The Uluru Statement is a lot more than one page. Here’s why they now want to hide it from you

Rather than being a “simple and gracious request”, as the PM has put it many times, the longer document reveals that the Voice is just one part of a larger agenda.

With apologies to Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, Uluru Dialogue co-chair Professor Megan Davis, ABC presenter Leigh Sales, and countless others who have sought to gaslight the Australian people about the implications of the Voice to Parliament, it actually does matter how many words are in the Uluru Statement from the Heart.

Not because it matters how many pages those words fill, but because of what those words contain.

Since I reported on the existence of a longer form of the Uluru Statement that emerged from a Freedom of Information request to the National Indigenous Australians Agency, Voice advocates have circled the wagons and tried to force the nation into believing the document didn’t exist.

Albanese and others have called the debate the product of a “conspiracy theory.”

The ABC’s Leigh Sales sent an all hands email to her Ultimo colleagues instructing them on the talking points to shut down anyone who said the Uluru Statement was more than a page long.

Yunupingu with Prime Minister Anthony Albanese at Garma in 2022. Picture: Melanie Faith Dove

My Sky News colleague Peta Credlin had an editorial she did on the subject censored by Facebook, though in the end that unjustifiable act of censorship wound up causing Facebook to suspend its relationship with RMIT fact-checkers who had originally flagged the piece as misinformation.

It’s not hard to see why.

Rather than being a “simple and gracious request”, as the PM has put it many times, the longer document reveals that the Voice is just one part of a larger and more divisive agenda that includes calls for financial settlements and racial separatism.

Some of this we knew – the Uluru Statement was always about Voice, treaty, and “makaratta” (truth telling) – but much of it we didn’t.

In discussing treaty making, for example, the longer document raised the possibility of “a truth commission”, “reparations”, “recognition of authority and customary law” and “a financial settlement (such as seeking a percentage of GDP)”.

This is very much in the spirit, by the way, of what Uluru Dialogue co-chair Pat Anderson said in 2022.

Pat Anderson has said that the Voice would make Aboriginals a separate, “sovereign” people. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Gary Ramage

“If we have the Voice, then we have two sovereign peoples having an equal discussion, not the power imbalance that we have now. So we will then be in charge of everything that happens after that,” Ms Anderson said at the time.”

“Once we are locked in there to the Constitution, we are locked in. We can’t be gotten away – and we are equal.”

Weirdly, until it was critically reported on, nobody in the Yes camp seemed to care that this longer form existed.

They all acknowledged its truth.

For example, the final report of the Referendum Council, issued in 2017, contained a version of the long form of the Uluru Statement.

Crucially, though, things like the call for a percentage of GDP were left on the cutting room floor – perhaps even back then they realised this would be a little hot to leave lying around in public.

Before this controversy erupted, Megan Davis and Pat Anderson acknowledged the true length of the document when they wrote the manuscript for their new official, authorised biography of the Uluru Statement – a book that was clearly sent to press before this became an issue.

In it, they said the Uluru Statement was a 15 page document.

The ABC’s Leigh Sales gave instructions on how to describe the Uluru Statement to colleagues.

The one page, 439 word preamble that has now become holy writ for the prime minster was just a “pitch document” to sell the Australian people, they explained.

That “pitch document” may have been enough for Anthony Albanese, who famously said “why would I?” when asked if he had read the longer document.

But clearly it is not enough for voters, who are more concerned about the potential for constitutional mayhem and division than giving Albanese a legacy as the “father of the Voice”.

Instead, because the government appears to be trying to wave through massive constitutional change on the basis that one page pitch document (pay no attention to the call for reparations behind the curtain!), voters are turning away in droves.

In the most recent Newspoll, the “no” vote rose to 53 per cent, while those saying they were definitively in the “yes” camp fell to 38 per cent.

A detailed reading reveals that the floor has fallen out of the referendum, with support collapsing among voters over 35 (meaning opposition is not just for the oldies) and the university educated.

The trend is being confirmed by pollsters with ties across the political spectrum.

On Tuesday Essential polling conducted for the Guardian found that “no” was leading “yes” 48 to 42.

The Guardian also noted that “more poll respondents reported being a hard no (41 per cent) at this stage than a hard yes (30 per cent)”, though the paper also did try to make a virtue out of the fact that their poll showed plenty of persuadable undecideds.

It’s worth noting too that “don’t knows” tend to break in the direction of no, just as a matter electoral physics.

It is also more than likely that as with polls asking Britons about Brexit or Americans about Donald Trump in 2016, plenty of “no” voters are keeping their counsel because of the moral bullying of the “yes” campaign.