“On behalf of the Australian Labor Party, I commit to the Uluru Statement from the Heart in full.”
These are some of the first words Australia’s new prime minister Anthony Albanese said after winning the 2022 federal election.
Constitutional reform
Professor of constitutional law at the University of NSW and one of the statement's authors, Megan Davis, said it is a plea for constitutional reform.
“To put it very simply, the Uluru Statement from the Heart is almost like a sales pitch to the Australian people as to why we need constitutional reform,” the Cobble Cobble woman told SBS News.
While receiving widespread support, not all First Nations people are behind the statement. It was promptly dismissed by the Turnbull government, but a new Labor government has given it wings.
It makes two key recommendations: the enshrinement of a First Nations Voice to the Australian parliament in the constitution and the establishment of a Makarrata Commission.
The Voice
Professor Davis said the voice would be an advisory body of First Nations people constitutionally enshrined to the parliament.
“The reason for an enshrined voice is that currently in Australia’s legal and political system, First Nations have very little, if any, influence on laws and policies that are passed or written [and] that impact upon our communities,” she said.
“The outcome of that is very poor-quality laws and policies, and a widening of gap and disadvantage. Whether it’s health, education or justice, the gap is getting wider.
“A big part of this is the fact that the Commonwealth does not have to have First Nations peoples at the table when they make laws and policies about our life."
The statement calls for the voice to be enshrined in the constitution, so it cannot be removed by any government of the day. For that to happen, the constitution must be amended, and that can only be done by a referendum.
Mr Albanese committed to holding a referendum on the voice in Labor’s first term of government, and will announce the date of the poll in August.
It’s a voice to the parliament, not a voice in the parliament. It’s a very important distinction
“We will, of course, be advancing the need to have constitutional recognition of First Nations people, including a voice to parliament that is enshrined in that constitution,” he told reporters on Monday in Canberra.
Professor Davis said – as per the statement – it is imperative the Voice is enshrined in the constitution otherwise it could do more damage than good.
“When we went around Australia to ask what would be meaningful recognition to communities, the answer was a voice. But a voice that cannot be abolished like previous bodies have been,” she said.
“There have been five or six Commonwealth-created entities that functioned as a voice at a federal level and they were all abolished.
“When they’re abolished they leave great destruction behind in communities and it takes a very long time to recover."
Professor Davis said there’s nothing about the voice that can bind the parliament constitutionally.
“It’s a voice to the parliament, not a voice in the parliament. It’s a very important distinction," she said.
“Nothing that is said by this entity can bind the parliament. It is an advisory in the sense that every single body that reports to the parliament is like the Productivity Commission or the Human Rights Commission."
Makarrata
A Yolngu word, Makarrata means the coming together after a struggle to supervise a process of agreement-making between governments and First Nations, and truth-telling about their history.
Once the voice has been constitutionally enshrined to the parliament, the Uluru Statement from the Heart recommends the establishment of a Makarrata Commission.
According to Professor Davis, the commission will perform two key roles.
The first “is to facilitate and supervise agreement-making, otherwise known as treaties”.
“It is to do the rest of the work that’s required to be done to settle some of these issues that have been outstanding since 1788,” she said.
Developing the treaties is a complex process.
“The idea is the agreements would be done on a nation-by-nation basis and there are over 200 nations on the continent and treaties take a very long time to negotiate,” she said.
The second key role of the Makarrata Commission would be truth-telling.
“The process of truth-telling is to understand what happened in terms of dispossession – the massacres, the genocide, the killings, the protection era, the assimilation era where children were removed from their families,” Professor Davis said.
“The idea is to have a proper and full discussion about Australian history.”
Why hasn't the Voice referendum been held already?
Shortly after the Uluru Statement from the Heart was issued to the Australian people in May 2017, it was dismissed by the then deputy prime minister Barnaby Joyce as a “third chamber of parliament”. Mr Joyce “unreservedly” apologised for the “mistake” two years later.
Back in 2017, however, the Turnbull government ruled out the referendum.
But Professor Davis said the past few years haven’t been wasted.
“Since that time we’ve had a co-design process led by [former Indigenous affairs minister] Ken Wyatt, where he has led a number of committees, who have designed the fundamentals of what a voice might look like,” she said.
