Indigenous voice to parliament: What’s the fuss about a bit of recognition and an ear?

The vote for the Indigenous voice was born out of a collective desire for a community-sanctioned group of Indigenous elders concerned about the future wellbeing of their people. They essentially believe they need that voice to be adequately heard as it affects the affairs of their people. If we cannot support that, what would we support?

Robert Vitkunas, Broadbeach Waters, Qld

I will be voting Yes in the voice referendum, but not for any of the reasons I have heard in the media. I don’t think anybody has looked at the big picture. Australian Indigenous culture has lasted more than 60,000 years. Our Indigenous elders have offered for us to walk with them into the future. This is an opportunity for us to improve our society, to make it stable and lasting.

I will be voting to accept this offer to work with our parliament in the centuries to come. I do not want what we have achieved to date to be lost to the dustbin of history. They may not repeat this generous offer.

Greg Butler, Murrumbateman, NSW

Noel Pearson is now proposing 35 local voices as well as a national voice (“Not one voice but many: Pearson says local communities must be heard”, 26/9). It seems this is getting messier and more complex as every day goes by. I find it astounding that voice advocates don’t themselves know what the structure of the voice would be when it is less than three weeks to referendum day. Do they seriously think Australians will vote for such a half-cooked proposal?

Anthony Scott, Cook, ACT

I’m sure the voice is very important to most First Nations peoples, but to me it’s a bit of a distraction. However Liberal HQ, which spammed me last night with the Opposition Leader’s words “Don’t know? Vote No”, has just made this personal. By encouraging me to remain ignorant and blindly reject anything I don’t know is a hell of an insult to anyone’s intelligence, especially when the actual proposed changes to the Constitution are so uncomplicated. A bit of recognition and an ear for our Indigenous people, which has been missing in our Constitution. So what’s all the fuss?

Tom Hunt, Oak Flats, NSW

I feel compelled to respond to Nikki Gemmell’s article in The Weekend Australian Magazine (“On the Indigenous voice to parliament, I was tremendously naive”, 22/9). Gemmell assumes “all of us” feel a “corrosive weight of past wrongs”. While we all acknowledge that in the colonisation of Australia some terrible things happened, we should also acknowledge that in the past 100 years governments and Australians have worked tirelessly to assist Indigenous people. There are thousands of Aboriginal organisations and billions of dollars put towards this end. The fact is that much of that money does not reach the people in need but goes to elites and activists. This needs to be called out. The No campaign wants the best for the Aboriginal people in need. But the voice is not going to do that. The voice will divide Australia even more and this division will be based on race. It is naive to think otherwise. Most Australians would vote for recognition in the Constitution. But the voice is not about recognition.

Victoria Webster, Norwood, SA

Chris Merritt’s article last week (“Goal of the Freedom Riders was equality, not division”, 21/9) deserves reflection. In a nutshell, he tells us that in 1965 Charles Perkins led an anti-racist group of Freedom Riders to a string of country towns where racial separatism was blighting the lives of Aboriginal people.

Their goal was racial equality – the antithesis of the proposed voice to parliament. Partly as a consequence of their efforts, Australians voted overwhelmingly in 1967 to support changes in the Constitution to “remove any ground for the belief that the Constitution discriminated against people of Aboriginal race”.

Almost 60 years later we are being asked to entrench a race-based lobby group that would be empowered to involve itself in debates about all matters of public policy. So if passed it would give one racial group – and their descendants for all time – power to have an additional say on public policy that would go beyond the normal rights of citizenship of all Australians.

So the so-called discriminators of old will now become the discriminated.

Jeffrey Cox, North Boambee Valley, NSW