In truth, the voice speaks of racial and religious division

The farce regarding Goat Island (“Perrottet vows island will be returned to ‘right’ Indigenous group”, 22/7) is a forewarning of the trouble we will have with the voice. Elite MPs, public servants, lawyers and journalists naively think of the first people as one complete tribe that has common interest when in reality they comprised many different tribes with competing interests.

The utopian voice will be unworkable as separate tribes compete for their own interests and in the process render government for the whole of the Australian people unworkable. The First Nations people already have a voice and they are called MPs.

Charles Stanford, Bondi, NSW

For more than 30 years I have lived and worked as a public servant in some of the most remote parts of Queensland, including Indigenous communities.

Indigenous Australians aren’t homogenous. To think otherwise is soft racism at its most pernicious. It’s the kind of racism that can’t even conceive of the possibility that a righteous life can be led without adhering to middle-class Anglo-Celtic norms.

A Murri has less in common with a Noongar, linguistically and culturally, than your average white Australian has with a Slovak. Some tribes with common boundaries have been in conflict since Jesus was playing scrum- half.

If you want to get a rise out of a black man, treat him like your “project”. Reading some of the material The Australian publishes, it is easy to see that pontification is what determines Indigenous policy, rather than real-life experience.

If you want to know what is best for Indigenous people, leave the green leafies and go and live with them for a year. Regardless of whether you are black, white or brindle, your opinion is of little consequence to an Aboriginal man or woman unless they have connected with you as an individual – and this won’t happen if you only fly in with a flashy entourage every six months.

This is about the only recurring theme you will see in communities.

The voice runs the risk of just being more gammin that makes white people feel good while giving proto-bureaucrats the opportunity to future-proof six-figure salaries in unassailable white elephants.

John White, Townsville, Qld

Parliament comprises 227 members and senators, of which 10 (4.4 per cent) are Indigenous. This exceeds the Indigenous share of the population. By contrast, there are just four federal MPs with Chinese ethnic heritage, representing 1.7 per cent of the parliament compared with their 5.5 per of the population. The same logic applies to the under-represented Indian, Filipino, South African and Vietnamese heritage populations, and probably many others too.

This is why the Uluru voice proposal is so dangerous: it would entrench racial hierarchy into our law and precipitate political demands from all manner of other groups who would claim justification to demand some form of racialised political privilege based on ancestry. This would inevitably corrode the free and equal basis of the universal franchise, which constitutes parliament on the only reasonable basis: elections decided by one person, one vote in a secret ballot.

Nicholas Tam, Traralgon East, Vic

The claim to constitutional recognition, and racial separatism, made in the Uluru statement rests on an entirely religious/spiritual premise – that there exists a racially specific, spiritual connection that links Aboriginal people – and only Aboriginal people – to the Australian landmass.

People are free to hold whatever religious or spiritual beliefs they wish. But metaphysical and spiritual claims, such as the Uluru statement sets out, can play no role in our constitutional order.

Are not the European wars of religion – in which millions died during the 16th and 17th centuries – sufficient evidence of the grave folly of religion being woven into the fabric of the state?

I can hardly believe that apparently sensible people are imploring the Australian public to privilege a particular religion, which supposedly favours one particular race, in our Constitution.

Whatever the challenges facing some Aboriginal people may be, they must be addressed within our current constitutional framework which is, correctly, blind to religion and to race.

James Miller, Wolli Creek, NSW