This week in parliament, Anthony Albanese doubled down on his claim that the Uluru Statement from the Heart is just a simple one-page statement – almost an Australian version, he’s said, of the Gettysburg Address.
He’s doing this because he needs the Uluru Statement to be a benign, uplifting document in order to get his voice referendum passed by voters, and because he needs to deny that the voice is just the first step in “Voice, Treaty, Truth” – a lengthy and complex process that will lead to multi-billion dollar reparations payments (on top of the near $40bn a year that’s currently spent on Indigenous Australians) and the rewriting of our history as a story of shame.
He’s so keen to bluff people out of referencing the full statement that he denounced the claim that it’s actually a 26-page document as a “conspiracy” worthy of QAnon.
On Wednesday, to justify his claim in the parliament the day before, Albanese produced a statement from Megan Davis, which she issued late on Tuesday night. “The Uluru Statement is just one page,” the statement read. There’s only one problem with this. It’s not what Professor Davis has said repeatedly for years in official speeches, documents and in her many media appearances.
Professor Davis, who was one of the Uluru Statement’s main authors and a key member of the PM’s hand-picked Referendum Working Group, said in her 2018 Parkes Oration: “The Uluru Statement from the Heart isn’t just the first one-page statement; it’s actually a very lengthy document of about 18 to 20 pages, and a very powerful part of this document reflects what happened in the dialogues”.
In May 2022, she wrote in this newspaper that: “The Uluru Statement … is occasionally mistaken as merely a one-page document ….in totality (it) is closer to 18 pages and includes … a lengthy narrative called ‘Our Story’.”
And in November last year, she spoke at the Sydney Peace Prize Award Ceremony and Lecture saying: “It’s very important for Australians to read the (Uluru) Statement, and the statement is also much bigger, it’s actually 18 pages.”
It’s because this part – after page one – is so full of anger, entitlement and the demand to atone for the past 240 years of Australian history that the PM now wants to pretend that it doesn’t exist or has no status. In other words, it is political dynamite.
Then there’s the official report of the Referendum Council, co-chaired by Pat Anderson and Mark Leibler, about the constitutional consultations that culminated in the 2017 Uluru meeting that endorsed the Statement from the Heart, which is the foundation of the voice campaign.
The council’s final report starts with the one-page version of the Uluru Statement that the PM so frequently eulogises. But then, from page 16 of the final report, there are many passages of what it says are “extracts from the Uluru Statement from the Heart” including “Our Story”, as referenced by Professor Davis.
Here are some representative quotes: “The invasion that started at Botany Bay is the origin of the fundamental grievance between the old and new Australians.”
“This is the time of the Frontier Wars when massacres, disease and poison decimated First Nations … The Tasmanian Genocide and the Black War waged by the colonists reveals the truth about this evil time.”
“The taking of our land without consent represents our fundamental grievance against the … Crown.” “Makarrata is another word for Treaty … it is the culmination of our agenda.” “Any voice to parliament should be designed so that it could support and promote a treaty making process.”
“Treaty would be the vehicle to achieve self-determination, autonomy and self-government.” “The true history of colonisation must be told: the genocides, the massacres, the wars and the ongoing injustices and discrimination.”
Lest there be any doubt, these are all passages from the larger Uluru Statement as highlighted and confirmed in the Referendum Council’s final report. These passages are identical with those in the 26-page document, released in March under FOI, which the National Indigenous Australians Agency officially described as the Uluru Statement from the Heart – or did until Wednesday.
On Wednesday, the National Indigenous Australians Agency’s chief executive wrote to Senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price and said that “the Uluru Statement from the Heart is one page, signed by the delegates at the National Convention in 2017. The authors of the statement … have confirmed this. The additional pages … are background and excerpts from the regional dialogues”.
The problem with this letter – and why it smacks of bullying by the government – is that the NIAA had confirmed just a fortnight back that the full-26 page “Document 14”, released under FOI, is indeed the Statement from the Heart.
Consider this email exchange between the FOI applicant and the NIAA.
On July 19, the applicant wrote: “for the avoidance of doubt, I am seeking access to the complete un-redacted document that is referred to as the Uluru Statement from the Heart”. The next day, the official reply came back: “the information you have requested is published on the NIAA disclosure log … as Document 14”. For further confirmation, the FOI applicant then asked: “can you confirm that the document you referred me to (Document 14 …) is the Uluru Statement from the Heart…?”
The following day came official confirmation “that the extracts in the Referendum Council’s final report are taken from the Uluru Statement from the Heart”.
As someone with long personal experience, I think I can surmise what’s just happened between the government and the bureaucracy. At some point in the past couple of days – once the full Statement for the Heart became a big political headache for the PM – the backroom operators started scrambling because they knew the full Uluru Statement would only harden voters against the voice. When Jacinta Price’s office then had oral confirmation that matched the FOI written advice, the NIAA boss was forced to weigh in and backtrack.
It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that, under pressure from the government, junior officials have been thrown under a bus in a tawdry attempt to rescue the PM from a hole of his own making.
In fairness to the PM, who is not a details man, he may not have known about the other 25 pages of the Uluru Statement when he pledged at least 34 times to implement it “in full”. But the activists who drafted the statement certainly knew what it contained, as Professor Davis’s repeated statements show. She cannot now credibly backtrack and nor can the NIAA.
The use of the term Makarrata, even in the sanitised one-page Uluru summary, gives the game away. This is a Yolngu word meaning a retribution ritual, a disabling spearing, to atone for a wrong that’s been committed. Hence the Makarrata Commission – which even the one-page version of the statement demands – is essentially a payback punishment for the supposed injustice of the settlement of Australia.The very fact that the government now wants to bury the full statement says everything about what will happen to Australia if the voice gets up: Voice. Treaty. Truth. Voice first. Then Treaty and Truth.
It’s more like a log of claims against the Australian nation for a litany of wrongs (unrelieved by any countervailing benefits) that have supposedly been perpetrated against Aboriginal people. This is what all Australians should be familiar with before casting their votes.
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