Time to remedy great wrong against indigenous: Malcolm Turnbull

Malcolm Turnbull says changing the Constitution to recognise indigenous Australians is needed to correct a ‘great wrong’.

Indigenous referendum council co-chair Patrick Dodson in Sydney yesterday. Picture: James Croucher

Malcolm Turnbull says changing the Constitution to recognise indigenous Australians is not for the faint-hearted, but is needed to correct a “great wrong” and unite the country.

Addressing the first meeting of a new 16-member referendum council that will steer the process of constitutional recognition for indigenous Australians, the Prime Minister said he was confident there was sufficient goodwill to reach a successful conclusion and remedy the mistake.

“When our Constitution was framed over a century ago, there was no acknowledgment of the custodianship of the Aboriginal history of Australia, there was no acknowledgment of 40,000 years’ occupation and caring for this country by the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people,” Mr Turnbull said.

“That was then, this is now, and what we are seeking to do is to find a way to ensure that our Constitution reflects Australia not just as it was, or as it was perceived to be in 1901, but as it is in 2015 and reflects all of our history and does so in way that unites us and makes us an even stronger nation than we are today.

“Constitutional reform, as I know from experience, is not for the faint-hearted. Nor regrettably is it particularly straight forward or easy, but I know that around this table we have enormous goodwill (and) we have bipartisan commitment,” he said.

Yesterday’s meeting of the new council opens the way to a ­series of planned conventions next year that will refine a model of constitutional recognition for a public vote, slated for 2017 to mark the 50th anniversary of the 1967 referendum on indigenous rights.

No consensus on the best model to take to a referendum has been reached, with constitutional conservatives pushing back against a plan to include a racial non-discrimination clause along with changes to remove outdated sections relating to race.

Council co-chairman Patrick Dodson, who has signalled a new willingness to pursue reform without an explicit ban on racial discrimination, said the measure remained “on the table”.

“We are not ruling anything in or out,” he said.

“They (the recommendations) will be further discussed and considered by the processes going forward, and I think the challenge around some of those prop­ositions obviously will be brought to our attention by others.’’

Arguing that change was needed to reflect Australia’s “modern democracy”, Mr Dodson said decent people would be “appalled” to understand the origins of the race provisions that remained in the Constitution.

The referendum council has a June deadline to present to parliament a recommended timeframe and model for change, with the first of the conventions planned for February.

“We are cognisant of the fact that indigenous peoples have got their concerns, and rightly so, I might say, in terms of their concerns, but yet we have a task to undertake and that is to try and refine and deal with (how) our Constitution belatedly may recognise the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people,” Mr Dodson said.

Fellow chairman Mark Leibler said achieving change by 2017 was “doable” but there needed to be bipartisan consensus among indigenous people on the model.