Indigenous Voice: Has Australia missed its opportunity to move on from racist past?

After years of talks about creating a constitutional body to represent and advocate for Australia’s Indigenous people, the country is finally going to the polls this weekend to vote on the matter at a referendum. And if opinion polls are anything to go by, Australians are about to firmly reject the opportunity to do so.

Australians are being asked to alter the country’s founding legal document for the first time since 1977 to recognise the “First Peoples of Australia” by establishing an Indigenous Voice to parliament.

If passed, the non-binding body would advise the parliament on issues that concern Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people – the most vulnerable communities in the country.

In 2020, the Australian government acknowledged that Indigenous people continued to face “entrenched disadvantage… and ongoing institutional racism”.

While the historic referendum would be seen as a big step forward for the one million-strong Indigenous population, opinion polls suggest the amendment will be rejected just as more than four in five referendums have been in the past.

Prime minister Anthony Albanese, a leading Voice advocate, on Friday cited the Israel-Hamas war to underscore why Australians should vote “yes” out of kindness.

“This week of all weeks where we see such trauma in the world, there is nothing – no cost – to Australians showing kindness, thinking with their heart as well as their head, when they enter the polling booth tomorrow and vote ‘yes’”, the prime minister said.

“Kindness costs nothing. Thinking of others costs nothing,” he added.

Opponents of the referendum, who have run a seemingly effective “No” campaign for months, argue it would be the biggest change to Australia’s democracy in the nation’s history and divide Australians along racial lines without reducing Indigenous disadvantage.

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Peter Dutton, leader of the opposition Liberal Party, said polling showing declining support for the referendum over the past year was evidence Mr Albanese failed to convince voters of the benefits of the Voice.

But for the marginalised community, the referendum is an opportunity to finally be “visible”.

“I never thought I would experience it in my time here,” Karen Gibson, a Yalanji and Nyungkul woman, told the BBC. “My ancestors were invisible. They’re still invisible. I want to be visible.”

Noel Pearson, an Indigenous leader and architect of the Voice, argued that Australians were facing a “moral choice” at the referendum as well as a question of constitutional law.

“One choice will bring us pride and hope and belief in one another and the other will, I think, turn us backward and bring shame to the country,” Mr Pearson told the Associated Press.

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Rejecting the referendum, he said, “would be a travesty for the country and we will possibly never live it down”.

Indigenous Australians account for 3.8 per cent of the country’s population.

The Aboriginal people of Australia’s mainland are culturally distinct from Torres Strait Islanders who come from an archipelago off the northeast coast. So Australia’s Indigenous population is known collectively as Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.

Indigenous Australians are the most disadvantaged ethnic group in the nation, with a suicide rate twice that of the national average and increased suffering from diseases in the remote Outback that have been eradicated in most other developed nations.

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Indigenous men have a life expectancy of 71 years and Indigenous women 75 years. That’s 8.6 years shorter than other Australian men and 7.8 years shorter than other Australian women.

“Yes” campaigner Kyam Maher, an Indigenous man and South Australia state’s attorney general, said the question he was most often asked by thousands of voters was what result Indigenous Australians wanted.

“I can say absolutely and overwhelmingly Aboriginal people want their fellow Australians to vote ‘yes’ tomorrow,” he said.

More than 17 million Australians will vote “yes” or “no” on a single question on Saturday to “alter the constitution to recognise the First Peoples of Australia by establishing an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice".

If the answer is “yes", the constitution would be rewritten to state that the Voice “may make representations” to the parliament and executive government “on matters relating to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples”.

Members would be chosen by local Indigenous people and serve for a fixed period. Parliament would “have power to make laws with respect to the composition, functions, powers and procedures” of the Voice, the constitution would say.

The creation of the Voice was recommended in 2017 by a group of 250 Indigenous leaders who met at Uluru – an Indigenous sacred site formerly known as Ayers Rock.

The conservative government rejected the proposal, arguing that a Voice would be seen as a “third chamber” of parliament.

But following the centre-left Labor Party’s election victory in May last year, Mr Albanese used his first speech to commit his government to creating the Voice.

Some Indigenous activists, such as Robbie Thorpe, have argued that the “referendum is an attack on Aboriginal Sovereignty”.

The opinion polls published on Monday showed a majority of Australians initially supported the Voice but have now turned against it.

A poll published in The Australian newspaper showed 58 per cent of respondents opposed the Voice and only 34 per cent supported it. The poll was based on an online survey of 1,225 voters nationwide from 3-6 October.

Another survey by the Sydney Morning Herald found 56 per cent of respondents rejected the Voice and only 29 per cent supported it. The poll was based on a survey of 4,728 voters.

Referendums in Australia are notoriously difficult to pass and only eight out of 44 have done so since Australia became a country in 1901.

Success requires a double majority: a majority of voters nationwide and majorities in at least four of Australia’s six states.

Nearly a quarter of people have already voted in early polling centres across the country, according to the Australian Electoral Commission figures. Another 2 million have applied to vote via post, and around 125,000 have voted via mobile polling teams.

The rest will line up from 8am (local time) on Saturday at more than 7,000 polling stations set up in churches, schools and community centres across the country.

Western Australia is the last state where polls will close at 6pm (local time), three hours after they have closed in the eastern states of New South Wales, Victoria and Tasmania.

If voting trends are clear in the eastern states, a result may be apparent before voting has finished in Western Australia.

Additional reporting by agencies