The Voice - for reflection, for the weekend

This week a poll suggested that support for the Voice has lessened. And, this week the AFL came out in support of the Voice. Our Chapter voted in support of the Voice. Tim Brennan has sent an article by Gareth Evans which offers some thinking on the issues. Here are some excerpts for weekend cocnsideration:

First, the Chapter resolution:

• We Missionaries of the Sacred Heart of Jesus welcome the opportunity to support the Uluru Statement from the Heart, and the desire of First Nations Peoples to have a Voice that will be acknowledged and listened to, enshrined in the Australian Constitution.

At the heart of the case for the Voice is that it will mean Indigenous Australians will be recognised – for the first time in our founding national document, and for the first time in practice on anything like this scale – not just as the subjects, for better or worse, of government policy choices, but as agents of policy change, contributing actively to legislative and executive decision-making.

The product of an extraordinarily comprehensive national consultative process culminating in the Uluru Statement from the Heart, the Voice deserves none of the sniping it has received from either some perennially disaffected members of the Indigenous community itself, or from familiar conservative political voices. Of course, it will not by itself deliver the well-crafted, well-financed, health, education, welfare and employment programs still so desperately needed. But it is a means to that end, not a distraction from it.

But this worry dissolves when looks also at the actual draft constitutional text which will, as currently proposed, accompany it on the ballot paper:

1. There shall be a body, to be called the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice.

2. The Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice may make representations to Parliament and the Executive Government on matters relating to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples.
3. The Parliament shall, subject to this Constitution, have power to make laws with respect to the composition, functions, powers and procedures of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice.

We need to do that not grudgingly but with the kind of sensitivity so trenchantly articulated by Paul Keating in his Redfern address. As he said, “it was we who did the dispossessing. We took the traditional lands and smashed the traditional way of life. We brought the diseases. The alcohol. We committed the murders. We took the children from their mothers. We practised discrimination and exclusion. It was our ignorance and our prejudice. And our failure to imagine these things being done to us.” Even Tony Abbott acknowledged that this “movingly evoked…the stain on our soul”.

None of this means abandoning our critical faculties. None of it means sacrificing reason to sentiment. None of it means giving rewards and benefits to individuals irrespective of their needs and deserts. None of it will automatically translate into more effective government programs. But what it does mean is non-Indigenous Australians listening, as we have never seriously listened before, to what our Indigenous brothers and sisters have long being trying to tell us. That we do owe a very special debt to the first Australians. And we can do much better than we ever have before in discharging that debt. By listening – really listening – to their Voice. 

Gareth Evans, ALP minister, former Senator, Chancellor ANU, author.