The prime minister, Anthony Albanese, acknowledged we have been here before as a nation: at a crossroads, about to decide a path that will affect the lives of Aboriginal and Torres Islander people for generations to come.
But for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, this time the stakes are so much higher, because the past is littered with the broken promises of politicians.
The prime minister said as much in his stirring speech at the Garma festival in Arnhem Land on Saturday.
Anthony Albanese spoke of “over 200 years of broken promises and betrayals, failures and false starts”.
“So many times, the gap between the words of balanda [whitefella] speeches and the deeds of governments has been as wide as this continent,” Albanese told a packed crowd.
But reactions have been mixed.
Campaigners for the Uluru Statement from the Heart are pleased with the detail – or rather the clarity – outlined in Albanese’s speech.
“It’s great that this level of clarity is with us now, with the PM backing up an election commitment with a clear and simple set of words,” the From the Heart campaign director, Dean Parkin, said following the PM’s speech.
The words Albanese used reflected the rigorous work done over many years by constitutional experts on the campaign, Parkin said.
“It’s showing the government has been listening, they recognise the work that’s gone before, they know they are on a strong foundation that can launch the next phase of the process that leads up to to a vote,” he said.
The Coalition said they would wait to see the “detail” of the voice – who would sit on it, how it would work – before committing to a process.
The opposition spokesman on Indigenous Australians, Julian Leeser, said it was now up to the government to explain to the Australian people how a voice to parliament would operate.
Leeser, who travelled to Garma with the prime minster, said he supported the move to enshrine a voice in the constitution but wanted to see the detail of the question and the proposed reforms. If a referendum was to succeed, Leeser said, it would depend on whether the government could adequately explain to the Australian people what the voice would look like.
“We as a Coalition have an open mind about the issue of the voice that the government is putting forward, and we are awaiting the detail,” Leeser said.
“This is a step today on that road, but we still want to know how the voice itself is going to operate.
“I’ve been involved in this debate for too long to see it fail because the government hasn’t answered peoples’ reasonable questions about how it’s going to operate.”
Leeser co-chaired the 2018 joint select committee on constitutional recognition with the Western Australian Labor senator Pat Dodson, which outlined options for “detail” on the voice in its final report.
The committee cited four other parliamentary reports that also provided detail around various models, including the 2012 expert panel on constitutional recognition of Indigenous Australians, the 2012 joint select committee on constitutional recognition of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, the 2017 Uluru Statement from the Heart and the 2017 referendum council.
The University of Melbourne emeritus professor Marcia Langton was scathing on calls for “detail” when she spoke to ABC radio on Friday.
Prof Langton, who co-chaired the Indigenous voice co-design group, said there was ample detail already available.
“When people say they want more detail, all that tells me is that they refuse to read our report, because all the detail is there,” she said. “There’s over 500 pages of detail, and I see this demand for more detail as just a mystery of making and sowing confusion. I do wonder if some of them can read and write.”
The Greens said they wanted to see other changes before a referendum.
Senator Lidia Thorpe said she would be seeking a meeting with the Albanese government to put “urgent, critical matters for First Nations people on the table”.
“These are things that will save people’s lives, before any referendum,” Thorpe, a Gunnai, Gunditjmara and DjabWurrung senator, said in a statement on Saturday.
“I want the government to support our bill to back the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, implement the remaining recommendations from the Stolen Generations and Deaths in Custody Royal Commissions, and back the Greens’ plans for concrete steps towards a treaty,” Thorpe said.
Later on Saturday, the lead convener of the Coalition of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peak Organisations (Coalition of Peaks), Pat Turner, said it was possible to do more than one thing at a time.
Turner said the voice and improving the lives of Aboriginal and Islander people was “not an either-or prospect”.
“Our members undertake service delivery across Australia to some 500,000 Aboriginal and Torres Strait people,” Turner said.
“Our members are on country, working in and for our communities, to make a difference in our people’s lives.”
