Regardless of how Australians feel about the result of the referendum, it’s pretty clear the campaign was divisive and featured rhetoric that made Indigenous Australians feel unsafe.
Australia must now have a reckoning about how it can advance reconciliation and improve practical outcomes for Indigenous Australians without a voice.
Our Indigenous affairs editor, Lorena Allam, has written about that need to shift to progress truth-telling and treaty-making, the other elements of the Uluru statement from the heart.
But with civil discourse fraying and the possibility of opportunistic violence arising from the Israel-Hamas war, it’s clear the cleavage between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians is just one manifestation of racism in Australia.
So in addition to finding ways to close the gap and come to terms with what the result means for reconciliation, the government should also be looking for other ways to bring Australians together and unbork the very polarised nature of Australian society.
Here are a few.
First, the national anti-racism framework. Labor committed to fund the Australian Human Rights Commission to do this work before the election and has begun to deliver.
So far the AHRC has produced a scoping report, some of the key findings of which are that it is a “myth” that racism doesn’t exist in Australia, and yet Australia “does not have a consistent and comprehensive national approach to anti-racism”.
The AHRC found there was “widespread support for a national anti-racism framework”, and that many consulted parties shared “their strong view that a framework must acknowledge the experience of colonisation and its ongoing impacts on First Nations peoples”.
It called for: better data on the impact of racism, improving public awareness, cultural safety in workplaces and the delivery of services, legal protections, a focus on the discrimination against Indigenous Australians in the justice system, and “stronger media standards and more effective regulation”.
AHRC president and acting race discrimination commissioner, Rosalind Croucher, said it is consulting culturally and linguistically diverse Australians, and will consult First Nations Australia later this year.
It’s aiming to complete a draft framework by early 2024, although this depends on the appointment of a new permanent race discrimination commissioner.
The Albanese government could call a 2020-style summit to finalise the framework, as recommended by the AHRC.
It may be difficult to secure the attendance of Peter Dutton, an opposition leader who walked out on the apology to the Stolen Generations (for which he apologised), raised fears about African gangs in Melbourne, and argued that Liberal prime minister Malcolm Fraser should not have let people of “Lebanese-Muslim” background into Australia. But that doesn’t mean the rest of us should give up on it.
Second, a Human Rights Act.
Many non-Indigenous no voters in the voice referendum appear to have been concerned that somehow Indigenous Australians were getting special rights or privileges.
While that argument misses the point of constitutional recognition, it contains an impulse that advancements in rights should be universal. That logic won’t redress the specific disadvantage of settlers dispossessing Indigenous Australians of the continent, but it can be harnessed for some good.
The AHRC released a model act in March, and it is chock-full of good ideas: equality before the law; the right to life; protection of children and families; privacy; freedoms of movement, association and expression; freedom of thought, conscience, religion and belief; rights to education, health, an adequate standard of living, to access social security and a healthy environment.
Taken at face value, rights like these are neutral when it comes to race, but would still do a lot of good especially for Indigenous Australians, some of the most disadvantaged people on earth, if governments were prepared to enact and deliver them.
Human rights shouldn’t be a left-right issue. A Human Rights Act might provide some protection against the excesses of policies detested by progressives (such as robodebt and indefinite detention) and some detested by conservatives (like Covid policies).
Third, discrimination law.
Section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act prohibits speech that “offends, insults or humiliates” a person based on their race – a protection that does not exist in discrimination laws for other attributes.
When the Morrison government tried unsuccessfully to push its divisive religious discrimination bill through parliament, the then Labor opposition complained it didn’t contain a protection against vilification on the grounds of religion.
The then manager of opposition business, Tony Burke, queried how it could be that if a woman wearing a hijab was abused or intimidated because she was Arabic, she had legal protection but if it was because she was a Muslim, she had no protection under federal law.
Labor could bring forward its religious discrimination bill, which is expected to include protection for queer students as well as a prohibition on religious vilification. If it were really brave, it could attempt to consolidate discrimination laws to extend that protection for other attributes.
None of this will be easy, especially with an opposition determined to block as much of the government’s agenda as possible.
But the Albanese government has a year and a half left of this term and a very progressive Senate, needing only the Greens and the Jacqui Lambie Network, or Greens and the independents Lidia Thorpe and David Pocock, to pass legislation.
A defeat in a referendum is a bitter pill to swallow but it should not be the end of all social progress.
