Uluru Statement From The Heart

will scott

The Uluru Statement is document that was written in 2017 by Aboriginal delegates from across Australia. In this document, they express that they are a sovereign people, and what they want the Government to do to recognise and support this sovereignty. It is further described by The Guardian as “the largest ever consensus of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people on a proposal for substantive recognition” and by the ABC as “the most important piece of political writing produced in Australia in at least two decades”.

There are five key elements to the statement:

Sovereignty

• Acknowledgement that Aboriginal Tribes were the first sovereign nations of Australia
• Acknowledgement that sovereignty was never ceded, and that it co-exists with the sovereignty of the British Monarchy

Constitutional Reform

• Aiming to empower Aboriginal people to manage their own affairs with Parliamentary ‘supervision’
• Enshrine Aboriginal people in the Constitution, as Indigenous Australians are currently not recognised in the Constitution
• Aim to replace or update Section 51 of the Constitution (Race Bias)
• Aim to remove Section 25 of the Constitution (Allowing states to ban people of certain races or ethnicities from voting)

Makarrata Commission

• Develop a national framework that would permit each sovereign Aboriginal nation state to negotiate their own respective treaty
• Oversee truth-telling in Parliament and across Australia

Truth-Telling

• A process that exposes the full extent of the past injustices against Aboriginal Australians
• Aim to allow the entirety of Australia to understand the terrible past regarding Aboriginal history, and work towards greater reconciliation and building a less xenophobic Australia

Aboriginal Voice to Parliament

• Establishment of an elected voice to the Parliament with Constitutional backing
• This would empower and allow Aboriginals to have a say in the laws that affect them
• A voice that cannot be removed unless by future Constitutional referendum

How the statement was received

Prime Minister’s Response: (Malcolm Turnbull)

• Turnbull rejected the proposal 5 months after it was issued
• He claimed that after “careful” consideration that an Aboriginal voice to Parliament would not be “either desirable or capable of winning any acceptance in a referendum”
• Turnbull and Joyce feared that the representative body “would inevitably become seen as a third chamber of Parliament”
• The Prime Minister did not believe that “such a radical change to our Constitution’s representative institutions has any realistic prospect of being supported by the majority of Australians”
• The Opposition (Labour) backed a Constitutionally-enshrined ‘Voice to Parliament’
• The Greens also strongly supported the Uluru statement from the Heart
• BHP and Rio Tinto expressed support and pledged around $1m to raising awareness

To think about

Do you support the Uluru Statement from the Heart?

Do you think that the Australian Constitution currently exhibits racist and xenophobic notions?

People opposed to the Statement believe that it gives Aboriginals an ‘unfair’ advantage over other Australians. How valid is this statement?

What does it mean to have Aboriginal Australians permanently enshrined in the Constitution and Parliament?