THE VOICE TO PARLIAMENT: TWO VIEWS – SEAN GORDON

The request for creating the Indigenous Voice to Parliament was a result of the May 2017 Uluru Statement from the Heart, delivered by the First Nations National Constitutional Convention which met at Uluru. With a change of government on 23 May 2022, new prime minister Anthony Albanese promised in his victory speech that a referendum to decide the Indigenous Voice to Parliament enshrined in the Constitution would be held within his term of office. In July 2022, he outlined further plans regarding the referendum, and proposed that the advisory group be named the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice. On Monday 17 October 2022, The Sydney Institute heard from two Indigenous Australians the case for and concerns about the proposal – Sean Gordon, Chief Executive Officer of Awabakal Enterprise Ltd and Chair of Uphold & Recognise joined Dr Anthony Dillon, Researcher at the Institute for Positive Psychology and Education, Australian Catholic University, Sydney to share their views.

THE VOICE TO PARLIAMENT: TWO VIEWS

SEAN GORDON

I acknowledge that we are gathered on the lands of the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation and pay my respect to their elders. I bring greetings from my people the Barkindji and Wangkumarra.

For tens of thousands of years, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples have cared for this country. The Brewarrina fish traps are believed to be the oldest man-made structures on the planet. The fish traps were shared by the Ngemba, Ngampaa, Barkindji, Wangkumarra, Murrawari, Weilwan and Gamilaroi people for thousands of years. The fish traps made Brewarrina one of the great inter-tribal meeting places of pre-European eastern Australia. Despite our long and deep connection to these lands, it took until 1992 for the High Court of Australia to overturn the doctrine of terra nullius.

I am a Wangkumarra/Barkindji man born in 1970. In 1938 my great grandparents and 107 Wangkumarra people were forcibly removed off their traditional lands and put on the back of cattle trucks transported from Tibooburra to the Brewarrina Mission. That generation, and the generations that followed right up until the NSW Aborigines Protection Act was repealed in 1969, were deprived in so many ways:

The right to speak their language;

To practice their culture and pass on knowledge;

To go to school;

And even the basic right to just move freely without needing to seek permission to move off the reserves and missions.

COVID gave Australians a very small insight into what it is like to have your movement restricted. To have the government overreach into your life, telling you what you can and can’t do.

Now imagine that went on formally for 60 years. My family lived under that Act from 1909 to 1969. By the time I was born, my people had suffered, and my family was broken. I grew up in a foster home with 42 other Aboriginal children on the Brewarrina Aboriginal Mission. A foster home full of kids from broken families.

The 1960s and 1970s brought big changes in this country – necessary changes. The 1967 Referendum was a turning point. The oppression that Aboriginal people had long suffered was being replaced by the “rights agenda”. Winning these rights was vitally important. It finally made us equal in the eyes of the law.

My grandfather who fought in World War Two could now enter a pub and have a beer with his fellow veterans – a right he was previously denied. But things were not equal.  Our starting positions were not same.

Too many people were coming from a very broken place – economically, socially, spiritually, and culturally. Many of our families were left shattered after the decades of failed laws, which included the cruelty of separating children from their families and being reminded that we were a lesser race of people. So, when we won the same rights as everyone else, what we also saw was a rise in harmful social dysfunction.

Peter Sutton’s book The Politics of Suffering, details the unintended damage from having a tunnel vision on rights, which robbed our people of the thing we needed to be doing as we gained these rights: taking responsibility. As the saying goes, we ended up having things done to us and for us, not with us, because the rights agenda was not met in equal parts with a responsibility agenda.

The constant effort by governments to then try to save us, has created an often-chaotic layer of well-meaning services funded from multiple different Departments with multiple different providers without any coordination and with very limited consultation.

To be clear – disadvantaged people need services. But, overlay a service driven society with the narrative of low expectations – you can see how Indigenous people end up.

When Prime Minister John Howard announced his intention to recognise Indigenous peoples in the Constitution in 2007, he spoke of:

The unfinished business;

The special status as the first peoples of our nation;

Of our national identity being diminished when our citizens feel marginalised;

Of the long struggle for a fair place for Indigenous people.

But, importantly, he believed constitutional recognition would be the cornerstone of “a new settlement”. This new settlement, he argued, would include the rebalancing of rights and responsibilities. Howard lost the election, but the commitment to recognition continued.

In 2012, Julia Gillard appointed an Expert Panel that concluded we should insert a new section 116A prohibiting racial discrimination in the Constitution. This form of substantive recognition would create a new right – not coupled with any new responsibility. Prohibiting racial discrimination was pushed until 2015 when a small group of Indigenous leaders, in collaboration with constitutional conservatives, developed a proposal for a constitutionally guaranteed Indigenous advisory body – or voice. This shifted the debate significantly.

