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DANIEL:

From Schwartz Media, I’m Daniel James. This is The Fight for a Voice.

Tomorrow, Australia will vote on the future of reconciliation in this country.

It’s a binary question, but we’re being asked to consider the country’s relationship with the First Australians and the way we all want to conduct political discourse in this country.

For the final episode in this series, we are going to look at the two different Australia’s we are choosing between, with someone who has spent her life in the struggle for reconciliation and understanding: Professor Marcia Langton.

This is Episode 5: The Future.

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DANIEL:

All right, let's start. Okay. For the record, who are you?

MARCIA:

Okay. Marcia Langton. So I've been involved in this exercise of having a change made to the Constitution to recognise us as the First peoples for coming up on more than 15 years now. And I've written about it quite a bit. So I'm Yiman Bidjara, born and raised in Queensland and very rarely get home, but, you know, can't escape my roots.

DANIEL:

Marcia this interview will go out to listeners on the day before the vote on referendum, and so I wanted to have a conversation about the two Australias people have the choice to choose between tomorrow. Can you tell me about the choices they have?

MARCIA:

Daniel, the “Yes” proposition is for constitutional recognition of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples as the First peoples by establishing in the Constitution enshrined in the Constitution a voice to Parliament and the Executive Government. Our argument is that, we are not making headway in closing the gap on only two of the 46 targets.

Meanwhile, on other important targets such as adult mortality rates and infant mortality rates, we will not close the gap in my lifetime or yours. For those reasons, the way that Indigenous affairs is conducted is not working to ensure that we survive as first peoples, that we survive with a life expectation at parity with other Australians that our cultures and languages survive and we face an existential threat in the future if Indigenous face continues to be administered and imagined, as it has been now for over 50 years.

On the other hand, the “No” case has no answers to this existential threat. They've made no serious policy recommendations. They want more of the same. The lies that they've told to convince Australians that our proposition is, as they put it, racist, is the worst lie of all. Because it's not about race. We are very clear that we are the First peoples. We are descended from the First peoples. And this has nothing to do with race. And many Australians cannot see that distinction because they are so wedded to the concept of race. The outcome of a majority “Yes” vote would unite Australia in a way that I think most Australians want. If I could understand that by including Indigenous people in the Constitution in a meaningful and practical way, we therefore have a nation that's built on not British traditions alone but includes 65,000 years of Australian history. And makes our existence a part of the national fabric. And it doesn't deny anybody else anything. It actually enriches the idea of Australia. And takes away the us and them factor that the “No” case and been so successful at selling to Australians.

Imagine an Australia in the week after the referendum when the votes come in, if they're in the majority, Australians will feel oh at last, we've recognised Indigenous people. What a relief. Now we have a nation built on an honourable proposition, not a dishonourable proposition.

DANIEL:

You've been either involved in or witness to some of the biggest reforms and some of the biggest fights around Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australia from, you know, the 20th century through to today. I wanted to get your recollections of being a young girl at the time of the 1967 Referendum - did you think Australia was on a particular trajectory with its relationship with First peoples after that? What are your recollections of that time?

MARCIA:

Well, I can't remember exactly how old I was, but I certainly wasn't a voting age at that time. I was in my teens and I remember being outside of town hall in Brisbane and one of my aunts, I mean, you know, she's not technically an aunt, but I called her aunt. She was at a table basically campaigning for the “Yes” vote in the 1967 Referendum. And she said, you girl come here. You can read and write. You have to give us a hand.

So. Many of the people who were campaigning for the “Yes” vote in 1967 were pensioners like Aunt Theresa. They were people who lived through the worst of times. And you might know that at that time, technically, most Aboriginal people didn't have the right to vote.

Still, at that time, most of our people were incarcerated in administrative reserves and could only leave the reserve with a paper signed by the reserve superintendent or the police and could leave for work or they could be exempted from the act if they promised to do certain things they had to basically live up to a contractual obligation, such as not having relations in the House, essentially committing to be being assimilated. Of course, that was impossible.

And I lived in my childhood in a native camp where we were permitted to live outside of town in order for the adults to work on the stations. So, you know, I had people across the spectrum amongst my relations and of course people were in jail. A lot of people were in jail. None of it made any sense to me. But I remember what Aunt Teresa said, you know. I had an obligation because I could read and write.

DANIEL:

Around the time of the 1967 Referendum, a feeling of change was sweeping across the world. In Australia the referendum went some way to emboldening a generation of Blak activists in this country. The civil rights movement from the US also influenced thinking around race issues in Australia. This melting pot of momentum and ideas would influence a young Marcia Langton. Images of social change, civil rights, and struggle.

