Dudley Leggett’s letter in last week’s Echo raises a common question: what will be the usefulness of the referendum’s proposed Voice Committee?
We have the exact examples of ‘successful’ results from existing ‘voices’ to parliament, in the form of business’s highly-paid lobbyists, who are paid to successfully get the ear of government, to get the interests of, and benefits for, their private corporations from government.
We have the hard evidence of the many cases where lobbyists have successfully got their corporation’s interests before parliamentarians with successful outcomes for the private organisations they are representing.
The referendum’s Voice Committee will be a similar lobbyist group, that will lobby to address practical actions on specific issues, as well as for broad structural reform. Integrating Aboriginal business development, as well as practical actions to address the failing ‘Close the Gap’ proposals and Australia’s poor record of protecting cultural sites, will be some of the benefits.
But as well, Australia has a 60,000-year history. The Voice Committee has the real capacity to move Australia towards a better general social, cultural and financial integration of Aboriginal people into what 21st-century Australia actually is, from a colonised country where Aboriginal people were ignored in our Constitution.
Importantly, the Voice Committee is a vehicle where we can move Australia forward towards where Aboriginal people and Australians of immigrant backgrounds all stand together, and all call ourselves fellow countrymen and women on the same level playing field.
Regarding the referendum’s financial cost – it’s time to pay the rent. All income, both government and private, is generated on unlawfully occupied land. It was illegal under British royal law, British parliamentary law, and international law, to occupy already-occupied land – Cook only got away with it as it took a year to get a reply to his letters back from England. The British replies probably went: ‘If the continent is unoccupied, who are these artefacts from, that you’ve sent back?’ and, perhaps, ‘In regard to your claim of terra nullius (land empty of people), do you mean that just the beach had no people on it, after you cleared it by shooting at them?’
But the lives of a people, whose numbers were reduced from perhaps 1,300,000 to just 300,000 over a few short decades, and who are now a minority, and where sections have a glaring disparity in their lives to that enjoyed by the broad society, should be no laughing matter for any of us. Accept the hand that has been extended, it will be a better Australia for all of us – vote ‘Yes’ to the referendum question.
For four decades The Echo has printed the stories some people loved, some people hated, and some pretended not to read. If you want us to keep telling the truth, the real truth, not the sugar-coated version. We’ll need your support to keep the presses rolling. 
