The authors of the Uluru Statement from the Heart are calling on Australians to make constitutional change an election issue, saying the only chance for reform is if voters, not the government, start to demand it.
“Look, forget the government,” said Pat Anderson, a Alyawarre woman who co-chaired the Referendum Council, which designed the process that resulted in the Uluru statement. “They are not going to do it, even the people five years ago … we know that they are not going to do it. That’s why we have to appeal to the Australian people now.”
The Uluru statement was delivered on 27 May 2017. It has not been enacted, and even plans to legislate for a non-constitutional voice to parliament have not yet eventuated.
The statement arose from a lengthy consultation process culminating in three days of talks at Uluru between First Nations delegates from across the country. They produced a joint statement calling for the right for First Nations people to have a voice to the Australian parliament to be enshrined in the constitution. They also called for a Makarata commission, which would undertake a truth-telling process and begin paving the way for a treaty, or many treaties.
Anderson called the statement “a beautiful gift to the Australian people” and said it was never directed at the government of the day. It was hoped that Australians would pick up the mantle of change, as they did in the 1967 referendum, and overwhelmingly vote in support of First Nations people.
“There was a really strong fundamental belief in the decency of the Australian people,” Anderson said.
The government’s response to the Uluru statement – a swift and continued rejection of requirement that a voice to parliament be enshrined in the constitution – was neither unexpected nor unprecedented.
The past 233 years of colonisation, Anderson said, had given First Nations people a lot of experience at rejection. So the statement’s authors are now calling on voters to use their power to try to grow support for the reform.
“We didn’t really expect the government to say, ‘We’re gonna do this,’” Anderson said. “But if there’s a people’s movement and a real groundswell of support … If politicians are getting stopped everywhere they go by people who want to talk about the Uluru statement, they’re going to come back to Canberra and see their bosses and say, ‘Listen, I can’t get anywhere in my electorate without somebody wanting to stop me and talk to me about the Uluru Statement from the Heart’ … That’s the people’s movement and it’s real old-fashioned activism.
“Write to your local member, write to the prime minister, talk to your local member, and say why you support the Uluru Statement from the Heart.”
Supporters of the voice have spent the five years since the statement was handed down lobbying governments and businesses, and travelling around the country with the statement to share it with schools and community groups. They have begun meeting with independent candidates in the lead-up to the 2022 federal election.
In November the federal Indigenous affairs minister, Ken Wyatt, said he was close to introducing legislation that would set up a non-constitutional voice to parliament, on the back of a co-design process led by Tom Calma and Marcia Langton. That legislation has not yet been tabled and is unlikely to come before an election.
That proposal was criticised by Labor’s Indigenous affairs spokesperson, Linda Burney, who said any attempt to create a voice to parliament which was not enshrined in the constitution would be a “fail”. Labor has pledged to enact the Uluru statement in its entirety if elected.
Enshrining the voice in the constitution was a non-negotiable part of the reform, according to Anderson.
“Generation after generation of us has tried to negotiate with the government of the day, we’ve set up our own organisations,” she said. “But with a swipe of the pen, the government of the day can just wipe them away.
“There has to be fundamental change here. And the only thing we haven’t done, the only thing left standing was the constitution”
Anderson said that trying to get recognition, representation and support for First Nations people felt like “running at a brick wall” but she would not give up hope that the Australian people would support the change.
“Every generation it’s our turn to run at the brick wall. For God’s sake, eventually it’s got to topple. It’s got to topple, or I don’t know what sort of a place we are.”
