nations Voice Repeal Bill, introduced by Leader of the Opposition in the Legislative Council, the Hon. Nicola Centofanti, was put to a division in the Legislative Council on 17 June 2026 and defeated at its second reading by the narrowest possible margin, ten votes to nine.

The Liberal Opposition has opposed the Act since its passage, centred on the lack of a referendum, the level of detail available when it passed, and the principle of equal citizenship; in 2026 it campaigned explicitly on repeal, proposing the Parliamentary Aboriginal Lands Committee alternative discussed above. Members of the crossbench, including Sarah Game, now sitting for the Family First Party after a period with One Nation and then her own party, Fair Go for Australians, have pressed the same objection since the Act's passage. Game introduced her own repeal bill in November 2023, while still sitting as a One Nation member, and spoke and voted for Centofanti's bill in the June 2026 division.

I hold no standing allegiance to any party. On this question, and on a number of others, I find myself in closer agreement with the crossbench than with either major party; I disclose that as standpoint, not as evidence, and it is not a blanket endorsement of every position associated with any of the parties named here.

It would be tempting to read the outcome of that same 2026 election the other way: Labor, the party that passed the Act, was returned to government, and some will take that as a vote of confidence in the Voice's continuation. The numbers do not support that reading. Labor's seat landslide occurred despite its own statewide primary vote falling, amid a dramatic reconfiguration of the non-Labor vote under single-member electorates.

Labor fell from 40.0 to 37.5 percent, while Liberal support collapsed to 18.9 percent and One Nation rose to 22.9 percent, splitting the non-Labor vote across two parties rather than consolidating behind one (Antony Green, election results summary, updated 2 April 2026). Neither major party campaigned on the Voice as a headline issue. A different and narrower measure was available on the same election day: not of the wider consent question above, but of how the Voice's own constituency has engaged with it.

The Voice election ran alongside the state election on a voluntary roll, and drew formal ballots from roughly 3,308 of an estimated 32,000 enrolled voters, about ten percent, against 88.5 percent turnout for the compulsory state ballot at those same booths. That gap is not evidence about democratic consent for the Voice as an institution; it is a separate and narrower question, about how broadly the constituency the Voice claims to represent has actually taken part in choosing it.

Two legitimacy questions now sit alongside one another, and they should not be collapsed into one. The first is democratic: South Australians were never asked directly whether they wanted this additional statutory representative structure created at all. The second is representative: after two elections, only a small proportion of the eligible First Nations constituency has taken part in choosing who sits on it. Neither fact, on its own, settles the Voice's future. Together, they make independent, measurable scrutiny of its continued operation difficult to avoid.

What matters for this article is not who has said it, but whether the argument is right: that a standing statutory institution should not be built on inherited identity without the direct consent of the wider electorate whose Parliament it now sits alongside.

10. A Call to Action

I want to close with a practical step, not just a question.

Before publishing this piece, I wrote to every Member of the House of Assembly and every Member of the Legislative Council. On 17 August 2026, I set out the argument above and asked each of them directly whether they support the First Nations Voice Act 2023's continuation, amendment, statutory review, or repeal, along with the fuller set of questions below. Unless a member asks me not to, I intend to report responses accurately and in context, in this piece or in a follow-up examining the positions members of Parliament actually take.

Given the statutory review under section 50 is now open, I asked more than a yes-or-no question. I asked whether they support continuation, amendment, statutory review, or repeal of the Act; what evidence or principles most strongly inform that position; what measures should determine whether the Voice is genuinely representative and effective in influencing better public policy; whether the section 50 review should include additional safeguards for independence from both government and the Voice itself; what measurable outcomes or standards of accountability South Australians should reasonably expect, if the Voice is retained; and, if repeal or substantial reform is preferred, what alternative mechanism would ensure Aboriginal disadvantage, local knowledge, and community concerns continue to receive serious attention.

I invite you to ask your own member the same questions. You can find your local member and your Legislative Council members on the South Australian Parliament website. When you write, keep it respectful, keep it focused, and use the language of citizenship and stewardship rather than accusation.

