Federal cabinet is meeting to discuss the Albanese government’s next steps to address Indigenous disadvantage, with senior government figures favouring an interim listening mechanism to provide advice directly to the prime minister.
After the resounding defeat of the voice to parliament on Saturday night, Guardian Australia understands the government will consider on Monday options including appointing a new short-term policy advisory group reporting to the prime minister.
Indigenous leaders have asked for a week of silence for Australians to reflect on “the role of racism and prejudice against Indigenous people” in the no result. The government wants to give people time to regroup before setting up a new dialogue with First Nations leaders about closing the gap and rebooting reconciliation.
The defeat of the referendum may see the focus shift to state-based voice and treaty arrangements rather than national processes.
With federal parliament set to resume on Monday, the Albanese government will attempt to draw a line under the divisive national debate about the voice and focus on other elements of its agenda.
The government is expected to turn its attention to cost-of-living issues, with the parliament to consider key legislation on industrial relations and migration. It will also address matters related to the Israel-Palestine conflict. With Albanese to travel to the United States next week for an official visit to Washington DC, the government is also working up a policy response to challenges and opportunities created by the Biden administration’s Inflation Reduction Act.
With a backlash against the voice in heartland seats in New South Wales, and ahead of a caucus meeting on Tuesday, Labor backbenchers said the referendum campaign had failed to cut through in outer suburban or regional areas. Macarthur MP Mike Freelander and Hunter MP Dan Repacholi were among those saying cost-of-living pressures had been higher on voters’ agendas.
Leading yes campaigner Marcus Stewart said the referendum result had left Indigenous communities “hurting” but the conversation had highlighted crippling issues facing Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people – and voters wanted politicians to do better.
Sources said on Sunday it was too early to pinpoint alternative plans because the government did not want to rush its next proposal and needed to “let the dust settle”. But an interim listening mechanism was on the table.
How the government now planned to tackle key problems like incarceration rates, suicide rates and life expectancy – structural issues it said could only be addressed through a mechanism like the voice – was unclear, as was the future of the government’s commitment to the remaining parts of the Uluru statement.
Asked on Saturday night whether Labor was still committed to the statement in full – meaning voice, truth and treaty – Albanese only would answer: “We had a referendum and it wasn’t successful. I respect the outcome of that referendum.”
The government had promised $27m for a Makarrata commission, part of the Uluru statement, to oversee truth and treaty processes. This year’s budget committed $5m to the project.
The Greens leader, Adam Bandt, and the party’s First Nations spokesperson, Dorinda Cox, on Sunday called for the government to establish a national truth and justice commission to “work alongside and in support of local and state level truth-telling processes and [to] help initiate processes in regions and states where none currently exist”.
“There’s no need for delay and we can’t leave the country without a clear pathway forward,” Bandt said.
“A national truth and justice commission would bring everyone together to talk honestly about the violence and dispossession of First Nations peoples so we can heal and move forward together.”
Time to put the politics away and ‘do better’
Stewart, a Nira illim bulluk man of the Taungurung nation, said the nation needed to find a new way forward after the voice was rejected.
Voters “sent a very clear message around the country that politicians of all sides need to do better and need to be better,” he told ABC radio.
“Everyone’s ready to get to work. All our political leadership – put the politics away. We have to get to work today and start chipping away. That mechanism [the voice] isn’t in play any more, the Australian people have voted it down, we’ve got to look at another way forward.”
Stewart said he believed Australians now had “a stronger baseline of the challenges Aboriginal people are facing across this country”. He rejected the idea that no voters had opposed the referendum based only on racism.
Several states are progressing with their own voice or treaty arrangements. South Australia’s voice will continue, the state government said, while NSW has flagged its intentions.
The Victorian First Peoples’ Assembly said on Sunday that a national voice would have improved its work, but that state-based treaty processes would continue. Aunty Esme Bamblett told a press conference that “constitutional reform isn’t the only show in town”.
“We’re going to be negotiating a treaty early next year. The process we’ve established when negotiating treaties will put decision-making power directly into the hands of Aboriginal communities at a local level,” she said.
Co-chair Rueben Berg said the assembly was negotiating treaty with the Victorian government but he suggested the commonwealth could join the talks.
“I would imagine that there would be similar opportunities across the rest of the nation with other states progressing their own treaties,” he said.
No campaign leader Warren Mundine had previously said treaties with Indigenous people were more likely in the event of the referendum’s defeat. On Sunday, he said he opposed a national treaty and the Makarrata commission but backed the concept of local treaties with individual Aboriginal nations.
“We have our people, our traditional owners, clan leaders and elders in our communities of all the many Aboriginal nations. They are the voices for our people,” Mundine told the ABC.
However, he didn’t say immediately what action he and other no campaigners might take in this regard, instead raising previous calls for an audit of spending on Indigenous programs.
