Indigenous Australians will become more “pragmatic” in efforts to construct a voice to parliament after Malcolm Turnbull’s rejection of the proposal, Labor senator Pat Dodson has said.
Dodson and Liberal MP Julian Leeser, the co-chairs of the joint standing committee on Indigenous recognition, said the committee was considering models with a greater focus on local and regional consultation, but Dodson also warned they were no replacement for a voice to parliament.
The co-chairs made the comments after a meeting at the Australian National University’s first nations governance forum on Tuesday at which several international experts urged it to adopt constitutional recognition to grant Indigenous self-determination.
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.
Asked whether the Indigenous community would accept anything less than the Uluru statement, Dodson said “people will become pragmatic about some of this”.
“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,” he said. “It’s still under investigation.”
Leeser said the committee is 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”.
“Certainly in the communities that we’ve spoken to in the Kimberley, western New South Wales, in the Northern Territory, that’s the message we’ve been hearing all the time: ‘We’ve got local problems and local issues’.
Dodson said the committee is considering governance models that “get a balance between regional and national [consultation]”, as well as international examples such as the Maori’s reserved seats in New Zealand’s parliament.
He said it was not clear how a voice would be “effective within the parliament” because the government controls the legislative agenda and “by the time the government gets a bill together that goes through the machinery steps of [parliament], you’re really playing catch-up”.
After Turnbull’s rejection, Labor has proposed pushing ahead with legislation for an Indigenous voice as an interim step before moving to a constitutionally-entrenched body when bipartisan support exists.
In the committee hearing Labor’s Linda Burney noted the committee had an “incredibly complex” task because Uluru had called for a constitutional body, but constitutional changes by a referendum were “difficult to get up”.
Mattias Ahren, a law professor at the Arctic University of Norway, said this was essentially a “strategic question for Australia” but strongly recommended a constitutional body which would guarantee its autonomy and give Indigenous people a “direct relationship with the Australian government and parliament”.
Ken Coates, the Canadian research chair from the school of public policy at the University of Saskatchewan, said constitutional change had a “huge importance” because it guaranteed “real participation” and gave recognition “real substance for Indigenous folks”.
Coates said it would be “terrible not to get constitutional change but it would be even worse to lose it”, accepting a legislative body as a compromise “if you couldn’t have constitutional amendment”.
Dalee Sambo Dorough, an associate professor at the University of Alaska Anchorage, said constitutional change presented an opportunity to be “as comprehensive as possible” in giving Indigenous people a say in all matters affecting them.
Barrister Brian Crane warned that after attempts in Canada to achieve Indigenous self-government through constitutional change in the 1980s ended in defeat, “politicians laid down their tools” and said it would not be achieved in that generation.
But after that failure a large number of self-government agreements were negotiated in the form of treaties, granting constitutional recognition in individual cases, he said.
Leeser concluded the committee meeting by noting there were “different approaches” internationally but “there is no panacea” to issues facing Indigenous peoples.
“The importance of changing minds is at the heart of what we’re trying to do.”
