Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese turned to U.S. basketball legend Shaquille O’Neal to help garner support for a referendum on changing the constitution to set up a representative Indigenous body in parliament.
“Shaq is someone who is well known to younger people, and one of the things that we have been doing is trying to mobilize support for the Voice to Parliament by talking with sporting figures,” Albanese said Saturday in Sydney. “Mr. O’Neal does a lot of work in the U.S. about social justice and lifting people up who are marginalized, including through sporting organizations.”
Albanese last month promised to hold a poll by the end of his first term in office in 2025 on the so-called Voice to Parliament to improve the lives of Australia’s Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. Indigenous Australians make up about 3.2% of the population and are the country’s poorest and most disadvantaged group on average.
Referendums are a rarely used tool in Australia, which has held 44 since federation. Most of those have failed to win backing and the prime minister acknowledged the risks.
“There is always a risk,” Albanese said. “This will improve the nation. It will improve our self-confidence in the way we see ourselves, but it will also improve the way that we are seen by the world.”
