Dividing us by race is not the way forward

We are either all one people, or we are not. BHP boss Andrew Mackenzie should know anything that seeks to divide us on the grounds of our race, takes us backwards, writes Peta Credlin.

I’m sure BHP boss Andrew Mackenzie is good at picking market trends and keeping costs down. But when it comes to political issues, he’s way out of step with everyday Australia.

Having reportedly spent time on the ground around Port Hedland with traditional owners and indigenous leaders, it seems the BHP boss thinks the biggest issue facing indigenous Australians isn’t joblessness, health and living standards, or the rights of women and children to a life without violence, instead it is constitutional change, “so that the voices of indigenous Australians can be fully heard”.

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And he’s pledged to spend $1 million of BHP’s money to help campaign for it.

Presumably, Mackenzie is not aware that, with Ken Wyatt, Linda Burney, Pat Dodson and Malarndirri McCarthy currently in the federal parliament (and with Warren Mundine, Jacinta Price and maybe Bess Price too hoping to join them), Aboriginal people hardly need a new body in order to have their say.

BHP CEO Andrew Mackenzie next to the original Uluru Statement. Picture: AAP/Richard Wainwright

Nor do the rest of non-indigenous Australia need to be shut out from a proposed new process that gives laws affecting indigenous people (and that would be every law) a different treatment than laws affecting everyone else.

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One of the tenets of our legal system is that justice is blind. It applies to all. As a society, we’ve spent centuries building our legal model based on equality, and if elected, under Bill Shorten’s referendum plan, we’re now told that division and a different treatment for some, based on their skin colour, must now be how the Australian Parliament makes our laws.

It is backward and smacks of the Plessy v Ferguson court decision of the 1880s that established the “separate but equal” doctrine that led to state-sanctioned segregation in the US.

We are either all one people, or we are not. And anything, anything at all, that seeks to divide us on the grounds of our race, takes us backwards not forwards.

We know where Labor are on this, but where are the Coalition?