this post was submitted on 06 Oct 2023
71 points (91.8% liked)

Australia

3616 readers
69 users here now

A place to discuss Australia and important Australian issues.

Before you post:

If you're posting anything related to:

If you're posting Australian News (not opinion or discussion pieces) post it to Australian News

Rules

This community is run under the rules of aussie.zone. In addition to those rules:

Banner Photo

Congratulations to @Tau@aussie.zone who had the most upvoted submission to our banner photo competition

Recommended and Related Communities

Be sure to check out and subscribe to our related communities on aussie.zone:

Plus other communities for sport and major cities.

https://aussie.zone/communities

Moderation

Since Kbin doesn't show Lemmy Moderators, I'll list them here. Also note that Kbin does not distinguish moderator comments.

Additionally, we have our instance admins: @lodion@aussie.zone and @Nath@aussie.zone

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] naevaTheRat@lemmy.dbzer0.com 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Sorry, I was trying to focus specifically on the means by which they are elected. Not trying to mislead, I think there's parallel because like the voice just says it has to be a body and not how it's made up and senate elections more or less just say "you have to have them, figure out how".

So there's a lot of leeway in the constitution in general, like to my knowledge there's nothing stopping senate electing laws being like a 2 hour window in the state capital except that if a government tried to do that presumably they'd be challenged on either going against the intention of the constitution, established practiced, or worse case there would be revolts. There's a few risks to making something too specific, what if things change and you need to like have another referendum to say hire a new person?

It certainly is vulnerable to say appointing the board of PwC as the voice, except of course that's the status quo now (inasmuch as advisory bodies on indigenous affairs go) although nobody could argue that the government was going against the spirit of the constitution doing so. So this can really only be thought of as massively strengthening the situation we have now.

If we look at how divisive even this change is, you can imagine the sort of polemic criticism a more prescriptive change might apply. If the voice fails to be satisfactory and vulnerable to being hijacked then we can always go to referendum again, we wouldn't be worse off than we are now. Legislation is a lot more flexible, which is a weakness and a strength but in general keeping systems flexible helps us fix things and keep them relevant as times and goals change. If the people want this, then the people have an interest in it working correctly after all.

[–] stifle867@programming.dev 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Excellent points. Thank you for putting in the time to discuss this with me. You, and others here have been invaluable to me. It's too hard to find quality information like these replies through searching. I'm the kind of person that likes to understand things in an extra level of detail so when I discuss things with people I can know what I'm talking about. Knowing only the bullet points makes it hard to back up opinions when talking to people of differing opinions.

[–] naevaTheRat@lemmy.dbzer0.com 6 points 1 year ago

You are welcome.