Constitution Alteration (Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice) 2023

House of Representatives 

 

Deputy Speaker,

The American writer William Faulkner famously declared that “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”

What he meant is clarified in the less well-known sentence that followed.

“All of us,” he wrote, “labor in webs spun long before we were born, webs of heredity and environment, of desire and consequence, of history and eternity.”

Webs of heredity and environment

Of history and eternity.

How could we not feel the weight of these words in this place today?

The weight of heredity, of history, maybe even of eternity.

We all feel it.

We meet here to discuss a proposed amendment to enshrine an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice in our Constitution.

A proposal that has dominated column inches, media air time, and political debate in our national life in recent times.

And rightly so.

A proposal that not we, the legislators, but we, the people will be called upon to vote on in a referendum this year.

A proposal whose meaning is impossible to grasp without feeling for oneself the fine webs of history it is spun from.

Deputy Speaker, like the majority of Members and Senators in this Parliament, I wasn’t born when modern Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander land rights began.

But I know that the kind of Australia that I was privileged to grow up in was profoundly altered and always for the better by each of their many struggles and successes.

Take the Yirrkala Bark Petitions, the beginning of land rights in 1963, when the Yolngu people from Yirrkala in north-east Arnhem Land protested the loss of their land to a mining lease.

This petition was addressed to this very Parliament.

To this very House.

What was the object of this protest?

That the federal government had decided, unilaterally and without consultation, that part of the Yolngu people’s homeland would be excised for a bauxite mine.

Unilaterally and without consultation.

And when that protest, that clear Aboriginal voice, was heard by the federal government, it was dismissed.

The mine was opened.

The voice ignored.

We would see a repeat of this pattern in the Yolgnu people’s 1971 Gove land rights case, in which the Northern Territory Supreme Court rejected their claim because it didn’t conform to the European notion of ‘property’.

So, the case was thrown out.

We see the glimmers of a new approach in the 1966 Wave Hill walk off when Gurindji man Vincent Lingiari led a strike for better working conditions at a cattle station in the NT.

Lingiari, too, demanded the return of his traditional lands, which Prime Minister Gough Whitlam returned in 1972.

On this occasion, the voice was just as clear and strong as in the bark petition.

Only this time the federal government actually listened to it.

That simple act of listening to and acting on First Nations people’s concerns where laws and policies affect them—an act which can hardly be called radical and which should just be good manners—reshaped Australia into a fairer land.

The whole country learned to listen again at the 1967 referendum, when 90.77% of voters agreed to remove race-based clauses in our Constitution and to treat Aboriginal people like full citizens by counting them at the census.

Progress on restoring the rights of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people was slow and hard going in Australia, but breakthroughs only came when they were listened to.

The solutions we take for granted as great milestones today didn’t come from non-Indigenous Australians.

And they didn’t come from public servants in Canberra.

They came from First Nations people themselves.

From local communities advocating to government.

We should always remember that.

We saw this in 1976, when land rights legislation passed that would eventually allow Aboriginal people to have almost 50 percent of the Northern Territory returned to them.

And we saw it in the landmark Mabo case in 1982 that threw out the concept of terra nullius, the old lie that the land belonged to no one prior to colonisation.

And we saw it again in the far-reaching consequences of Mabo, which led this place to legislate the Native Title Act in 1993, through which thirty-two per cent of the Australian continent has now been recognised under native title.

None of this is ancient history.

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people weren’t even given full voting rights federally, by being required to register on the electoral roll like all Australians, until as late as 1984.

But even the past is not yet past.

History is unfinished business in Australia.

I learned this in 2004 when I joined the activist and legendary Essendon footballer Michael Long’s “long walk” to Canberra to seek a meeting with the then Prime Minister John Howard to talk about the abysmal state of Indigenous affairs.

I decided I would go and support Michael, so I got my brother to drive me up the Hume highway to look for the walkers.