Audio excerpt – Speaker 1:

“What do you think about sending troops to Vietnam?”

Audio excerpt – Speaker 2:

“I think it's a good idea. I think all countries should participate.”

Audio excerpt – Speaker 3:

“I think it’s gotta be done, we don't have any choice at this stage.”

MARCIA:

And then soon afterwards, of course, Australia was caught up in the Vietnam War.

Audio excerpt – Broadcast:

“William White’s birthday was drawn in the first conscription ballot held in March 1965. He was the first Australian to fight his call up notice.”

MARCIA:

Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated…

Audio excerpt – Broadcast:

“Martin Luther King 20 minutes ago died…. I would like to take this opportunity to…”

MARCIA:

Then Kennedy was assassinated…

Audio excerpt – Broadcast:

“The flash apparently official, President Kennedy died at 1pm central standard time.”

MARCIA:

And the American civil rights movement appeared on our television screens.

Audio excerpt – Unknown:

“You should ask yourself, who taught you to hate being what god gave you.”

MARCIA:

And then, of course, Charles Perkins led the Freedom Rides.

Audio excerpt – Broadcast:

“A lot of Australians talk about yeah we want to give the Aboriginal a fair go, and then it’s full stop and it’s usually forgotten they never go on to say, look, we proposed..”

MARCIA:

And so there was an incipient civil rights movement that developed in Australia. And of course, it didn't result in the full body of civil rights that we expected.

So I don't think anybody who campaigned in that very long campaign, it went on for over ten years for the 67 Referendum with, you know, cake stalls and marches and meetings. I don't think I fully understood that the two changes to the Constitution that they did achieve in eliminating two discriminatory phrases from two clauses in the Constitution delivered what they wanted. But it did bring about change. So the franchise was achieved some time before in some jurisdictions and sometimes after the referendum. Across Australia Aboriginal people got the right to vote. Torres Strait Islander people got the right to vote universally across Australia after the referendum.

DANIEL:

Indigenous people were able to vote. On paper, they were treated as equal under the Constitution - but in the decades since, it’s become clear that they’re still second class citizens. This referendum has bought that racial hostility into the open for all to see. Culminating in new and insidious ways, including those on the conservative side of politics characterising the Voice as elitist…

MARCIA:

Well, it's utter nonsense, isn't it? Because none of us come from families that had made it. We all come from families that struggled and were discriminated against in profound ways. Nothing that I've achieved was achieved easily. I, you know, persisted with my university education in the face of enormous discrimination. And as an academic, I face enormous discrimination in all sorts of weird and wonderful ways. But my origins are typified by extreme poverty, extreme discrimination. And you know, the hopes for me in life when I was a child was that, you know, I. Get a service job somewhere. I was actually taken out of science in high school because it was pointless teaching an Aborigine science. So I was put into shorthand and typing and you know, I love science. So I've spent my life reading science. Because, you know, that opportunity was taken away from me. In eighth grade, we were actually removed from the class and told where we would study and what we would study because we were Aboriginal in Queensland. That's what happened.

Not one of the people on the referendum working group comes from anything like a privileged background. Every one of us comes from the typical indigenous background of those times when we were children of extreme poverty and discrimination.

I could go on and on about all of the work that the members of the referendum working group, have done, which is involved research, consultation, a deep knowledge of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities across the nation, and I respect for law and for the Constitution.

All of us visited over 160 communities. We consulted over 10,000 people in the second round of consultations. We received hundreds of submissions. We conducted online surveys. We held online meetings with every major institution in the country.

And yet we're being depicted as elitists with no understanding of the problem. In fact, the contrary is true.

Peter Dutton has quite deliberately refused to understand the problem, and so to his apparatchiks in the “No” campaign such as Jacinta Price and Warren Mundine. They say things like colonisation was good for us. Intergenerational trauma is a hoax and the evidence shows otherwise. Mountains of evidence shows otherwise. So they're spinning cheap lies to deceive the public in the face of combined centuries of knowledge, understanding and experience from those of us who've done the hard yards for decades.

DANIEL:

Disinformation, spin and the pathological need to control the daily narrative, has impacted the tenor of the debate and its forced former hard “No” voters in the Indigenous community to change their vote as they recognise the existential threat of racism and bigotry being unleashed on public discourse.

Coming up after the break…. What Australia has the opportunity to do tomorrow.

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DANIEL:

There have been countless inquiries, coronial inquests, Royal Commissions and glossy government strategies aimed at addressing Indigenous disadvantage. Billions of dollars spent with limited outcomes.