It was this idea for an advisory body – or a voice – that was eventually endorsed by the Uluru Statement from the Heart. Despite what some opponents are trying to argue, in my view, the Uluru Statement was never about progressing special rights or creating division. This “modest yet profound” reform empowers Indigenous peoples to take responsibility in their affairs, while upholding the Australian Constitution.

It will be up to the Parliament to decide exactly how we will get to have a say, so this change will not empower the High Court. To date, the race power has only ever been used for one group of people – Indigenous people. Shouldn’t the Constitution therefore allow us to have a say when special laws are made about us? As Noel Pearson has said, “Isn’t it our right to take responsibility?”

The Voice will recognise the strength and resilience of our communities – who want the future to be bright for our young ones, who want economic development, to own homes, to practise their language and culture, and who want to be free to live their lives.

I regard myself as a practitioner, I have been privileged to work with communities for the past 20years to develop placed-based solutions to their challenges. I led the Empowered Communities, Empowered Peoples an initiative supported by then Prime Minister Tony Abbott.

The Empowered Communities is a responsibilities reform focussed on resetting the relationship between communities and government, where communities step up and take responsibility, and governments step back and assume their role as enablers.

I am also the Independent Chair of the Barkley Regional Deal, an initiative of Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull for a 10-year approach to regional development. This place based regional governance framework brings together all tiers of government.

The Barkly regional Deal is also a Stronger People, Stronger Places initiative, a Coalition Government regional governance structure. The Barkly Regional Deal creates a granular governance group who can feed up and into elected representatives. Like Empowered Communities, there are now Indigenous leaders sitting at the table who are stepping up and taking responsibility for their community.

Importantly, government is listening and acting. There are no veto powers – just a say.

Regrettably, governments can pull the rug out from underneath all these initiatives, leaving communities powerless. This is why the voice needs to be guaranteed in the Constitution. This stop-start policy making, and ad-hoc consultation is costly, inefficient and, in many cases, ineffective, leaving Indigenous people and the broader community fatigued and disheartened.

As a nation, we all want to see more Indigenous communities driving a responsibilities agenda and leading change. There are pockets of change happening, but this change is slow. To accelerate progress, communities need to be able to tell government how to get rid of the barriers to their development, and they need a structure or group who is authorised to drive place-based reform.

The Voice to Parliament can be that change if the parliament designs it as such. The local/regional bodies were developed as an integrated part of the voice proposal for this purpose.

While much work has been done over the last decade on options for recognition, and on how a voice might work, there remain three important elements that we must focus on if we are to win at a referendum. Firstly, it seems hard to see how we can go to a referendum without detailing how the voice will work in practice. Our opponents will be able to make a log of claims, and we will not be able to refute them. The Calma/ Langton codesign report is the starting point for this, but it is not the end point.

To engage constructively, and not destructively, we need a robust process that will allow people with questions or criticisms to have them dealt with, and then outlined in draft legislation. It seems obvious the Parliament must be at the center of that work – there is no point having a Liberal model or a Labor model. The Parliament needs to work in the interests of all Australians and deliver a final model that will endure.

Secondly, we need to ensure the voice model is tied through legislation to practical change and outcomes. There are many ways we can do this, including putting clauses into the legislation for the voice model to prioritise the issues that have been already well canvassed through the Closing the Gap reform agreement.

Finally, we need the legal community to come together and test the final wording in a transparent way. For people to have confidence to vote yes, we need to know the brightest legal minds have worked together to deliver a final set of words. The Prime Minister has said “if there is a different word or a tweaking here or there, we are up for that debate”.

In my view, we need to have an open and transparent process to provide advice to the Parliament and the public around the legal and constitutional issues that would determine the final constitutional amendment that is most viable and desirable. Worth winning, and winnable.

In conclusion

We have been here for more than 60,000 years. The Brewarrina fish traps, our ancient languages, our connection to country make our contribution to this nation as the first peoples worthy of recognition in the Australian Constitution. Former Prime Ministers John Howard, Tony Abbott, Malcolm Turnbull, and Scott Morrison accepted that. And only substantive recognition through a constitutionally guaranteed voice is worth doing.

I know there are many people out there who stand ready and who have been trying to make changes on their own in the absence of a voice.

The voice can help be that vehicle for change. For taking responsibility. It is not going to solve everything, but it is a start. I have seen it; I have lived it. We must win something worth winning. We also need it to be winnable.

A constitutionally guaranteed voice is the best option for substantive change that can unite us, that can be the opportunity to take responsibility, that can be true recognition, and that can chart a better course – a unifying course for our nation for generations to come.