I couldn’t find them because they had been kicked off the main highway onto the old Hume highway for safety and security reasons.

Walking was also more comfortable because the old highway was often tree-shaded. 

It was a great experience to walk through country towns in northern Victoria, where Michael was usually very well received.

It was a great privilege to walk alongside Aboriginal elders.

When you walk there is a lot of time for talking and I was able to gain from these Aboriginal people a very different perspective on the history of Australia.

And that appreciation has stuck with me ever since.

Every day the Long Walk was getting more and more media coverage, and the event was becoming an embarrassment to John Howard and his Government.

Eventually the Prime Minister got in touch with Michael and agreed to have a meeting.

We jumped into cars headed to Canberra, but stopped short of Parliament House so that we could make the symbolic walk up Commonwealth Avenue. 

Walking with Longy and his little group had been a formative experience for me.

It gave me a much better appreciation of the trauma and dispossession that Aboriginal people had suffered and the need for much more consultation with Aboriginal people about what the solutions look like.

That, for me, is the guiding thread in the history of reconciliation in our country.

When non-Indigenous people have listened to First Nations people’s desires on policy, on land rights, on culture, and on their experiences as First Nations people, we have moved forward on the long and twisting backroads of reconciliation.

But when we have ignored First Nations people, ridden roughshod on their concerns, requests, sacred sites, or their rights, the good name of all Australians has been diminished.

Martin Luther King Jr, that powerful voice of racial equality and great conscience of all humanity, talked about the moral arc of the universe being long but bending towards justice.

I think our history bears out that prediction.

Reconciliation is a grueling walk for all involved but every step brings us nearer the Promised Land that we seek.

And the next milestone on that walk is clearly the Voice.

That is what this Bill is all about, Deputy Speaker.

This Bill is required to hold a referendum to amend the Australian Constitution to recognise Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples in the Constitution through a Voice.

It is about recognising Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, who have been here for over 60,000 years, as the First Peoples of Australia.

And it is about listening to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples on the practical changes that will have an impact in their communities to address inter-generational issues

A Voice is the form of constitutional recognition called for by over 250 First Nations delegates in the Uluru Statement from the Heart.

It is a modest request.

The Voice will be able to make representations to the Australian Parliament and Executive Government on matters relating to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples.

And it will amplify the voices of First Nations peoples from communities and regions on matters that affect them.

Listening to the Voice when we make and change laws and policies will improve the lives of First Nations peoples.

And it will help us to close the gap.

As I learned on the Long Walk, we achieve better outcomes when we work in genuine partnership with First Nations communities.

The constitutional amendment empowers the Parliament to legislate about the day-to-day operation and functioning of the Voice, allowing it to evolve over time.

It will be up to the Voice to decide when to make representations on the matters that are important to First Nations peoples.

The Voice will not need to wait for an invitation.

The Parliament and Executive Government will also not need to wait for representations from the Voice before making laws or decisions.

The Voice’s representations will be advisory.

The Parliament and Executive Government will not need to follow the Voice’s representations.

The Voice will complement the existing structures of Australia’s democratic system.

Every Australian voter will have the opportunity to vote on this important change.

And I call on every Australian who can do so to vote.

Deputy Speaker, I began by speaking of history whose weight ever Member in this chamber must feel on this day.

As we consider this proposed Voice, the history of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people’s struggles for rights and for reconciliation are alive in our minds and in our hearts.

Like many here, I enjoyed the fruits of these struggles growing up, those of a fairer and more enlightened society.

And I hope my children grow up in an Australia where listening to First Nations people is a natural instinct and a cherished part of our democracy.

An Australia where First Nations peoples’ concerns are raised to the highest level—and not kicked down to the lowest.

Where the yawning gap between First Nations and non-Indigenous people is not only closed—but where it is history.

And where Australian children ask their history teachers why such inequalities persisted for so long—in the past tense.

But until then, the past is not yet past.

And it calls each of us by name.

Thanks Deputy Speaker.