Racism will fade with uniting voice: Noel Pearson

Racism will diminish when we recognise Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders through a voice, says Noel Pearson.

Noel Pearson delivers the first of four Boyer Lecturers in Sydney on Thursday. Picture: Oscar Colman

Cape York leader Noel Pearson says racism will diminish when Australia recognises Aboriginal and Torres Strait ­Islander people in the Constitution through a voice he predicts will be “a bridge to unite the First Peoples of this country with our British institutional inheritance and our multicultural achievement”.

“If we come to see that recognition of Indigenous Australians involves mutual recognition of British and migrant Australians, then the people of Australia will vote to build this greatest bridge and the referendum will succeed. Of this I am certain,” he said.

As Australia prepares for a referendum on the Indigenous voice within a year, Mr Pearson said he was hopeful yet worried the proposal could fail where the same-sex marriage postal vote succeeded. “Unlike same-sex marriage, there is not the requisite empathy of love to break through the prejudice, contempt and, yes, violence, of the past. Australians simply do not have Aboriginal people within their circles of family and friendship with whom they can share fellow feeling,” he said.

In the first of his four Boyer Lectures on Thursday, Mr ­Pearson said millions of Australians had joined the journey towards an amendment to the Constitution recognising Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples as the first peoples of Australia.

Read the full lecture here

However, he predicted that if success in the referendum was predicated on the popularity of Indigenous Australians as a ­people “then it is doubtful we will ­succeed”. “It does not and will not take much to mobilise antipathy against Aboriginal people and to conjure the worst imaginings about us and the recognition we seek,” he said.

“For those who wish to oppose our recognition it will be like shooting fish in a barrel. An inane thing to do – but easy. A heartless thing to do – but easy.”

Mr Pearson described Indigenous Australians as “perhaps the ethnic group Australians feel least connected to”. “We are not popular and we are not personally known to many Australians,” he said. “Few have met us and a small minority count us as friends.”

Despite this, Australians held and expressed strong views about Indigenous Australians based on what was in the media and what anthropologist Ted Stanner ­famously described as folklore about Aboriginal people.

“It has ever been thus. Worse in the past but still true today,” Mr Pearson said.

Mr Pearson, a land rights activist and community leader from the Guugu Yimithirr Aboriginal community at Hope Vale, is an ­architect of the 2017 Uluru ­Statement from the Heart that calls for an Indigenous voice in the Constitution.

The path to constitutional recognition began much earlier. In 2007, John Howard proposed a new preamble and in 2010 Julia Gillard established an expert panel on the recognition of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples in the Constitution.

“We are on the last leg of a long journey,” Mr Pearson said.

He said original sin racism – the old assumption that Aboriginal people were innately inferior – had greatly receded in Australia and the vast majority of fair-minded Australians were repulsed by it.

However, its legacy included a fear of repudiation.

This was “at the heart of the country’s trouble with Aboriginal people” and, in turn, the proposal for constitutional recognition in the form of an Indigenous voice.

“It is a troubling and unsettled question, involving denial and defensiveness and how to deal with guilt and truth … the country just does not know how to deal with recognition without the fear of repudiation. Denial and a visceral antipathy is the residue,” he said.

He said he took the bridge metaphor for the voice from Channel 9 television reporter Chris O’Keefe, who gave what he considered the best explanation of the referendum.

O’Keefe said: “The government [is] effectively asking Australians ‘do we need a bridge across the Sydney Harbour? Yes or no?’ With the parliament then to decide how many lanes it will have and its ­design.”

“(T)he trouble Australians have with Aboriginal people is readily called racism, and certainly racism is much to do with it, but the reality is not that simple … without sorting out that complex of matters falling under the rubric of ‘recognition’ we will forever think that what we call racism is at the heart of our problem as a nation rather than our not knowing who we are,” he said.

“Of all the claims I will make in these lectures this is the boldest and one of which I am most convicted: racism will diminish in this country when we succeed with recognition. It will not have the same purchase on us: neither on the majority party that has defaulted to it over two centuries, nor the minority that lives it, fears it and who too often succumb to the very fear itself.”