Will the Voice add race to the Constitution? Part 1

If The Voice created a division between Australians of different races, that would be a bad thing. Luckily, there’s two reasons it doesn’t actually do that.

The Voice does give one group of people an additional role in the way Australia is governed. It gives that additional duty to the First Peoples of this land. Pay attention to that phrase though: the First Peoples. Not “people of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander descent”. Not “black people” or “Indigenous people”.

the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice may make representations to the Parliament and the Executive Government of the Commonwealth on matters relating to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples;

Proposed section 129 of the Constitution

It’s written this way for a reason: because the Voice is in recognition of the fact that people were living on this continent for 60,000 years and then some British people invaded. They used their guns and diseases to kill as many of the Indigenous people as they could. And then they came up with a legal lie by saying Australia was terra nullius, which is Latin for “nobody’s land”. They knew that what they were doing was wrong, but they tried to use legal jargon in a dead language to justify it.

This new section is an admission that the invasion and colonisation of Australia was wrong. We can’t undo it, but we can at least acknowledge the truth and make a place in the Constitution for this group of people who never willingly gave up their rights to the British.

And this is why the Uluṟu Statement talks about the 60,000 years of ownership of this land. It doesn’t matter what race the First peoples are, or what race the invaders were, because it’s not about race. It’s about who was here first.

Proportionally, we are the most incarcerated people on the planet. We are not an innately criminal people. Our children are aliened from their families at unprecedented rates. This cannot be because we have no love for them. And our youth languish in detention in obscene numbers. They should be our hope for the future.

These dimensions of our crisis tell plainly the structural nature of our problem. This is the torment of our powerlessness.

We seek constitutional reforms to empower our people and take a rightful place in our own country. When we have power over our destiny our children will flourish. They will walk in two worlds and their culture will be a gift to their country.

Uluṟu Statement from the Heart

That’s a pretty good reason to change our Constitution, in my opinion. It makes it more accurate by giving recognition to the fact that this continent wasn’t empty when the British sailed on over.

So that’s the first reason I don’t think the Voice is enshrining race in the Constitution. The other one has some more history about it, so I’ll put that in another post.