For First Nations people, it will be seen as a rejection of reconciliation by Australia’s non-Indigenous majority and tacit approval of a status quo that is widely considered to have failed them for two centuries.
Before the vote, Senator Pat Dodson, the government’s special envoy for reconciliation, said win or lose, the country had a “huge healing process to go through.”
“We’ve got to contemplate the impact of a No vote on the future generations, the young people,” he told the National Press Club this week. “We already know that the Aboriginal youth of this country have high suicide rates. Why? They’re not bad people. They’re good people. Why don’t they see any future?”
Maree Teesson, director of the Matilda Center for Research in Mental Health and Substance Use at the University of Sydney, told CNN the Voice to Parliament had offered self-determination to Indigenous communities, an ability to have a say over what happens in their lives.
“Self-determination is such a critical part of their social and emotional well-being,” she said.
Teesson said a No vote doesn’t just maintain the status quo, it “undermines the self-determination of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.”
“I do hope that we don’t lose the possibility of the hope that this gave our nation and that we somehow work to find another way to achieve that,” she said.
Some experts say more broadly the No outcome could deter future leaders from holding referendums, as it could indicate that the bar for constitutional change – written into the document in 1901 – is too high.
The last time Australians voted down a referendum was in 1999 when they were asked to cut ties with the British monarchy and become a republic – and little has changed on that front since then.
“The drafters of the constitution said this is the rulebook and we’re only going to change it if the Australian people say they want to change it – we’re not going to leave it up to politicians,” said Paula Gerber, professor of Law at Monash University.
“So that power, to change, to modernize, to update the constitution has been put in the hands of the Australian people. And if they are going to say every time, “If you don’t know, vote No,” then what politician is going to spend the time and money on a referendum that can be so easily defeated?”
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