Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, on the left podium, is surrounded by members of the Working Group on First Nations Referendums as he speaks during a news conference at Parliament House in Canberra, Thursday Year, March 23, 2023.
Lukas Coch/AP
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Lukas Coch/AP
Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, on the left podium, is surrounded by members of the Working Group on First Nations Referendums as he speaks during a news conference at Parliament House in Canberra, Thursday Year, March 23, 2023.
Lukas Coch/AP
CANBERRA, Australia — The Australian government on Thursday released a wording of the referendum question promising the nation’s indigenous people a greater say in policies that affect their lives. .
Australians will vote between October and December on a referendum that will be constitutionally Indigenous Voices before Parliament.
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese was emotional, saying such a body promoting Indigenous views to government and Parliament was needed to remedy the disadvantaged situation of Indigenous Peoples.
“We desperately need better results because it’s not good enough in our position in 2023,” Albanese told reporters.
Indigenous Australians from the Torres Strait Islands off the northeast coast are culturally distinct from mainland Aboriginal people. These two ethnic groups make up 3.2% of Australia’s population and are the nation’s most disadvantaged ethnic group.
“By all measures, there is a gap between Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander life and the national average,” says Albanese.
“The 10-year gap in life expectancy, the suicide rate doubles, the child mortality and morbidity rate soars, the number of prisoners and deaths in incarceration account for too large a proportion, among children. sent to out-of-home care,” he said. speak.
“And this is not due to a lack of goodwill or good intentions from any political perspective, nor is it due to a lack of funding. It is because governments have spent decades trying to impose solutions. from Canberra instead of consulting the community,” he added.
The wording of the referendum question that the Cabinet signed on Thursday is similar to the wording proposed by Albanese last year.
The question would be: “A proposed bill: Change the constitution to recognize Australia’s First Peoples by establishing Voices of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. Do you approve of the change? this proposal?”
If the referendum is successful, the constitution would provide that “Voice may represent” Parliament and government “on matters concerning Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.”
Parliament will make laws concerning the Voice “including its composition, functions, powers and procedures.”
Opinion polls show most Australians support the concept of the Voice, which Albanese claimed was the majority priority of his centre-left Labor government in his election night victory speech. in May of last year. But deep divisions persist in Australian society.
Opposition leader Peter Dutton said his conservative Liberal Party had yet to decide whether it would support Voice and asked for more details, including government legal advice.
The National Party, the grassroots coalition partner in the former government, announced in November that it had decided to oppose Voice, saying it would divide the nation along racial lines.
Australia is unusual among the former British colonies in that no treaties have been concluded with the nation’s indigenous peoples. The constitution went into effect in 1901 and has never recognized indigenous people as the original inhabitants of the country.
The term Great Australian Silence was coined at the end of the last century to describe the erasure of Indigenous views and experiences from mainstream Australian history.
Changing Australia’s constitution has never been easy and more than four out of five referendums have failed.
Of the 44 referendums held since 1901, only eight have been conducted and none since 1977.
