Indigenous voice to parliament: Revive and renew: Anthony Albanese’s vision but how to deliver it

Anthony Albanese meets with Yolngu elder Djawa Yunupingu at the Garma festival on Friday. Picture: Getty Images

Anthony Albanese has returned to Garma where his quest began – to revive and renew the campaign for the voice.

The groundswell is coming. It is building with Indigenous invocation, moral appeal, financial power and elite campaigning.

The Prime Minister’s speech on Saturday is heartfelt, elegant and practical. It is hard to imagine a more effective polemic for the voice. Albanese talks of a “noble goal” and the “practical means” to achieve it. The Yes case has truckloads of momentum still to come.

His vision is uplifting – the “coming-together of two worlds”. Yet that begs the bigger, inescapable question. How does creating in perpetuity an Indigenous political body in the Australian Constitution with separate and near unlimited advisory powers to parliament and government actually deliver a more united country?

This is the paradox of the referendum. It purports to guarantee unity in separation. It is upon this issue that the Australian people are split. Albanese needs the referendum to transcend politics to bring people together yet the proposal itself just generates political division.

Much has changed since Garma 2022. Vague hopes of bipartisanship have surrendered to a partisan battle between Albanese and Opposition Leader Peter Dutton, a schism that only hurts the Yes case. Yet Albanese is not for turning, declaring “no delaying or deferring this referendum”.

At Garma, Albanese offers a new vision for Australia – a more hopeful, optimistic country with a better life for Indigenous peoples, a vision virtually everyone shares.

The test is whether the Australian people can be persuaded that only the voice can unlock this future.

It is a bold and contentious claim. In the process, the voice is being invested with expectations that are impossible to fully realise. Albanese says it is a “gift” to the nation, a means of Indigenous empowerment, a vehicle to deliver in health, education, employment and housing and a spirit that “enlarges and enriches” two cultures.

The reality, however, is that voice, once created with a constitutional guarantee, will be the complete master of its destiny. Nobody will tell the voice what to do. Nobody can prophesise its operations.