“For me, Indigenous recognition won’t be changing our Constitution so much as completing it.” – Tony Abbott, 2015.
When on February 7, 1788, the British claimed the eastern half of Australia, they left us with two abiding problems. They assumed that the First Nations were not in actual possession of their own homelands and that they had neither laws nor customs which could be given formal recognition.
As a result, they departed from what had been customary practice in North America of respecting what was called Indian title to traditional property and determining that the Indigenous tribes held a form of internal sovereignty, and with whom many treaties were negotiated.
The anomalous situation in NSW was noted by Jeremy Bentham, the leading political philosopher of the time. In 1792, he wrote that there had been no negotiations and that no treaties had been drafted or signed. “The flaw,” Bentham wrote, “is an incurable one.”
It took Australia more than 200 years to begin to remedy this situation. In 1992, the High Court’s Mabo decision recognised native title and overturned one aspect of terra nullius. But the twin problem of the political and legal status of the First Nations remains where it was in 1788.
To seek the source of the twin pillars of the 2017 Uluru Statement from the Heart – a Voice to parliament and a makarrata, or treaty – we need to go back to the referendum of 1967 and the assumption of federal powers over Indigenous policy. The Holt government, deciding it needed a permanent body to advise it in an area where it had little experience, established the Council for Aboriginal Affairs, which operated from 1967 to 1976.
The Voice to parliament, which now meets ignorance and misunderstanding, has been with us for more than 50 years, although the bodies varied in name, structure and longevity, from the National Aboriginal Consultative Committee to the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission and, after 14 Indigenous organisations met prime minister Scott Morrison in 2018, the National Agreement on Closing the Gap, which gave First Australians unprecedented influence to and “shared decision-making”.
The process was initiated in July 2015 by Tony Abbott, then prime minister and Aboriginal affairs minister. He invited 40 First Nations leaders to Kirribilli House to discuss ways that their communities could be recognised in the Constitution, telling them: “This is a very important national crusade. It’s very important to me, it’s very important to the Indigenous people of our country and it should be very important to all of us who want to see our country whole. And for me, Indigenous recognition won’t be changing our Constitution so much as completing it.”
smh.com.au/national/we-ve-been-tuning-this-voice-for-50-years-don-t-silence-it-now-20230830-p5e0mq.html
