MELBOURNE, Australia — Australia will hold a national referendum within the next three years on the question of formally recognizing Indigenous Australians in the Constitution, a government minister said on Wednesday, a significant step for a marginalized population that has long sought an official voice in government.
Ken Wyatt, the minister for Indigenous Australians, said the conservative government of Prime Minister Scott Morrison would commit more than $100 million to holding the referendum, but he provided few details on what the government planned to include in its proposal.
“The Morrison government is committed to recognizing Indigenous Australians in the Constitution and working to achieve this through a process of true co-design,” Mr. Wyatt, the first Indigenous person to hold his ministerial post, said in a speech in Sydney.
Australia’s Aboriginal and Torres Islander peoples have sought to be recognized in the Constitution and given a formal representative role in the government since the document was ratified in 1901. Those years of activism came to a head in 2017, when a group of Indigenous leaders presented to the public the Uluru Statement From the Heart, a road map for recognition.
Among the statement’s proposals were the formation of a new government agency that would serve as an Indigenous advisory board, and treaties between the government and Indigenous groups. The prime minister at the time, Malcolm Turnbull, rejected the proposals, saying they would amount to the creation of a third chamber of Parliament.
Constitutional recognition is “really about bringing the wisdom and experience of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people closer to the Parliament,” said Dean Parkin, a member of the committee that helped draft the Uluru Statement.
Mr. Parkin and other Indigenous leaders said that they were glad that the government had finally promised to hold a referendum after years of false starts, but that they were wary of the governing Liberal Party’s lack of details and a perception that it was unwilling to wholly embrace the recommendations of the Uluru Statement.
Sean Gordon, chairman of Uphold and Recognize, an Indigenous think tank that supports constitutional recognition, said in a television interview that it was unclear whether the government would be “true to what Indigenous people asked for in the Uluru Statement.”
Mr. Wyatt, the Indigenous minister, said he expected the process of drafting the referendum to take several years, adding that the government would not hold a vote if it believed it would fail.
“Constitutional recognition is too important to get wrong, and too important to rush,” he said.
Ministers from the opposition Labor Party said they welcomed the government’s announcement. “It is critical that First Nations people, communities and leaders are consulted and listened to, and that we stay true to the principles of the Uluru Statement,” they said in a statement. “Bipartisanship is vital to the success of constitutional reform.”
Indigenous Australians have been subjected to decades of discriminatory government policies, which in the past have included internment, forced sterilization and the removal of children from their families.
Today, Indigenous Australians experience higher rates of incarceration, youth suicide and illness compared to white Australians. Such disparities, Mr. Parkin said, were intergenerational and required intergenerational solutions.
To pass, the referendum would need the support of a majority of voters nationally and at least four of Australia’s six states.
Of the 44 referendums previously held in Australia, only eight have succeeded. The most successful, however, was a 1967 vote to remove discriminatory references to Indigenous Australians from the Constitution. More than 90 percent of Australians agreed.
“Without the truth of the past, there can be no agreement on where and who we are in the present, how we arrived here and where we want to go in the future,” Mr. Wyatt said. “History is generally written from a dominant society’s point of view and not that of the suppressed, and therefore true history is brushed aside, masked, dismissed or destroyed,” he added.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/10/world/australia/indigenous-recognition-referendum.html
2019-07-10 10:34:51Z
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