The push for statehood in the Northern Territory is a damaging distraction from the larger question of constitutional recognition for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, the head of the Northern Land Council has said.
Joe Morrison, the NLC’s chief executive, said Aboriginal people in the Northern Territory were facing two fundamental questions – recognition of Australia’s first people in the commonwealth constitution, and now NT statehood.
But the reappearance of the statehood question at last month’s Coag meeting in Sydney “came out of the blue” and “the timing of it is all wrong”, Morrison said.
“Much more important is the consideration by the Northern Territory’s Aboriginal people – one third of the total population – of how they will be recognised in the Australian constitution,” Morrison told Garma festival in Gulkula, Arnhem Land on Saturday.
“Any campaign for Territory statehood in the meantime would be a damaging distraction from this much bigger question,” he said.
The Coag meeting late last month pledged its support for the “resolve” of the NT government to be granted full statehood by 2018, a move supported by both major political parties in the territory, but which was defeated in a 1998 referendum.
“The revival of that idea that we should be the seventh state of Australia certainly came out of the blue when it was promoted a few weeks ago by chief minister Adam Giles,” said Morrison.
He said the 1998 NT referendum on statehood failed narrowly with the loss credited to the no vote of Aboriginal people.
“That’s because they harboured serious reservations about the fate of the NT Aboriginal land rights act enacted by the commonwealth parliament in 1976,” he said. There had been repeated pushes by Country Liberal politicians for the commonwealth to surrender the act to the Territory government, he said, “and people still fear the consequences”.
Morrison also said the recent history of the CLP government – which has been mired in controversy and scandal since taking office in 2012 – gave little comfort that the jurisdiction “had the politically maturity or has the machinery robust enough to deserve the recognition of being a state”.
Morrison gave his support to a proposal by prominent Indigenous spokesmen Noel Pearson and Patrick Dodson for the federal government to finance and hold a round of conventions for Indigenous people to ensure they fully understand the referendum question, once it is drafted.
“Constitutional recognition of our Indigenous peoples is a critical next step in this nation’s maturity, and it must come with a prohibition of racial discrimination by all governments,” he said.
Morrison pointed to the Howard government’s suspension of the racial discrimination act so it could legally stage the Northern Territory intervention into Indigenous communities.
“What sort of a nation are we if our politicians can’t countenance a prohibition on racial discrimination by governments? Yet some of them seem crippled by a caution that that would be a step too far, by a fear that the people would not stomach a change to the constitution that would contain such a prohibition.”
Dodson, who was the first chairman of the Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation, went further in his introduction of Morrison. Dodson told the crowd he “shuddered to think how it was going to go” in the Northern Territory’s push for statehood.
“Unless the Aboriginal people and their rights and interests are adopted and entrenched in some Territory formal constitution ... we’re going to miss the boat, and the Territory will have missed the boat, and Australia will be poorer for it,” he said.
Dodson agreed with Morrison and said “the real game is out there in the numbers that have to be won in a successful [constitutional recognition] referendum once the proposition’s determined.
“Unless Australians absolutely decides it wants to stand up and defeat racism once and for all through constitutional recognition, we might as well give the game away.”
