There is an overriding reason to single out the First People of this land from all the rest of us immigrants, and descendants of immigrants: our gain was their loss.

The society that now occupies this continent was created at the cost of the dispossession and near-genocide of the First People, including the spiritual rupture of being separated from their Country and the loss of much culture and many languages.

This is true of no other group in Australia. Whether you arrived here yesterday or are descended from first fleet convicts, as some of my ancestors were, you benefit from this grand theft. The very least we can do is acknowledge this fact of our history.

The First People are now asking for a little more than acknowledgement. They want a purely advisory body that can’t be abolished at the next change of government. They want to be able to advise governments on matters of relevance to them. They want to have their own unchallengeable expertise on their unique situation taken into consideration. It is hardly a radical request.

There have been such advisory bodies before. The sky did not fall, but the advisory bodies did. They were abolished by new governments in acts of partisan spite or arrogant paternalism. If the existence of an advisory body were required by the Constitution then it could not simply be abolished.

That is all they are asking for. It is little enough. Governments would be under no obligation to act on the advice of the Voice. It could be ignored. It could be tied up in complicated rules imposed by the Parliament. Its funding could be slashed and its existence reduced to a token. There would be no great burden on the Parliament, on the executive government or on whitefella society. The blackfellas would not be able to steal our back yards and push us into the sea.

The Constitution is not the place for detail. Its role is to specify general principles of governance. That is why the proposed insertion into the Constitution is brief and fairly simple.

The details of how the Voice would function would be left to the government, acting through the Parliament. The time to worry about the details is after the referendum is passed, if it is passed. There is a lot of detailed advice available on how the Voice would be set up and function. Those details would not be set in stone because they could be changed by subsequent governments.

Much of the opposition to the Voice is opportunist and fatuous. The Opposition is trying to use it to wound Prime Minister Albanese, in the desperate hope of restoring the Coalition’s political fortunes. The commercial media are fanning dissension because their business model is to cultivate conflict for profit. The Murdoch media are opposing the Voice for the additional reason that they are overtly political, an extension of the Coalition.

The referendum does not create division, racial or otherwise. The First People would deserve special consideration even if they were deeply-suntanned descendants of a long-lost band of Englishmen.

There are legitimate issues. Constitutional law is complicated, it’s true. However most legal experts are of the view that the Voice would not impede the functions of government significantly, nor could it presume to advise on every matter before Parliament with any expectation of having influence.

The Voice might turn out to be ineffectual, a token, and seen by White society as a sufficient concession to the First People, so their calls for Treaty and Truth could then be ignored. There are plenty of grounds for cynicism in that regard. Whether that implies a No vote, or just abstention, or a Yes to see what happens, is for individuals to decide.

My own view is that the tides of politics and history are turning. Awareness of First Peoples’ presence among us, and of their cultures, passions and plights, has been rising dramatically over the past decade or so. The strangle-hold of regressive forces on our society is weakening. The old, corrupt political culture is losing ground. Our Parliament will be repopulated with people who will act for the good of us all.

I would go so far as to say that even if the referendum is lost the push for change will continue and will succeed within the decade. The long processes around Treaty and Truth will continue. More and more people will realise that we all, First People and immigrants, need a whole new non-colonial constitution, a constitution that expresses a negotiated joint sovereignty over this unique land.

[First published in the Braidwood Bugle, 12 July 2023.]