Page 3727 - Week 11 - Wednesday, 23 November 2022
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Strait Islander delegates who came to the National Constitutional Convention, in their words, “from all points of the southern sky”.
This convention was the culmination of a series of dialogues conducted by and with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people across Australia on the matter of constitutional reform, seeking to address the long-identified hole in the heart of our formative national document—its silence on the pre-existing sovereignty over this land of the oldest living cultures on earth.
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander politics is diverse, at least as diverse as mainstream Australian politics. I know there are strong advocates for the voice in our local community, demonstrated by the powerful words from Aunty Violet Sheridan and Elected Body member Paula McGrady, speaking on her own account, that Dr Paterson reiterated.
We know there are also members of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander community who do not see the voice as the best path forward and who are still unsure. We must be respectful of this diversity as we head towards a referendum. However, we must also respect the mandate that the Uluru statement has earned through the dialogues and the constitutional convention.
I was privileged to attend, along with Dr Paterson, the recent National Press Club address by Professor Megan Davis and Aunty Pat Anderson. Professor Davis and Aunty Pat were both members of the referendum council that led the work to develop the Uluru statement. In her address Professor Davis outlined the importance of the voice to those who participated in the dialogues, reflecting that “every working group in the dialogues endorsed the voice to parliament as a reform priority”. They discussed how the voice would operate as a “front end political limit on the parliament’s powers to pass laws” that affect First Nations peoples. They appreciated that this political empowerment model would hopefully achieve “better designed policies in the future”.
In endorsing the Uluru statement on behalf of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people from across Australia, the Constitutional Convention presented an invitation to all Australians. The question set to be put to the Australian people is whether we accept this invitation.
I am proud to be a member of the Labor Party that both here in the ACT and at the national level is firmly committed to the Uluru statement. So central is that commitment that when Prime Minister Anthony Albanese delivered his victory speech on election night, his first words as Australia’s new Prime Minister were a reiteration of it: “Labor will deliver on the Uluru statement in full.”
As others have talked about, there are three key components to the vision outlined in the Uluru Statement from the Heart: a voice to parliament and a Makarrata commission to oversee truth telling and agreement making; voice, treaty, truth. The federal Labor government is progressing first towards a referendum on the voice, in line with the sequencing of the statement. The commitment from Labor puts an end to a half-decade of refusal from the previous Australian government to take action on the Uluru statement.
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