The Indigenous leader Mick Dodson has implored Malcolm Turnbull to open the door he “slammed” on Aboriginal people when the prime minister rejected a constitutionally enshrined first nations voice to parliament at the centre of the Uluru statement.
While signalling Indigenous leaders would go into any renewed talks with the government with an open mind, rather than with any predetermined agenda, Dodson underscored the intrinsic importance of having a representative body.
He acknowledged there had been problems with the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission abolished by the Howard government in 2004, but he said the federal parliament had not been abolished “because some of our parliamentarians were a bit careless about their adherence to the requirements of section 44 of the constitution”.
Dodson said people making mistakes was not normally the threshold for abolishing an institution. “We didn’t abolish the parliament because some of our parliamentarians misbehave,” he told the National Press Club on Wednesday.
Dodson – the director of the National Centre for Indigenous Studies at the Australian National University and ANU law professor – said it was not sufficient for governments to point to growing Indigenous representation in the federal parliament, and then move on. He noted his brother, the Labor senator Pat Dodson, was “not my bloody voice in parliament”.
He said in any renewed talks between Indigenous people and the government, the various proposals put forward with the objective of correcting the injustices imposed on Australia’s Indigenous people throughout the history of white settlement “ought to be considered, rationally and sanely like adults”.
Dodson said Turnbull’s rejection of the voice to parliament, and his characterisation of that recommendation as a third chamber of parliament, “was a gross distortion of what was said at Uluru and it’s shameful that it’s come from the head of the country, the person elected to lead the country”.
He said Turnbull’s reaction had been “deplorable”. Dodson said it was time for white Australia to work cooperatively with Indigenous people to achieve reconciliation because black Australia needed the majority of the “97% on board”.
“We’re only going to do this together. We can’t do it alone.”
Dodson’s comments at the National Press Club follow a first nations governance forum in Canberra hosted by the Australian National University. He was accompanied by Victoria Tauli-Corpuz, an international Indigenous activist of Kankana-ey Igorot ethnicity, and Mattias Åhrén, a legal professor at the Arctic University of Norway.
The Liberal MP Julian Leeser and Labor’s Pat Dodson have been appointed co-chairs of the joint standing committee on Indigenous recognition. The committee has been set up to chart the next steps after Turnbull rejected the Uluru statement’s overwhelming consensus from Indigenous Australians in favour of a constitutionally-entrenched voice to federal parliament.
Speaking on the sidelines of that forum, Pat Dodson signalled Indigenous leaders were approaching the renewed process with a pragmatic disposition.
Addressing the central recommendation of the Uluru statement Dodson said: “The question of the permanency or guarantee of a voice in the constitution is a nice idea but it’s very difficult to see how you would be guaranteed an opportunity to have a say on legislation and policies at every point.
“It’s still under investigation.”
Leeser said the committee was considering “local, regional and national” mechanisms for consultation, and hoping to recommend a range of proposals that are “true to [the] Uluru [statement] and true to the fact we need some local voices”.
