Why can’t we just do constitutional recognition?

This was an option for a few years, and people are asking why it’s off the table now. When I looked into it, there was a short answer and a long answer to this question. The short answer is that most Indigenous people don’t want to have just a symbolic mention in the Constitution. It wouldn’t make any real difference in their lives.

Inside Story has an article called The Long Road to Recognition, which as you might tell from the title is the long answer. It’s worth a read if you have time, I liked it. Here’s my summary, I guess I’m calling this the “medium length” answer:

• Starting in 1846, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders have been asking for a treaty, or a say in how they were governed. Over and over again.
• In 1988, Indigenous leaders in the Northern Territory presented the Barunga Statement to PM Bob Hawke, asking for a treaty. He actually started working on it for a while, until things got difficult for him with some of the state Premiers. To make them happy, he stopped talking about treaty and suggested Constitutional Recognition instead. Various politicians started working on it. You might have seen the Recognise campaign doing events and posters back around 2012, it was pretty popular with corporate types, but it wasn’t the only group doing this stuff.
• But after a lot of faffing around from politicians for years and years, Indigenous leaders got fed up. Recognition wasn’t what they’d asked for in the first place, and even that was getting watered down and down over time.
• So in 2015, 40 Indigenous leaders wrote the Kirribilli Statement and gave it to PM Tony Abbott and Opposition Leader Bill Shorten. It said they weren’t interested in just having a little paragraph in the Constitution, or just removing the races power. It was time for a real conversation, not politicians telling everyone how things were going to be.

In the Kirribilli Statement, under the heading “Substantive issues” it says:

Any reform must involve substantive changes to the Australian
Constitution. It must lay the foundation for the fair treatment of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples into the future.

A minimalist approach, that provides preambular recognition, removes section 25 and moderates the races power [section 51(xxvi)], does not go far enough and would not be acceptable to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples.

Kirribilli Statement, 2015

And that’s what actually kicked off the Dialogues that led to the Uluṟu Statement from the Heart being written. And this time, instead of presenting the statement to politicians, Indigenous people offered it to all Australians including me and you. I think they were hoping that we’d all get on board and not treat this like it’s a political football to be thrown around. Let’s hope they were right!