Marcia Langton has been witness to or a central figure for much of it – one of the things she has been central to, is the examination of Blak deaths in custody – as an assistant commissioner to that Royal Commission, which has largely gone unaddressed for decades.

But as someone with experience and a deep knowledge of political inaction – she says the Voice is a new way to address disadvantage, by hearing from the primary source: Indigenous Australians.

Would a voice to Parliament say in the instance of something like the Royal Commission report into Blak deaths in custody, would, in your view, would that be able to help address the recommendations that haven't been implemented yet as a result of partisan politics? Would the Voice go some way to helping Australia reckon with something like Blak deaths in custody alone?

MARCIA:

Yeah, well, this is a very interesting problem and this is why the “No” campaigners are so very, very wrong. Most of the recommendations of the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody are the responsibility of the states and territories such as policing, correctional services, health services for prisoners, health services for the detained and so on.

The Commonwealth has a convening power and previously that was through the Council of Australian Governments and then when that was abolished through Scott Morrison's National Cabinet. The convening power of the Commonwealth Court, as it once did back in the 1990s, resulted in the police forces of Australia being called to Canberra on the particular recommendations of the Royal Commission that have not been implemented. And bring them into a federal policy initiative where the state and territory police forces are required to, for instance, provide automatic, immediate medical attention to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people who are arrested. One thing that was noticed by the commissioners was that the first 24 hours for an Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander prisoner is the most dangerous time. And to get the prisoner through that first 24 or 48 hours and, you know, prevent suicide, make sure that medical attention is provided for pre-existing dangerous medical conditions. No Australian should be arrested and placed in a position where they will not come out alive.

DANIEL:

I'm being reminded of that in real time, by a voice to Parliament would surely have some sort of impact.

MARCIA:

I would want the voice, the national voice, to have that role of calling on the Commonwealth to use its convening powers to implement the many, many recommendations of so many Royal Commissions, where the responsibility lies with the states and territories to legislate. So, you know, one that comes to mind in these times is raising the age of criminality from 10 to 14. Now. I think only so far two jurisdictions have done so, but they've only raised it to the age of 12. I believe that's not good enough.

What history tells us is that politicians are elected for a short period of time. If they come into power, then the onus is on them to deliver on the promises that they made. Very rarely is the promise to do with fixing an Aboriginal problem or an Indigenous problem. Albanese is the standout exception in that regard. He made a commitment and he delivered on it. In providing this this opportunity to vote on the referendum question.

DANIEL:

And here we are. But here in 2023, I've seen the debate around the Voice go to the next level, you being much closer to these campaigns of fear and campaigns of hope. Have you been surprised by the nature of the debate around the Voice?

MARCIA:

No, Daniel, I'm sorry to say no.

DANIEL:

Yeah.

MARCIA:

I haven't been surprised by it. I get around the country a lot. I'm an anthropologist. That's what I do. And there are various locations in Australia where I've been going back for decades to see people and observe progress or lack of progress on various issues. And you know, I'm very familiar with racism in Australia. I've been denied service all over this country. And you know, but leaving aside that those individual experiences, there's the structural racism, that's so very profound. And you know, I could point to many, many examples of it.

DANIEL:

As one of the leading proponents of the “Yes” case, Langton was in Bunbury stating the argument for constitutional reform. She was asked a question about the conservative ‘No” campaign’s tactics.

Audio excerpt – Marcia Langton:

“Every time the “No” case raises one of their arguments, if you stop pulling it apart, you get down to base racism. I'm sorry to say it, but that's where it lands.”

DANIEL:

Her comments were seized upon by Peter Dutton and others. There was a huge media pile on. Mainstream media outlets published pieces labelling Marcia’s comments as divisive. Accusing her of calling “No” campaigners racist.

Audio excerpt – Peter Dutton:

“I think she should apologise, withdraw. And in fact, I think the Labor government should do something about this because she is a key architect of this proposal.”

DANIEL:

As has been the case throughout the debate, nuance has struggled to gain traction.

MARCIA:

It goes to the heart of, you know, the problem with Australian racism. Australian racism is a very peculiar kind of racism. In the United States, you know, they're still having arguments about slavery and reparations. You know, there are still arguments about whether or not slavery was good. You know, the the Republicans there are Republicans who say slavery was a good thing. Yeah, I have no doubt that Jacinta Price was worded up by her managers to say colonisation was a good thing.

