I’ll sweat blood for 2017 indigenous referendum vote, says Tony Abbott

TONY Abbott has revealed he wants the nation to vote for ­constitutional change to recognise indigenous Australians in 2017.

TONY Abbott has revealed he wants the nation to vote for ­constitutional change to recognise indigenous Australians on the 50th anniversary of the 1967 referendum — May 27, 2017 — ­declaring he is “prepared to sweat blood on this”.

Announcing another $5 million for the constitutional recognition campaign at a fundraising dinner in Sydney last night, the Prime Minister said those working for change must “temper their ambitions” to give the referendum the best possible chance of succeeding. “We will be a diminished ­nation if we cannot find a way to acknowledge the first Australians in our nation’s foundation document, but we must not underestimate the lions in the path of this vital project,” Mr Abbott said.

He told the gathering of Aboriginal leaders that recognition of indigenous Australians was “at least as important as all the other causes this government has been prepared to take on”.

“I want this to happen,” he said. “I want this to happen as quickly as it can. I hope that it might happen on the 50th anniversary of the 1967 referendum, the 27th of May 2017. But I do not want it to fail because every Australian would be the loser.”

The extra funding takes total spending on the campaign to $20.73m.

Mr Abbott commended indigenous MPs Ken Wyatt and Nova Peris for their work in chairing the parliamentary committee providing advice on the constitutional change, but said he feared the first two proposals they had suggested as options for constitutional change would be rejected at a referendum, while their third was in his view “not strong enough” in its recognition of indigenous people.

Mr Abbott told the fundraising dinner he was a supporter of ­constitutional recognition because he wanted the country “to transcend the ‘them and us’ mindset to ­embrace ‘all of us’ in the spirit of generous inclusion that has always marked Australians at our best”. He also gave the strongest indication yet that he wanted to go further than symbolic change.

Mr Abbott cited his role in campaigning against a republic to illustrate the challenges the referendum faced, even with support levels reportedly now at 60 per cent. “I know, ­because I helped to ­defeat the ­republican cause that was overwhelmingly supported by the Labor Party, significantly sup­ported by the Liberal Party and backed by every major newspaper editorial in the country,” he said.

Bill Shorten said Mr Abbott was right to say that Australians could not allow the debate to be run off the rails by extreme views or a fracturing of national consensus. He said Labor would work with the government on constitutional recognition “every step of the way”.