I'm voting 'Yes', here's why

I will be voting with a vehement 'YES' at the 2023 constitutional referendum to enshrine a First Nations Voice to Parliament. I see this as an essential step along a long journey of reconciliation and healing; a journey that will be dangerously diverted if we wake up to a no vote on 15 October. While I respect the First Nations individuals and organisations advocating for a 'no' vote, the failure of the referendum will be read nationally and internationally as a signal of intolerance and bigotry.

The idea that we could hold another referendum if this one fails is cynical and false. As someone who campaigned to the point of exhaustion in support of Australia becoming a republic in 1999, almost a quarter of a century later I am still waiting for the 'second chance' promised by the direct-election republicans who helped scuttle that referendum. And how is that referendum remembered? Not for the wedge driven between the republican camps, but as a victory for monarchism.

A 'no' vote at this referendum will have much greater impact than in 1999, because it will further damage the relationship between First Nations and settler communities. Rather than open up an opportunity for truth telling and treaty, it will empower those forces who would rather put such a debate down.

I support the need for truth telling, for the full horror of invasion, genocide and cultural destruction to be brought into the open and atoned for. There is also a need for a treaty to correct the historical lie of Terra Nullius. These processes will be painful, uncomfortable and expensive. But they must happen. Are we ready for them just yet? Judging by the discourse currently taking place on this referendum, the answer must surely be 'no'. The referendum is, in my view, the first step in the right direction, but not the only one.

What we have in front of us right now is a referendum to change our constitution - the legal document which underpins our democracy - to recognise that there were peoples here long before the European invaders. People who lived and loved and prospered on this land for tens of thousands of years. People whose attitude to land was not that it was a commodity to be traded and exploited, but for whom country is part of their very being.

It will give these same people - who were by force of legal fiction dispossessed of their land and subjected to unimaginable violence, racism and institutional disadvantage that lasts to this day - a voice. A constitutionally entrenched right to have a say in the decisions that affect the First Nations people of this continent.

No, this voice will not solve all of the problems that afflict our First Nations people. It is not a panacea. It will not be perfect and it may need to evolve over time as its purpose and our relationships themselves change. But it will be a platform for conversations about solutions. A mechanism for working our way through the unpicking of knotty, currently irresolvable problems.

Those who complain that there is not enough detail are simply mischievous. The Australian Constitution is a different document to the US Constitution. It does not enshrine a Bill of Rights, it simply sets out the powers that the Commonwealth Government can exercise. Everything else is pretty much left to the States. So the Constitution doesn't say a whole lot about most topics it addresses. It deliberately leaves the detail to our elected Parliamentarians - our democratic representatives - to sort out. And if there are disputes about that, it sets up an independent judiciary to solve them.

And so it will be with the Voice, just like it is for a whole range of other important matters like defence, trade, and taxation. The most important thing about enshrining the Voice is that it can't be subsequently removed based on a political whim. That is a level of certainty our First Nations people have never been offered before.

I implore all Australians to think carefully about how they will vote on October 14. The perspectives I have offered are those of a descendent of convicts and settlers - judicial and economic refugees from the UK - and, frankly a beneficiary of all this dispossession. I cannot speak for First Nations people, I can only speak for myself. But I do want to listen to their Voice.