Fifty years after 1967 referendum, indigenous recognition remains elusive
Fifty years after the historic 1967 referendum, Constitutional recognition of indigenous Australians remains elusive.
It was the swinging 60s, the height of the American civil-rights era. International opposition to South African apartheid was growing. Post-war decolonisation was underway. A small group of activists hoped to win equal rights for Australian Aborigines. The Federal Council for Aboriginal Advancement, later the Federal Council for the Advancement of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders, ran a decade-long grassroots campaign despite restrictions on the movement of indigenous people.
There were letters and meetings and regular petitions to federal parliament that inserted calls for equality into the ceremony of the highest legislative body in the land. Slowly, the public and then politicians listened. By the time a constitutional referendum was called in early 1967, there had been the Yirrkala bark petition, the Freedom Ride, the Wave Hill Walk Off, Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream’’ speech, laws banning racial discrimination in the United States. The mood of the times was evident. FCAATSI campaigners stood alongside supporters of both major parties under banners bearing slogans like “Right the wrongs, write ‘yes’ for Aborigines” and posters with pictures of adorable Aboriginal children. A ‘Yes’ vote for a fair go for everyone.
Faith Bandler, FCAATSI’s charismatic spokeswoman, reached into lounges and kitchens around the country via the then-novel medium of television. “It’s important that we should have the maximum vote, because the eyes of the world are on Australia: they are waiting to see whether or not the white Australian will take with him as one people the dark Australian,” she said. South Australian Labor politician Don Dunstan and academic Zelman Cowen (who would go on to be governor-general) warned about risks to Australia’s international reputation. “If we don’t change, we will be lumped as the enemy. And we cannot afford to be lumped by the majority of nations of the world with South Africa as the enemy,” Dunstan said. The referendum passed with over 90 per cent support.
The 50th anniversary of that historic vote, on 27 May, will coincide with the 20th anniversary of the Bringing Them Home report and the 25th anniversary of the Mabo judgment on 3 June. Until recently, it was also the hoped-for date of another planned constitutional referendum, this time to recognise indigenous people as the first Australians. But so beleaguered has that process become that leaders and politicians are now questioning whether it should continue. Critics argue indigenous recognition is on track to be the most expensive referendum ever, even though after a decade of work, no consensus proposition has yet emerged. The times differ markedly to 50 years ago.
Speaking from the Netherlands, where Geert Wilders’ far-right Party for Freedom came second in recent elections riding a wave of populist sentiment, Lilon Bandler, Faith’s daughter, says it’s difficult to appreciate what life was once like for many Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. Back in 1967, race-based restrictions differed between states, curfews were enforced in some areas, and some people had to wear “dog tags”. “It’s also incredibly hard for people to comprehend how challenging it is to actually get a referendum passed in Australia,” Bandler says. “The thing that set the ’67 referendum apart and got it passed was that the lead up was unifying rather than divisive.” Bandler is now an associate professor of indigenous health at The University of Sydney.
Only eight of 44 Australian constitutional referenda been carried with the required “double majority”. John Howard abruptly revived the push for indigenous recognition while campaigning for a fifth term in office in 2007. Bandler says that despite abundant goodwill, there is still no “groundswell” of public support, and she doubts a referendum for even minimal constitutional change would succeed presently. “My gut feeling is that it wouldn’t. My gut feeling is that now, in Australia, we have a politics of division,” Bandler says. “While there is a broad sense that there’s a wrong to be righted, there are also very loud voices that could campaign against constitutional change … if that happened, I think in all likelihood a referendum would not pass.” Failure could bring severe repercussions. “If you put up a referendum that doesn’t pass, you set back the issue by an unknown amount of time. I think that’s what happened with the republic,” Bandler says.
Fred Chaney, a lifetime advocate for indigenous causes and a former minister in the Fraser government, says the ’67 vote passed in part because it remedied blatant injustices, marking a boundary “between segregated Australia and non-segregated Australia in legal terms.” The changes removed obstacles to counting indigenous people in the census and transferred supreme authority for making laws for Aborigines from the states to the commonwealth, obliging the commonwealth to intervene. “This was the quite extraordinary adoption by the Australian community of the idea that Aboriginal people should be equal at least in law,” Chaney says. “Then, of course, the whole scene became much more difficult because you moved from demands for equality to demands that related to special rights accrued to people because of their identity … ‘67 was the dividing line between struggles for civic equality and the continuing difficulty with Aboriginal people wanting to enjoy full and equal citizenship but also things that attach to them through their collective identity.” He thinks any recognition proposal that “smells of special rights” would be unlikely to succeed, not least because the wider community is still “struggling to come to grips” with indigenous collective identity. Chaney points instead to past successes through common law. “Would Mabo have been put in place by referendum? I think the answer is ‘no’,” he says.
