It was Martin Luther King Jr, prophet and martyr of the civil rights movement in the United States, who famously remarked, “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice”. Yet there are times when justice seems to become more distant rather than closer.
Saturday was such an occasion in Australia. The nation failed to grasp an opportunity to help redress the most grievous injustice in its history, the dispossession and exclusion of First Peoples. As Prime Minister Anthony Albanese repeatedly said during the referendum campaign, the 2017 Uluru Statement from the Heart was a generous and gracious outstretched hand from Indigenous Australians.
That hand was spurned by Saturday’s “no” vote.
