Voice to parliament inquiry is giving Indigenous Australians an opportunity to share their own powerful stories
A rich insight into Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people’s lives has been an unexpected outcome during the inquiry into Indigenous voice to parliament referendum and Constitutional amendment.
Alisha Agland is feeling the effects of a bureaucracy not known for rewarding good results or even recognising them. The 26-year-old is one of the young ones working in a broken Indigenous affairs system. Much of their advocacy is unpaid.
“We’re tired,” Agland told senators who visited her home town of Orange in the central tablelands of NSW on Tuesday to take evidence from Indigenous residents. Agland broke down as she told the story of a deeply troubled Indigenous teen who pulled out her own hair and paced while trying to explain herself.
The 15-year-old girl used her finger to draw herself in the dust on the back of a car. She was a circle, far away from her family and the government department that she knew controlled her life.
“I have seen first-hand in working in a Youth Justice-funded program, particularly with young people who are involved in such a program, that while it’s great – and yes, the program meets great outcomes for these young people – one thing, though, that I can see is that on an individual level they know that it’s not guaranteed that they can have a place in that program,” Agland said.
“This should be open to anyone that’s disengaged. It’s innovative, it’s creative and it works. We know it does. We’ve got data to show that. But we know it can be taken away.”
These are the stories Indigenous people are telling the parliamentary inquiry into the voice, though it is not strictly why the inquiry was established.
The Joint Select Committee on the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice Referendum was formed in response to calls from Liberal senator Andrew Bragg and others for an interrogation of the words that Australians will vote for or against later this year.
The subject of the inquiry is the bill containing the proposed constitutional amendment for the voice. Some of Australia’s finest legal minds have given evidence to the committee about it. Anyone who wishes to make a written submission to the inquiry is instructed in bold letters to confine their comments to the contents of that bill.
However, something more is happening along the way. The hearings are becoming a rich and unexpected record of Indigenous people’s lives, family stories, their frustrations and triumphs. It’s as if the invitation to speak about the voice has been received as a more general invitation to use your voice. Some Indigenous witnesses have disclosed deeply personal details about their past, such as being raised by a grandmother who pretended not to be Aboriginal to dupe child welfare workers.
Roy Ah-See, who was co-chairman of the Prime Minister’s Indigenous Advisory Council, spoke about growing up in a two-bedroom house on a former mission in central NSW with eight other kids and a single mum.
“In the wintertime we’d have no hot water because Mum couldn’t afford to pay the electricity bills,” he told the inquiry. “By the time summer would come we’d have no furniture because we had to burn it in the open fireplace. We had to sleep with clothes over the top of us. We had three or four kids in a bed. This is the type of stuff lives with me today, and that’s why I’m so passionate about giving future generations a voice so they can make decisions on behalf of the next generations to empower Aboriginal people and our communities to bring about change.
“If the government had their way we’d be still living in those conditions.”
Ah-See volunteered that at 18 he had a problem with drugs, gambling and alcohol. Then he was in jail. It was an uncle who told him to go to university because “nobody is going to stop an angry young man if he’s got a white man’s education”.
Since the inquiry opened on April 14, committee chairwoman and Labor senator Nita Green has asked each new witness if they have an opening statement. The answer from Indigenous witnesses is invariably yes, followed by revelations that hint at relief at being heard.
Sharon Riley, a Wiradjuri elder and veteran firefighter from Lithgow, told the inquiry about the day in 2020 when she showed firefighters to the most important rock art sites inside Maiyingu Marragu reserve as a massive blaze closed in. At the time, Riley had just been made redundant from NSW’s firefighting service. In her evidence, she was clearly not happy to be replaced by someone from Sydney “who hasn’t got strong cultural background” but still was proud to have been able to help.
The firefighters knew of only one rock art site, she said, so she told them about the others and they cleared them “so that once the fire front came through it didn’t get sucked into the rock and then destroy the rock art”.
Riley wishes the government would do more of the “cultural burns” that her people traditionally have done to reduce fuel loads. Her focus now is the fate of the colony of great gliders that survived the blaze.
“I look after the critters a bit,” she told the inquiry.
Ah-See wanted the inquiry to know he has since reared a son who became a podiatrist and a daughter who became a doctor.
He says the voice is about healing the nation and he categorically rejects the argument that it is unnecessary when there are 11 Indigenous MPs in federal parliament. “I understand there are Aboriginal politicians down in Canberra but with all due respect they (were) put there by their parties,” Ah-See said.
“So I see a red voice, I see a blue voice, I see a green voice. Our people want a black voice.”
There have been some surprising moments. In his evidence, Cape York Land Council boss Richard Ah Mat gave Bragg an unusual compliment. Bragg supports a voice.
“There is a blackfella in him somewhere because when he speaks to me he understands,” Ah Mat said.
Most Indigenous witnesses to the inquiry so far have been in favour of a constitutionally enshrined voice to both government and parliament on the grounds it is a sure way to guarantee that senior bureaucrats and politicians will hear from the Indigenous people who know what is going on in their communities.
Indigenous leader Tom Calma, who instigated the concept of Closing the Gap – an annual measure of Indigenous disadvantage – sees the voice as a money saver.
His idea for measuring Indigenous disadvantage against targets such as life expectancy and how ready five-year-olds are in the year they start school has been recast as a partnership between all governments and peak Indigenous bodies from every state and territory.
While the federal government took the blame for the old Closing the Gap failures since 2009, the new agreement signed in 2020 makes states, territories, the federal government and a coalition of 50 peak Indigenous organisations responsible when Australia does or does not meet 17 targets in the new agreement.
Calma told the inquiry where he believed Indigenous money went.
“Every time a bureaucrat flies in, a house is built for a bureaucrat or there’s a vehicle, that’s all billed together as Indigenous expenditure, so the real money doesn’t hit the ground for Indigenous projects,” he told the inquiry.
“Yet you see bandied around all the time, ‘$X billion is spent on Indigenous affairs.’ Let’s get real on some of this stuff and work out how much is actually going into the projects. I think the voice can provide that level of guidance to the parliament and also to the bureaucracy on how to make much more efficient and effective delivery of services.”
Cape York Institute chief executive Kirsty Davis offered the example of a new high school built two years ago at Lockhart River, where a school ready existed and parents had been trying to tell bureaucrats they would prefer attention for the serious problem of truancy.
She said that at the time school attendance was about 24 per cent.
“The local voices (were) saying ‘we have other problems that we need to have a say on before you go and do this great big construction’,” Davis told the inquiry.
Local leaders had ideas to encourage children with the lowest attendance rates to re-engage in school and wanted support from authorities. But by the time school was built, at a cost of $2m, school attendance had fallen to 18 per cent.
Davis told the inquiry the community was then told that, because school attendance was so low, the school did not qualify for funding to properly recruit and provide the curriculum that was required.
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