Indigenous Leader Pans ‘Woke’ Corporations for Supporting Change to Australia’s Constitution

The trading symbol for BlackRock is displayed at the closing bell of the Dow Industrial Average at the New York Stock Exchange in New York on July 14, 2017. Bryan R. Smith/AFP via Getty Images

Indigenous leader Warren Mundine has criticised Australia’s business community for throwing support behind changing the country’s Constitution to enshrine an “Indigenous Voice to Parliament.”

Mundine also said he spoke with many business leaders who admitted they had little understanding of the impact of the “Voice.”

“What’s happening in the background is in the business community; a lot of people are telling me they’re under enormous pressure to support the Voice,” he told The Epoch Times.

“This is a bizarre situation where you’ve got the corporate world running their own campaign—effectively spending a lot of money—and when I go out into the Aboriginal community, I find it hard to find people who actually support or understand it.”

Mundine said the Voice was receiving support from “woke” corporations, inner-city elites, Indigenous academics and politicians—despite the fact Aboriginal communities were opposed to the constitutional change.

“I’ve had many conversations with business people, and not one of them can explain to me: How it’s going to work? How it’s going to benefit Aboriginal people? And how are people going to be better off with it? Not one person.”

An array of Australia’s largest corporations have announced their support of legislating a permanent Voice into the Constitution, essentially an advisory body supposed to “make representations to the Parliament” on matters relating to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders.

Mining giant BHP has previously endorsed passing the Voice, along with National Australia Bank, biotech firm Commonwealth Serum Labs, and property giant Lendlease.

Activist Corporations Come Under the Spotlight

Mundine’s criticism comes as listed companies in the United States have come under pressure for embracing “virtue signalling” and environmental, social, and governance (ESG) causes—including climate change and gender equality policies.

Notably, major investment firms BlackRock, Vanguard, and State Street, who own substantial holdings in the largest publicly listed companies across the developed world, are using this leverage to compel executive boards to embrace policies like more gender quotas in management positions.

While business leaders in Australia have been more muted in their response to the ESG trend, in the United States, Red States have begun overtly putting pressure on investment funds.

In fact, in mid-August, 19 attorney-generals issued a “please explain” to the world’s largest asset manager BlackRock that its pursuit of net-zero was potentially putting it in breach of its fiduciary duty to shareholders.

Indigenous Leaders Still Not Convinced

Meanwhile, in Australia, while the campaign for the Voice has ramped up, critics have expressed concern over the lack of detail of what the Voice entails, whether it will remain just an advisory body and whether it will enshrine discrimination into the Constitution.

“I have always maintained that the commonalities between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people far outweigh any differences. Any program that goes against this premise, I believe, will not help those Aboriginal people who most need help,” wrote Anthony Dillon, a regular commentator on Indigenous affairs and a researcher at the Australian Catholic University, in an op-ed in The Epoch Times.

Newly elected Indigenous Senator Jacinta Price of the Country Liberal Party in the Northern Territory said the Voice did little to address real issues confronting Aboriginal families, including domestic violence.

“It would be far more dignifying if we were recognised and respected as individuals in our own right who are not simply defined by our racial heritage but by the content of our character,” she told Parliament in late July.

“We cannot support legislation that fails to acknowledge the true causes of why Indigenous Australians are marginalised or false narratives that suggest racism is the cause when it has been proven over and again that this is not the case.”