Page 3721 - Week 11 - Wednesday, 23 November 2022
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school attainment and employment. In some areas, we are going backwards. More work is required to close the gap in such discrepancies, as they continue to cause serious harm to our Indigenous community.
This gap cannot and will not be closed without Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people leading this work and making decisions about issues that affect their lives, about what is important and how to go about it.
We know in the ACT that we have a long way to go. We have the highest youth Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander incarceration rate in the country and, according to the ROGS data, the proportion of prisoners who are Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander in the ACT has doubled over the last 10 years. The ACT also has Australia’s highest rate of recidivism for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. The list goes on, and the data collected represents only part of the picture of the ongoing injustices faced.
The path to justice is one that I know we, as a government, are deeply committed to and one that the Labor Party have always championed. I commend the work of colleagues in this Assembly, including Minister Stephen-Smith and her work in her portfolio responsibility, including her work on the ACT Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Agreement and impact statement, as well as actions towards treaty.
Many advocates over the years have used a simple phrase, “Nothing about us without us,” meaning that no policy decision should be made about any group in society without them being at the table. You simply cannot make a practical difference in Indigenous communities without having the people it impacts driving the change.
Enshrining the voice to parliament in the Constitution will ensure that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples are always part of the conversations that affect them. It is a first but very important step, and it is essential that we in the ACT put our full support behind the referendum.
The voice referendum did not come from nowhere. It has taken decades of activism and fighting for equality, led by Australia’s Aboriginal peoples. It took until 2015 for the federal Australian government to begin working on a dialogue to work towards a referendum to recognise Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in the Australian Constitution, through the Referendum Council. Then, in May 2017, over 250 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander delegates from Indigenous nations across the country met for the First Nations National Constitutional Convention.
It was during this convention that the Uluru Statement from the Heart was written and, on 26 May, Indigenous delegates signed the statement. The process aimed to address the historical exclusion of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples from the original processes which led to the drafting of Australia’s Constitution. There are three recommendations that have come from this: voice, treaty and truth.
The first recommendation from the Uluru Statement from the Heart is “the establishment of a First Nations voice enshrined in the Constitution”. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people have been leading the way in developing a voice, and a substantial amount of work has been done to date to get us to this moment. In October
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