Marcia Langton explains why the Voice hardly seems necessary

This article at The Conversation quotes Marcia Langton explaining things about the Voice, but it seems to me she is inadvertently explaining why it is being set up to be full of internal conflict, and isn't really necessary:

A key question being asked is how people will be selected to represent their communities. Langton says: “We have to accommodate an already existing Indigenous governance landscape. So across the country we have an enormous number of existing bodies, none of which have any assured way of advising governments. None of them are provided with a formal way to advise governments. I’ll give you two examples.

"One is the Torres Strait Regional Authority. And the other is the ACT Indigenous elected assembly. Now, indeed, both of them can give advice to the state governments, and that’s a good thing. But they don’t sit in an integrated framework. […] We developed a set of principles for the creation of such bodies as the Indigenous voice arrangements.

"Those principles are:

• Empowerment
• inclusive participation
• cultural leadership
• community-led design
• non-duplication and links with existing bodies
• respecting long-term partnerships
• transparency and accountability
• capability driven data
• evidence based decision making.

 "Those are the principles, and it was our preference that those principles be legislated so that each body that is created, should we be successful, complies with those principles.”

Those bullet points indicate a bureaucratic rubberiness that is ripe for conflict inside the aboriginal community.

And if current organisations keep their eye on issues affecting them, then even if they aren't invited to contribute their opinion (which I suspect they would usually be), they are still free to write to the relevant minister or local MP directly about it.

Under the Voice, they will have their opinion filtered through a Canberra representative body, which will no doubt be forced to pick and chose which policy to officially endorse.  

Langton said at her press conference that the trouble with past cases of aboriginal representative bodies (like ATSIC) was that governments turned on them for political reasons, and dissolved them, and claimed that there was no evidence that the organisations had failed.    

I'm no expert on the history of those past attempts at centralised advice bodies, but I very much doubt that they were complete victims of Canberra politics.    

The other thing talked about in the article is an example of local aboriginal input into an issue having good results:

A major point for debate around The Voice is whether it will deliver practical outcomes. Langton illustrates by example.

“As for the kinds of problems that the Voice would be able to tackle much more effectively than governments, I give you the case of the COVID-19 pandemic. The first people to respond effectively, long before governments did so, were the Indigenous health organisations […] The Indigenous community-controlled health sector leaders had dealt with two epidemics in recent history and one in particular had a very high mortality rate. So in response to that, the Indigenous health sector wrote an epidemic plan, and that was about ten years old, but it was easily revised to become the pandemic plan. So they went straight into action when we began to hear the news from overseas about COVID-19.”

“So who was first to close their borders? Not the states and territories. It was the Aboriginal landowners on advice from the Indigenous health sector that closed their borders to stop travel in and out of Aboriginal lands to keep their populations safe.

"Because the most vulnerable populations to COVID-19 were the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander populations with pre-existing health burdens such as chronic diseases, diabetes, kidney disease and so on.

Um, can't that example be used to show that adding an additional layer of bureaucracy onto the present system may slow down government action, and not be necessary at all??