11. The Question Before Us

I have written this piece because I believe the South Australian Voice presents a deeper question than whether one statutory body succeeds or fails.

It asks what kind of political community we are trying to become.

We can acknowledge the particular history of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australians. We can recognise that some communities continue to experience profound disadvantage. We can support additional assistance where additional need exists. None of those things requires us to pretend that history has been equal, circumstances are identical, or government has no responsibility to respond.

But there is a distinction I believe we must preserve:

Different need may justify different assistance. It does not, by itself, settle the question of different political standing.

That is where my concern with the First Nations Voice Act ultimately lies. The issue is not whether Aboriginal Australians should be heard. Of course they should be. Nor is it whether governments should seek local knowledge, listen to communities affected by their decisions, or direct additional resources toward entrenched disadvantage.

The question is whether reconciliation is best advanced by embedding an enduring representative structure in which eligibility depends partly upon inherited identity, giving one category of citizens a statutory relationship with Parliament, Cabinet and government administration that does not arise simply from citizenship itself. I do not believe it is.

That conclusion does not come from pretending Scripture hands us a constitutional model for a modern South Australian parliament. What Scripture gives Christians is something more fundamental: an account of the human person, a demand for justice, a warning against partiality, and a reminder that no ancestry confers greater human worth before God.

The Old Testament expresses the principle with striking balance:

Do not pervert justice; do not show partiality to the poor or favouritism to the great, but judge your neighbour fairly.  — Leviticus 19:15

That verse matters because biblical justice is not indifference to suffering. The same Scriptures repeatedly command care for the poor, the stranger, the widow, the orphan and those who have been wronged. Yet compassion and impartiality are held together. Need must be addressed, but human worth is not ranked according to status.

Paul states the underlying principle with remarkable simplicity:

For God does not show favouritism.  — Romans 2:11

Neither verse tells the South Australian Parliament how it must structure Indigenous consultation. To claim otherwise would ask Scripture to do something it is not doing.

But together they establish moral boundaries that matter.

The God before whom every person stands is impartial. The image of God is not distributed according to ancestry. The dignity of the person does not rise or fall with membership of a preferred group. And although justice may require us to respond differently to different circumstances, those differences do not automatically justify creating different forms of civic standing.

That final application is a prudential political judgment, and Christians of goodwill may disagree about it. My own judgment is that South Australia has taken the wrong path.

We sought to answer a history of exclusion by institutionalising a new distinction. We sought to overcome othering by creating a representative structure in which inherited identity determines who may participate. We sought reconciliation, but in doing so risk teaching another generation that citizenship alone does not provide the same relationship to the institutions governing us. I believe we can do better.

Repealing the Voice need not mean retreating from reconciliation. It should mean demanding something more difficult from ourselves: addressing disadvantage directly, listening locally, funding what demonstrably works, holding governments accountable for outcomes, acknowledging history truthfully, and doing all of this while refusing to make inherited difference an enduring measure of political standing.

The purpose of reconciliation should not be to erase difference. Neither should it be to institutionalise difference indefinitely. It should be to build a society capable of recognising difference while still saying, with conviction: we belong to one another in a common civic home. That is the choice I believe now sits before South Australia.

We can continue to organise political representation increasingly around group identity, accepting that different categories of citizens may properly stand in different statutory relationships to the state. Or we can recover the presumption of common citizenship: one in which particular needs can receive particular care, but the citizen's fundamental standing does not depend upon ancestry. My Christian convictions lead me toward the latter.

And while the Church and the State are not the same thing, and Paul's words are not a constitutional prescription, there is something profoundly Christian in the movement he describes: from estrangement toward belonging, from strangerhood toward fellowship, from separation toward a common home.

Consequently, you are no longer foreigners and strangers, but fellow citizens with God’s people and also members of his household.  — Ephesians 2:19

The question before us is not whether we remember our differences, it is whether reconciliation ultimately teaches us how to live together despite them, or asks the state to make those differences permanent. I know which path I believe better honours the dignity of the person, the responsibility of citizenship, and the common good.

The question for South Australia is whether we have the courage to take it.

Thank you for reading.

God bless.

Mark