The ‘67 referendum initiated the modern era of Canberra-led indigenous policy. Warren Mundine, whose siblings campaigned for a ‘Yes’ vote, says it also raised expectations about what could be achieved. “The mindset of Aboriginal people changed so we no longer felt subservient,” Mundine says. “We were going to push for our rights and our issues.” Soon, there was the Aboriginal Tent Embassy, the Gove land rights case, an expanded indigenous affairs bureaucracy, more money and a raft of new legislation. Canberra’s new power to make laws for indigenous people gave federal parties some incentive to compete on policy. From the ‘70s onwards, indigenous groups won land rights and heritage protections culminating with native title, which Chaney says moved many “from being supplicants to being stakeholders”. But those gains and more indigenous-branded more spending—currently between two and four times the national average on a per capita basis—have yet to raise indigenous living standards to those of the general population. Rights activists often characterise the ‘67 referendum as a failure in hindsight, largely because the gap remains unclosed. Labor Senator Linda Burney thinks that is a mistake. “The referendum didn’t change the social justice outcomes, but that’s not what it was about,” Burney says. “It delivered the census, and it delivered commonwealth powers.”
The Referendum Council, the body currently managing the indigenous recognition process, will hold a summit at Uluru ahead of the 27 May anniversary. The meeting is intended to resolve a consensus indigenous position on how to advance. The council was created after former prime minister Tony Abbott lost control of consultations in mid-2015. At that time, indigenous leaders ridiculed fears they might not be able to contain debate to a set of proposals developed over three successive government reports. Tense closed-door dialogues lacking wider community input have since forced the addition of options many observers think are unlikely ever to be put to a vote, let alone passed. Those options include an indigenous “voice” to parliament (perhaps a pseudo-legislative body with veto powers) and some route to treaties. A showdown appears imminent between elected politicians and council leaders, each claiming to reflect community views. “One of the decisions that ultimately will have to be made, certainly from a pragmatic perspective like my own, is whether or not to proceed with a referendum,” Burney says. “If you’re not going to win it then why would you do it? … If the constitutional referendum doesn’t speak to every Australian, then it’s going to be difficult to get it passed.” Mundine thinks the process is salvageable, “but it’s going to take a lot of realpolitik from the indigenous side.”
Liberal Senator Dean Smith wants the council scrapped and responsibility returned to the parliament. Much may depend on whether the Uluru summit reaches consensus ahead of the council’s expected reporting date on 30 June.
At the council’s Melbourne meeting in March, Lidia Thorpe led a group of rebel delegates loudly opposing constitutional recognition and favouring treaties. Some other stakeholders stayed away to avoid the ruckus. Thorpe, who has emerged as a de facto spokeswoman for the indigenous-led Vote ‘No’ to Constitutional Change movement in Victoria, says the consultations have been “disrespectful”, undemocratic and “extremely one-sided”. Governments have spent an estimated $40 million to date pursuing options that do not include sovereignty arguments activists like her consider vital.
A video posted last week of NRL veteran David Peachey opposing constitutional recognition was viewed over 25,000 times within 24 hours, Thorpe claims. She believes hers is the real grassroots movement, operating nationwide with minimal resources. “People are talking about state-based protests to send a message to the Uluru meeting without people having to go up there,” Thorpe says. “If they are successful at Uluru, then I imagine that they will get on with their agenda, but I doubt the ‘no’ campaign will let them do that very easily … we’ve got influential leaders in every state that don’t agree with this referendum, and they are the ones being shut out.” Council members privately argue they have worked hard to include supporters of the Aboriginal sovereignty and treaty movements. Regardless, a referendum undermined on both sides would fail.
Bandler thinks it could be years before Australia is ready to recognise indigenous people in the constitution. There are too many unresolved questions, too few thoughtful public debates and a lack of cogent political leadership. “This needs to be informed by a broader conversation than just what Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people think is important,” Bandler says. Like Burney, Mundine and others, she is uneasy about the council process. “Sometimes the demand that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders’ voices be heard ends up excluding the voices of other Australians, and also some Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander voices that are not as loud, not as well articulated, still confused.” “The voice we hear from Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders is always the loudest voice, the voice that has access to media, that’s well articulated and used to speaking up for its own benefit,” she continues. “It’s a very particular voice and an important one but not necessarily representative of a large and diverse group of people.” She agrees with Chaney that most indigenous activism since ‘67 has been for some form of special rights, which would be a tougher sell at a referendum, but prefers to subtly recast his point. “Australians are quite happy with the concept of equality but really struggle at times with the concept of equity,” Bandler says. “We hear a lot of, ‘they should get what we get’, not understanding that people’s starting points are different; there’s not enough recognition of pre-existing privilege or pre-existing assumptions. … How can we best accommodate that, so our constitution reflects our best and highest values? We are not at a point we can say we’ve settled that conversation.”
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