Some Aboriginal Australians want a constitutionally enshrined ‘Voice’ in parliament, beyond the right to vote and to make representations to parliament through their elected MP, or privately, like everyone else.
They don’t just want the Constitution to acknowledge their existence. The Uluru convention – misleadingly called ‘the voice from the heart’, taking the moral high ground – rejected that idea.
No other racial group in Australia has such a Voice. Would it be fair to grant one racial group a Voice and not others? All Australians are equal under the law and subject to it. We surely don’t want apartheid, with one set of laws for Aboriginal Australians and one for all others.
They want to be heard on matters affecting them. Don’t we all?
Any responsible government should take heed of sound advice relevant to any issue in hand, whether housing, health, education, child care, alcoholism, drug abuse, etc, and from any racial group or individual.
But do they? And will changing the Constitution make any difference? The powers that be will retain the right to ignore any advice they wish to ignore. And, politicians are not elected on their intelligence and integrity, but on their popularity and skills of rhetorical manipulation. Ignorance and prejudice tend to rule, not sound facts and rationality.
I, an Anglo-Saxon Australian, agree wholeheartedly with panentheistic spirituality, which identifies Aborigines with the land, each being within the other. But that spiritual basis is inconsistent with the roots of Western materialism, which separates ‘the owner’ from ‘the land’. Therein lies our problem. And we won’t solve it by changing the Constitution. Consciousness must evolve. That will change everything.
The money spent trying to change the Constitution would have been better spent on the problems the change is meant to address.
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. 
