Balancing the rights and wrongs of history to support a voice

I am an old man. I lived through the 1950s, the “forgotten decade” for Aboriginal people. Through the 1960s when Charles Perkins became the first Aboriginal person to gain a university degree and lead his emboldened equality demonstrations throughout NSW and that wonderful 1967 referendum when Aboriginal people were counted in the census and the commonwealth gained Aboriginal powers. The 1970s with those great men at Wave Hill and Gough Whitlam’s symbolic gesture and the passing of the Aboriginal Land Rights Act in 1976. The 1990s with the historic Mabo decision and Paul Keating’s momentous, inspiring Redfern Address.

Even Kevin Rudd’s Sorry Day speech in 2008 gave hope for a better outcome for Indigenous people.

What has changed? I have changed. I don’t like admitting it but I’ve become a sceptic. I’m no longer as supporting of Indigenous causes as I once was. We have seen countless billions of dollars poured into Indigenous issues with, as Anthony Albanese has intimated, little results to show. Why is this? Some reasons are obvious, others obscure and some morally questionable. Yes, government assistance and intervention is not always well targeted.

There are countless Indigenous “leaders” earning $100,000-$200,000 a year who deride governments for their failure but too few seem to take responsibility or action for the disgraceful plight of Aboriginal people in remote communities. To me they appear to be always striving for the moral high ground, but it's the low ground where their people live and who need their leadership and assistance.

Regretfully we see little or no leadership within these communities where women and children desperately need help. However, help must also come from within.

I can’t say I’m enamoured with the idea of a constitutional voice. However I do think the Prime Minister’s suggestion of the way ahead has merit, particularly accompanied by his three proposed constitutional sentences – with the third being essential. Will the voice make a difference to those who really matter? I doubt it. I hope I am wrong. I want to be wrong.

Malcolm Price, Sunrise Beach, Qld

As usual, Janet Albrechtsen (“Libs left limp as voice poses legal nightmare”, 1/8) shoots the arrow into the bullseye.

Julian Leeser is but one of the reasons the Liberals are as limp as. And certainly one of the reasons the base is still sitting out here waiting for this damaged mob to start wading the party out of the swamp. Peter Dutton is going to have to start punching with the passion required to quell those woke, green-left adherents in the Liberals.

Stephanie Millar, Cremorne, NSW

Janet Albrechtsen’s description of Julian Leeser’s comments on the voice as “quibbling” is quite unfair. Leeser’s questions are the precise questions to which I and many others would want answers before we would even consider a Yes vote.

Until those questions are answered I could not have confidence that the voice will adequately deal with the serious day-to-day issues in Aboriginal communities. It is those issues that are my chief concern.

Don McGregor, Baulkham Hills, NSW

Not a prayer

Nick Cater might be surprised to learn that our Constitution and whole system of national government were conceived and agreed without reference to Christianity (“Conservatives lose their religion, and thus lose their way”, 1/8).

Meetings of the Constitutional Convention were not preceded by prayer – Christian or otherwise. In fact, the Constitution it created specifically prohibits the commonwealth from making laws “imposing any religious observance”.

But the founding fathers came under intense pressure from the various churches to give a Protestant Christian god a prominent place in the formalities of our new national parliament. That is how the ritual recitation of the Lord’s Prayer by the Speaker and president found its way into the standing orders.

To suggest, as Cater does, that to cease this mindless mumbling of 70 words before every session of parliament would somehow undermine the “moral foundation for the nation” stretches credulity.

David Salter, Hunters Hill, NSW

On a pedestal

I would like to point out to the good burghers of Hobart that the statues of the people they wish to remove are there not because of the colour of their skin but for what they achieved for the city of Hobart and Tasmania (“ ‘Caucasian male’ statues face cull in premier row”, 1/8).

Tearing down statues does not change your history as a city and state one iota.

Don Smith, Gulgong, NSW