Peta Credlin: Anthony Albanese has deceived the Australian public on the Uluru Statement from the Heart

Anthony Albanese has desperately tried to avoid any in-depth discussion about the Uluru Statement from the Heart and now we know the reason why, writes Peta Credlin.

All the way along, the Prime Minister has told us that the Uluru Statement from the Heart is nothing more than a gracious invitation from Aboriginal people for recognition in our nation’s Constitution.

He talks about the Voice as being the mechanism to deliver that recognition while desperately trying to avoid any discussion about the other two elements of the Uluru Statement – Treaty and so-called Truth-Telling.

But that is nothing compared to his deception about the Uluru Statement itself, as dramatically exposed in a freedom of information release last week.

Time and time again, Anthony Albanese has repeatedly stated the Uluru Statement is a simple one-page document. In June, he said at a press conference at Parliament House, “The Uluru Statement from the Heart, I’d encourage people to read. You can fit it on one A4 page.”

A week later he told a business gathering in a speech: “Sometimes I focus on a couple of lines, but often I read it right through. If you haven’t, I recommend you do. Like the Gettysburg Address, it only requires a few minutes. It literally fits on one A4 page.”

Anthony Albanese speaking the Garma Festival in Arnhem Land. Picture: Pema Tamang Pakhrin

This is a lie.

The Uluru Statement from the Heart is not a one-page document. It is actually 26 pages in all, including diagrams. What the Prime Minister spruiks is merely an extract and we only know that because the government has just been forced to release the full document under freedom of information, or FOI.

READ THE FULL ULURU STATEMENT FROM THE HEART

And it’s the whole 26 pages of the Uluru Statement from the Heart that every Australian should read, not the PM’s sanitised one-page extract, before they cast their vote in the upcoming referendum.

Here’s why.

Because the whole tenor of the full Statement from the Heart, and of the 13 meetings leading up to it, as revealed by the official documents released under FOI, is one of anger, grievance, separatism, and the need to restore, as far as possible, Aboriginal rights over the entire Australian land mass.

The whole tenor of the full Statement from the Heart, as revealed by the official documents released under FOI, is one of anger, grievance, separatism, and the need to restore, as far as possible, Aboriginal rights over the entire Australian land mass, says Peta Credlin. Picture: NCA NewsWire/Martin Ollman

And it’s this complete statement, all 26 pages, that the PM has repeatedly said his government will implement in full, and that the new ALP national platform will commit to implementing “in this term of government”.

The full Uluru Statement, until now secret, declares that: “The invasion that started at Botany Bay is the origin of the fundamental grievance between the old and new Australians … This is the time of the Frontier Wars when massacres, disease and poison decimated First Nations even as they fought a guerrilla war of resistance … The Tasmanian Genocide and the Black War waged by the colonists reveals the truth about this evil time …”

The crowd at Come Together for Yes hosted By Yes23 to support The Uluru Statement from the Heart in North Adelaide. Picture: Emma Brasier

The full statement says (on page 7) that: “By making agreements at the highest level, the negotiation process with the Australian government allows First Nations to express our sovereignty.” This explicit reference to the “Australian government” directly contradicts the PM’s statement on ABC radio last week that the federal government won’t get involved in treaty-making because, he said, it’s already happening at state level.

The full Uluru Statement also says in plain English (on page 7): “Makarrata is another word for Treaty or agreement making. And it is the culmination of our agenda.”

So, despite the PM’s bad faith denials, it’s clear that the Voice is just the start of a whole series of steps to establish a treaty commission, or “Makarrata Commission”, that’s intended to act as an umpire sitting above the parliament and the executive government in negotiations with the Voice and with individual First Nations (see page 24).

The full Uluru Statement also reveals (on page 23) that parliament would begin work establishing this commission even before legislating the Voice. And we know this is under way because Labor have already committed $5.6m in the budget to a Makarrata Commission, of which some $900,000 has already been spent despite Indigenous Minister Linda Burney refusing to reveal in the parliament on “what”, or “where”.

The full Uluru Statement also sets out in granular detail (on page 22), things such as the Voice being “accommodated on an appropriate site within the parliamentary circle in Canberra” and that it “must also be supported by a sufficient and guaranteed budget, with access to its own independent secretariat, experts and lawyers”. I’m told with all the privileges and salaries of elected members of parliament too.

Indigenous Australians Minister Linda Burney refuses to explain on what and where $900,000 has already been spent on the Makarrata Commission, writes Peta Credlin. Picture: David Swift

But here’s the worst of what the full Uluru Statement from the Heart proposes: reparations, or compensation paid by taxpayers, including options (on page 19) such as a “financial settlement based on a percentage of Australia’s GDP” for “the resolution of land, water and resources issues …”

So be in no doubt that if the Voice gets up, there will soon be two classes of Australians. Those with ancestry extending back tens of thousands of years, increasingly consumed with a sense of grievance and entitlement, even though modern Australia is almost entirely colourblind. And those whose ancestry in this country goes back no further than 1788, who will be expected to pay reparations for the privilege of living in the nation that they and their ancestors have helped create. It’s all there in the documents now available, whatever smokescreen the PM and other Yes campaigners try and throw up.

The proposed indigenous Voice, to be voted on later this year, is not yet doomed; but it deserves to be, because its advocates have failed to be straight with the Australian people. As is now abundantly clear, the coming referendum is not about recognition; it’s an attempt to undo the last 240 years since settlement, and to retrofit Australia as a country that still belongs primarily to Aboriginal people, and we should just be grateful they let us live here.

As the full document reveals, the whole point of the Uluru Statement from the Heart, and the Voice it seeks to establish, and Treaty and Truth-Telling also, is to transform our country forever. The referendum that the Prime Minister wants us to pass is really a referendum on Australia itself.

I urge you to read the Uluru Statement in full, all 26 pages, and if it’s not your Australia that’s depicted in it, then the only way to respond is to vote “NO”.

Watch Peta on Credlin on Sky News, weeknights at 6pm