What has been missing from this debate is not just a serious conversation – and public debates – about the constitutional consequences of altering the Constitution but also a very serious debate about the change of direction needed to secure Indigenous advancement.

Australian governments, and their various departments, are advised by many Indigenous advisory bodies, many very well-funded ones. The answer for Indigenous advancement is not a new constitutional location for a lobby group – it is confronting what has gone wrong in the past. That means rigorously measuring successes and failures, demanding that every action is measured against real metrics, rather than the continual flow of feel-good money with no testing of outcomes.

This truly arduous work could have begun decades ago.

Noel Pearson said this week, that policy must return to a dual focus on rights and responsibilities. He observed correctly that many on the left bristle at any mention of responsibility.

What he failed to explain is how yet another bureaucracy – one entrenched in the Constitution and whose existence will be quarantined from parliamentary oversight – will confront this challenge.

How will the voice challenge, let alone discard, the failed shibboleths of those Indigenous activists who are opposed to focusing on the responsibilities each of us – regardless of race – has towards our children, our family, our friends and our society, responsibilities that secure the best educational, health, social and financial outcomes?

Well-meaning leaders at the forefront of Indigenous affairs for the past 40 years haven’t managed to move the dial enough to significantly improve the lives of the most vulnerable Indigenous people. A very large industry has a track record of very poor outcomes.

Cementing a lobby group into the Constitution won’t alter that direction. It risks entrenching the same “rights” agenda. We know that from the Uluru Statement from the Heart, from the demands of voice activists such as Thomas Mayo and others, further undermining the need for a transformative cultural change towards responsibility.

These difficult issues are being drowned out by a deliberately emotional and disingenuous campaign, and by Farnsy’s 1986 song. Recognition is one thing. So is listening to a lobby group. But giving them constitutional rights is absurd.

This has been taken from the excellent article by Janet Albrechtsen Columnist for The Australian Saturday, 08/09/2023

JANET ALBRECHTSEN 

 COLUMNIST for The Australian