Rod McGuirk
Associated Press
CANBERRA, Australia — The Australian government on Thursday released the wording of a referendum question that promises the nation’s Indigenous population a greater say on policies that affect their lives.
Australians are expected to vote sometime between October and December on a constitutional amendment that would enshrine a new body called the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice. The Voice would be an elected group charged with advocating Indigenous interests, but would not have a vote on laws.
An emotional Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said the body was needed to overcome Indigenous disadvantage.
“We urgently need better outcomes because it’s not good enough where we’re at in 2023,” Albanese told reporters.
The Voice was originally proposed by a group of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander advocates in 2017.
Megan Davies, an Indigenous lawyer who consulted with grassroots communities over years to develop the Voice proposal, described the decision on the referendum question as a historic day.
“When we ran the dialogues all over Australia, our people spoke about not being listened to and not being heard. They spoke about powerlessness and voicelessness,” Davies said.
“This prime minister, this government, has listened respectfully, genuinely, authentically,” she added.
Indigenous Australians from the Torres Strait archipelago, off the northeast coast, are culturally distinct from the mainland Aboriginal population. The two peoples account for 3.2 percent of the Australian population, and are the nation’s most disadvantaged ethnic group.
“On every measure, there is a gap between the lives of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples and the national average,” Albanese said.
“A 10-year gap in life expectancy, a suicide rate twice as high, tragic levels of child mortality and disease, a massive overrepresentation in the prison population and deaths in custody, in children sent to out-of-home care,” he said.
“And this is not because of a shortage of goodwill or good intentions on any side of politics and it’s not because of a lack of funds. It’s because governments have spent decades trying to impose solutions from Canberra rather than consulting with communities,” he added.
The wording of the referendum question that the Cabinet signed off on Thursday is similar to words proposed by Albanese last year.
The question will be: “A proposed law: To alter the constitution to recognize the First Peoples of Australia by establishing an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice. Do you approve this proposed alteration?”
If the referendum succeeds, the constitution would state that the “Voice may make representations” to the Parliament and government “on matters relating to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples.”
Most details of the Voice’s makeup and function would be left to Parliament.
Opinion polls suggest most Australians support the Voice concept, which Albanese announced was a major priority of his center-left Labor Party government during his election night victory speech in May last year. But deep divisions remain across Australian society.
Opposition leader Peter Dutton said his conservative Liberal Party has yet to decide whether they would support the Voice and required more detail including the government’s own legal advice.
Dutton questioned whether the Voice would help Indigenous women and children who suffer far higher rates of domestic violence than the wider community. He suggested the Voice might even drown out the victims’ voices.
“Is it going to make it more difficult because there is another layer of bureaucracy and makes it harder for the Indigenous women in these communities to be heard?” Dutton asked.
The Nationals party, the junior coalition partner in the former government, announced in November they had decided to oppose the Voice, saying it would divide the nation along racial lines.
The government has not said what form it proposes the Voice would take. But Cabinet on Thursday agreed on a set of principles.
Its members would be chosen by Indigenous people, and would serve for fixed terms. Members would be chosen from every Australian state and territory as well as the Torres Strait islands and include specific representatives for remote areas.
Genders would be equally represented and Indigenous youths would be included.
Cabinet specifies that the Voice would not have a veto power, countering arguments that the constitutional change could lead to unpopular laws being challenged in the courts.
Changing Australia’s constitution has never been easy. Of the 44 referendums held since 1901, only eight have been carried and none since 1977.
Draft laws setting out the question and the proposed constitutional change will go to Parliament next week and are expected to be voted on in June.
Even lawmakers who oppose the Voice are unlikely to anger constituents by standing in the way of the referendum going ahead.
Australia is unusual among former British colonies in it has never signed a treaty with the nation’s Indigenous population. The constitution came into effect in 1901, and has never acknowledged the Indigenous population as the country’s original inhabitants.
Many talk about a Great Australian Silence, a term coined late last century to describe an erasure of Indigenous perspectives and experiences from mainstream Australian history.
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WHO ARE INDIGENOUS AUSTRALIANS?
Australia is unusual among former British colonies in that no treaty was ever signed with the nation’s Indigenous inhabitants. The Aboriginal people of Australia’s mainland are culturally distinct from Torres Strait Islanders who come from an archipelago off the northeast coast. So Australia’s Indigenous population is known collectively as Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.
