More than 250 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander community leaders will fly into Uluru this weekend before a significant meeting on constitutional recognition that could change Australia’s relationship with its first peoples.
The national convention on constitutional recognition, also known as the Uluru convention, is the cumulation of 12 community dialogues that have taken place around the country in the past six months.
Seventeen delegates from each of those meetings will attend the four-day summit, which begins with an opening ceremony in the Anangu community of Mutitjulu on Tuesday.
The Referendum Council chairwoman, Pat Anderson, said it was a “historic meeting.”
“Without being too histrionic, this is one of the most important decisions that this generation, those of us over 18, will make,” she told Guardian Australia.
Anderson said the message from the community dialogues was that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples would reject any purely symbolic attempts at recognition and demanded substantive, structural reforms dictating how the Australian parliament, and Australian people, related to Indigenous Australians.
Resolutions from the Uluru convention will inform a report outlining Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander positions of recognition, due to be handed down next month. Politicians are barred from attending the meetings but will pick up the debate from 1 July, when the Referendum Council will be disbanded.
The coverage of the meeting has already been refracted through the prism of the 1967 referendum, under which Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people were included in the census andthe federal government was given power to make special laws.
The 50th anniversary of that vote is on 27 May, and was the original target date for a referendum on constitutional recognition when the former prime minister Tony Abbott committed to the process in 2013.
It's 50 years since Indigenous Australians first 'counted'. Why has so little changed?
In 1967 Australia voted in a landmark referendum to finally include Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders in its census. But, as Paul Daley reports, the fight for genuine equality is far from over
In the timing of the proposed reform, as in its substance, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples have opted for thoroughness over symbolism.
Anderson said it would be a “complex and difficult conversation” to bring non-Indigenous Australians along with the change, but said there could be no doubt the current state of affairs was not working.
“Aboriginal affairs is in freefall and there’s no bottom to it,” she said. “We are powerless and voiceless in our own lives. And now we have seven-year-olds drinking [aviation] gas, for god’s sake.”
One of the delegates is Nolan Hunter, a Bardi man from the Dampier peninsula near Broome, Western Australia, and chief executive of the Kimberley Land Council.
“People are really clear about one thing: they don’t want a symbolic gesture that’s not going to be any different for the Aboriginal community,” he said. “It needs to be something that gives Aboriginal people a voice. Otherwise it’s just as good as the apology, or statements made about closing the gap, or the Indigenous Advancement Strategy.
“It needs to be substantial: what actually changes then in terms of the statistical deficits of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in those socio-economic factors, in levels of health, incarceration, education?”
Hunter said it was important to remain focused on the outcomes, rather than debate the form recognition might take. The push for treaty was understandable, he said, but it would not automatically produce better outcomes if it did not create structural change at the highest levels of the bureaucracies that provide services and hold the purse strings for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities.
“In people’s minds when they talk about treaty, there’s an assumption that you will get everything, you will get a bill of rights, you will get sovereignty … but a treaty is just an agreement, you don’t know what you will end up with.
“There is no indication that doing a constitutional reform in any way negates the ability to do a treaty, or negates sovereignty.”
Source
The national convention on constitutional recognition, also known as the Uluru convention, is the cumulation of 12 community dialogues that have taken place around the country in the past six months.
Seventeen delegates from each of those meetings will attend the four-day summit, which begins with an opening ceremony in the Anangu community of Mutitjulu on Tuesday.
The Referendum Council chairwoman, Pat Anderson, said it was a “historic meeting.”
“Without being too histrionic, this is one of the most important decisions that this generation, those of us over 18, will make,” she told Guardian Australia.
Anderson said the message from the community dialogues was that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples would reject any purely symbolic attempts at recognition and demanded substantive, structural reforms dictating how the Australian parliament, and Australian people, related to Indigenous Australians.
Resolutions from the Uluru convention will inform a report outlining Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander positions of recognition, due to be handed down next month. Politicians are barred from attending the meetings but will pick up the debate from 1 July, when the Referendum Council will be disbanded.
The coverage of the meeting has already been refracted through the prism of the 1967 referendum, under which Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people were included in the census andthe federal government was given power to make special laws.
The 50th anniversary of that vote is on 27 May, and was the original target date for a referendum on constitutional recognition when the former prime minister Tony Abbott committed to the process in 2013.
It's 50 years since Indigenous Australians first 'counted'. Why has so little changed?
In 1967 Australia voted in a landmark referendum to finally include Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders in its census. But, as Paul Daley reports, the fight for genuine equality is far from over
In the timing of the proposed reform, as in its substance, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples have opted for thoroughness over symbolism.
Anderson said it would be a “complex and difficult conversation” to bring non-Indigenous Australians along with the change, but said there could be no doubt the current state of affairs was not working.
“Aboriginal affairs is in freefall and there’s no bottom to it,” she said. “We are powerless and voiceless in our own lives. And now we have seven-year-olds drinking [aviation] gas, for god’s sake.”
One of the delegates is Nolan Hunter, a Bardi man from the Dampier peninsula near Broome, Western Australia, and chief executive of the Kimberley Land Council.
“People are really clear about one thing: they don’t want a symbolic gesture that’s not going to be any different for the Aboriginal community,” he said. “It needs to be something that gives Aboriginal people a voice. Otherwise it’s just as good as the apology, or statements made about closing the gap, or the Indigenous Advancement Strategy.
“It needs to be substantial: what actually changes then in terms of the statistical deficits of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in those socio-economic factors, in levels of health, incarceration, education?”
Hunter said it was important to remain focused on the outcomes, rather than debate the form recognition might take. The push for treaty was understandable, he said, but it would not automatically produce better outcomes if it did not create structural change at the highest levels of the bureaucracies that provide services and hold the purse strings for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities.
“In people’s minds when they talk about treaty, there’s an assumption that you will get everything, you will get a bill of rights, you will get sovereignty … but a treaty is just an agreement, you don’t know what you will end up with.
“There is no indication that doing a constitutional reform in any way negates the ability to do a treaty, or negates sovereignty.”
Source
0 comentaris :
Publica un comentari a l'entrada