How the Voice referendum could radically change Australia’s identity

Pat Anderson doesn’t remember how old she was the day she sat in a hospital waiting room next to her father, her small bare feet dangling above the floor. But she does remember, with devastating clarity, patient after patient being attended to before her as her affliction tightened its grip.

“Eventually, my father took me up to the desk. He said, ‘Sister, I think it’s my daughter’s turn to be seen by the doctor; we’ve been here for some time and she’s now vomiting,’ ” Anderson told me.

“And to this day, I can still hear that woman saying loudly: ‘Oh, Mr Anderson! We didn’t realise she was with you!’”

Anderson, like her mother, is Indigenous. Her father is not. It’s the sole reason that it was he and rarely her mother who would accompany her as a child whenever she had to “meet with the establishment”, as she puts it.

Fast-forward 70-odd years to today, and Anderson, an Uluru Dialogue co-chair, described an Australia in which practised discrimination and countless daily indignities remain a constant in the lives of all First Nations peoples.

Speaking as we were on January 26, she said: “You know, my family made the decision not to go out years ago because it was too dangerous. You get sick and tired of being spat at and called a ‘black’.

“Every family has these stories; stories of exclusion, of prejudice, neglect. Metaphorically, their regularity makes your shoulders start to stoop — it’s just too much for a body to bear.”

Against this backdrop, Anderson said it would be a mistake to examine the crisis in Alice Springs in isolation, as though the frayed and fractured ancestral bonds with country and culture wrought by dispossession and perpetuated through generations of misguided government policies were of little consequence.

The violence had conversely laid bare the sweeping failure of successive governments to close the gap, and demarcated with immutable precision the reason the referendum on the Voice must succeed.

“The crisis didn’t just happen overnight,” she said. “It’s the product of generations of neglect, people feeling disempowered with hopelessness, the lack of investment — all the problems known about for years but not dealt with.”

On this footing, she said, a constitutional Voice to Parliament would have enabled these “underlying causes and issues” to be addressed before they approached crisis point, a sentiment echoed in recent days by several other prominent Indigenous leaders including Noel Pearson and Minister for Indigenous Australians Linda Burney.

“Local communities had warned of the harm that would follow the removal of the alcohol bans,” Pearson wrote in The Age. “The governments did not listen. Until we have a constitutional voice, the cycle of misery caused by top-down and tone-deaf policymaking will not end.”

Implicit in Pearson’s words “did not listen”, said Anderson, was an important truth commonly lost on opponents to the Voice, or at least those who sympathise with their views: Indigenous people have for decades tried to convince government of the historic realities grounding Indigenous disadvantage, but to no avail.

“The public doesn’t seem to understand that we’ve been talking to and begging governments for decades to listen to us,” she said. “Everything we’ve tried, however well-intentioned, hasn’t worked. Decades and decades of begging.”

It’s precisely this history, she said, which discloses the fundamental weaknesses of current representative Indigenous bodies and those of times past, revealing them for what they are: little more than an experiment in consultation condemned to the spectre of repeated failure.

Failure because the fate of such organisations has historically been tied to the whims of the election cycle and funding priorities of government. And failure, because absolutely nothing about those representative bodies compelled the government of the day to listen to them.

Indeed, she said it was precisely the lived experience of this failure that sheeted home the necessity of a constitutionally enshrined Voice to Parliament during the regional dialogues and the National Constitutional Convention at Uluru in 2017, from which the Uluru Statement from the Heart was born.

“The hundreds of elected local delegates and national leaders who came to Uluru said they’re done begging and done being excluded from the political and social life of the nation,” Anderson said. “They said they want the Australian people to listen to us, to hear us, and to act with us and that to do that we need the power of the ‘big law’ — the constitution.”

Unlike the quasi-advisory bodies of times past, the Voice to Parliament would not be vulnerable to abolition nor the marginalisation attached to politics as usual. It would instead “be an enduring voice for the voiceless”, she said, affording Indigenous people the status of agents of change on policies that affected their daily lives.

To this end, Anderson was at pains to point out that those who comprised the elected local delegates at Uluru were not elites, as some claim, but the leaders of downtrodden and powerless Indigenous communities across Australia.

“They told us that despite everything that’s happened in the past and still happens today, they fundamentally believe the Australian people are decent and good,” she said. “They said: ‘They helped us in ’67 and they’re going to help us again.’ ”

For a moment, tears smothered Anderson’s voice. But in the seconds that followed, she drew attention to something else that has been hidden beneath the distractions and misinformation of the current debate on the Voice — but is equally profound. The referendum is, she said, as much about “how all Australians see themselves as a nation and how they’re perceived in the world” as it is about “us blackfellas”.

“You know, it’s why the mob at the convention were very mindful to gift [the Uluru statement] to the Australian people, because it is they who will decide the referendum, it is they who will decide what kind of country we are.”

On this view, the referendum is — to paraphrase some of Paul Keating’s famous words at Redfern — as much a test of our self-knowledge as it is a test of our moral fortitude to look history in the eye and believe that the Australia of tomorrow can be better than the Australia of today. That the Australia of tomorrow can and must be better than the Australia Anderson knew as a little girl, and the Australia her grandchildren have come to know today.

A country which — as Prime Minister Anthony Albanese put it in his Garma address — recognises that: “We are all diminished, all of us, when First Nations people are denied their right to a happy and fulfilling life, denied the chance to play a full part in the life of our country.”

The only alternative is an Australia that resigns itself to the notion that change is neither possible nor desirable — a position that forfeits reason and forever relegates the oldest living culture in the world to the position of outsiders on their own, ancient land.

As Pearson wrote yesterday, if the referendum fails, so too will any prospect of reconciliation be defeated.