They accounted for 3.2 percent of Australia’s population in the 2021 census. Indigenous numbers had soared 25 percent since the previous census in 2016. Some say declining stigma encouraged more Australians to acknowledge their Indigenous heritage. Others say Indigenous roots are being faked to claim government benefits aimed at overcoming Indigenous disadvantage.
Indigenous Australians are the most disadvantaged ethnic group in Australia. They die younger than other Australians, are less likely to be employed, achieve lower education levels and are overrepresented in prison populations.
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WHAT IS THE VOICE?
The proposed referendum question only asks Australians if they agree with the Voice in principle.
The latest draft of the question is: “A proposed law: To alter the constitution to recognize the First Peoples of Australia by establishing an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice. Do you approve this proposed alteration?”
If the answer is “yes,” the constitution would be rewritten to state that the “Voice may make representations” to the Parliament and government “on matters relating to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples.”
The Parliament would make laws relating to the Voice “including its composition, functions, powers and procedures.”
The government has not said what form it proposes the Voice would take. But Cabinet has agreed on a set of principles upon which the Voice would be created.
Its members would be chosen by Indigenous people and would serve for fixed terms. They would come from every Australian state and territory as well as the Torres Strait islands and include specific representatives for remote areas.
Genders would be equally represented and Indigenous youths would be included.
Proponents say there would be no Indigenous right of veto over government policy and lawmakers would be free to disregard the Voice’s representations.
But opponents argue the courts might interpret the Voice’s constitutional powers in unpredictable ways, creating legal uncertainty.
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WHERE DID THE IDEA OF A VOICE COME FROM?
The Voice was recommended in 2017 by a group of 250 Indigenous leaders who met at Uluru, a landmark sandstone rock in central Australia that is a scared site to traditional owners. They were delegates of the First Nations National Constitutional Convention that the then-government had asked for advice on how the Indigenous population could be acknowledged in the constitution.
Their petition for constitutional change is known as the Uluru Statement from the Heart, a play on the common description of the semi-desert red sands of the region as Australia’s Red Heart.
The conservative government immediately rejected the proposal, arguing that a Voice would be seen as a “third chamber” of Parliament, an unwelcome addition to the House of Representatives and the Senate.
When the center-left Labor Party won elections in May last year, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese used his first speech to commit his government to creating the Voice.
The Nationals party, the junior coalition partner in the former government, announced in November they had decided to oppose the Voice, saying it would divide the nation along racial lines.
The Nationals also argue the Voice would undermine the work of 11 Indigenous legislators among the 227 federal lawmakers in Parliament.
The Liberal Party, the senior coalition partner, has yet to announce a position, but has demanded more details and the government’s own legal advice.
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WHY CONSTITUTIONAL CHANGE?
The South Australian state government responded to the Uluru Statement from the Heart by introducing in February legislation that it says would create Australia’s first Voice to Parliament for First Nations People.
The First Nations Voice Bill proposes a connected, direct and independent line of communication for Indigenous people to South Australia’s Parliament and the government, to allow important, shared communication by locally-elected regional members, the government says.
Critics question why the federal government doesn’t similarly legislate to create a Voice without changing the constitution.
But Voice proponents argue that recognition in the constitution of Indigenous Australians was an important element of the reform.
Victoria state created an elected First People’s Assembly of Victoria in 2019 but that is focused on creating a treaty between the state government and Indigenous people.
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WHEN WILL THE REFERENDUM BE HELD?
The government plans to introduce legislation to Parliament next week that would set out the referendum and constitutional changes.
The government hopes the referendum will be held on a Saturday sometime between October and December.
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HOW IS AUSTRALIA’S CONSTITUTION CHANGED?
Changing the constitution has never been easy and more than four in five referendums fail.
A referendum to change the constitution requires what is known as a double majority — the support of most Australian adults nationwide plus a majority of voters in a majority of states. Five referendums have failed because while they were supported by most Australians, they fell short of gaining majorities in at least four of the six states. Voter turnout is high because voting is compulsory.
Of the 44 referendums held since the constitution took effect in 1901, only eight have been carried and none since 1977.
When Australia last held a referendum in 1999, Indigenous recognition in the constitution was a key issue behind one of the questions. Australians were asked to approve adding a preamble to the constitution — an introduction that carried only symbolic and no legal significance.
The preamble was to have acknowledged that Indigenous Australians had inhabited the country “since time immemorial” and were “honored for their ancient and continuing cultures.”
Some observers argue that such an acknowledgment of Indigenous Australians’ place in the nation’s story would be an easier constitutional change to make today than the creation of the Voice.