You know, drawing that analogy from the Trumpian politics in the United States and what I was talking about in Bunbury was, you know, one of the first lies told by the “No” campaign, and that was the Voice campaign wants compensation. Don't let them have it. And so what I was doing was deconstructing this horrible slogan from the “No” campaign for the audience and saying, look, everybody's legally entitled to compensation according to the law, might be a vehicle accident or a house fire and you apply for compensation. And if you're eligible for it under the law, you are provided with compensation. Compensation is legally defined and it's subject to law. How would a Voice, you know, detract from the existing situation? It would not. And in any case, leaving aside the fact that the Voice would not change Australian laws. Because it can't do that. It's only an advisory body to Parliament. The government has no obligation, as we've proposed to accept that advice. But what is the problem with Aboriginal people getting compensation for which they are legally entitled? Is there a problem with that? Oh well, if there is a problem, that is a case of a gain of the “No” campaign making racism respectable. What are they saying is that Aborigines, all Aborigines have to be stopped from getting any compensation to which they are legally entitled. I said, Well, you know, that's racism. And so, you know, shock, horror. Marcia Langton calls Australians racist.

No, I was explaining how racism works because most Australians don't know how it works if they haven't experienced it themselves. And they could hear that stupid slogan or the Voice campaign want compensation. You know, the big bogeyman. So it's just explaining it to them so that they can understand how they're being caught up in a racist whirlwind. And Sharri Markson then turns it into the horror show, you know?

DANIEL:

Yeah. The Murdochocracy and that campaign has sort of been working lockstep all along the way in the campaign. Let's get to kind of the end of all of this. What does Australia look like if we wake up on Sunday morning and the nation has decided to vote no?

MARCIA:

So this is our great fear, isn't it? The “No” campaign and the architects of their extremely racist campaign will have had a political win that will entrench structural racism even further in our lives. And believe me, they will gloat about it and they will go out of their way to make our lives worse simply because they are filled with hatred of us. And a kind of perverse neoliberalism. You know, pull your socks up, get a job, and the gap will be closed. That's not how life works. I am sure that Warren Mundine was born in a hospital and was given immunisation by nurses at the hospital. He was taught in schools by teachers and yet he's reduced an entire life of being supported by taxpayer funded essential services to the cheap slogan “Get a Job”. So we are going to hammered with this. And I am hoping that Prime Minister Albanese's government has got a robust policy stance to announce to turn the tide on this vicious assault on us as peoples and our right to exist, our right to health services, our right to live as long as other Australians do and to thrive, not survive.

DANIEL:

And for individuals going into polling booths in the morning if they haven't already voted. What would you like those people to think about when it comes to the status of First peoples in Australia? What do we have the opportunity to do with this vote tomorrow?

MARCIA:

Australians don't have to feel ashamed or guilty about the fact that they live in a country which the British colonised, which they colonised successfully by warfare against our peoples.

By including us in the Constitution. In a practical way through a voice, that entire history becomes irrelevant to the definition of what it means to be Australian. On October 15, they have the potential to say our Australian nation includes its Indigenous people and we're very proud of that. And we have a nation that's built on an honourable basis and we've made a commitment to ensuring that the First peoples of this country survive.

DANIEL:

Speaking to people for this series – whether I’ve agreed with them or not – I’ve found everyone we’ve featured to be genuine in their beliefs.

In a debate that has been filled with misinformation and slander, it’s been comforting at least, to hear from people who care, stating their case to an audience that cares.

There’s much to be frustrated about, much to be hurt about, but there are people who care about the future of First Nations people in this country and are willing to throw their lives into that struggle. Whatever happens tomorrow, the struggle will go on.

Tomorrow the majority of Australians will be asked a binary question, it’ll be just you in a polling booth, with a voting slip and a pencil. It will be your choice to make your voice heard.

MARCIA:

I'm glad you asked me those questions because it put the wood on me to answer them clearly.

DANIEL:

You were firing on all cylinders. So good on you. And look after yourself and we'll catch each other in the flesh sooner rather than later.

MARCIA:

I hope so. It would be good to, you know, have something to eat and something to drink and say, you know, we lived through that.

DANIEL:

Yeah, we. We came through the other side. Just.

MARCIA:

Yeah. Yeah.

DANIEL:

Well, I see you later Marcia, take care.

DANIEL:

The Fight for a Voice has been a special series by 7am.

It’s been produced by Kara Jensen-Mackinnon, Atticus Bastow, Yeo Choong, and Sam Loy.

Our Senior Producer is Chris Dengate. Our Executive Producer is Ange McCormack.

Our Editor is Scott Mitchell. Our head of audio is Sarah McVee. Our Editor in Chief is Erik Jensen.

It’s been scripted and hosted by me, Daniel James. Thanks for listening.

This Sunday, we’ll be covering the result of the referendum – so look out for that episode on Sunday morning.