Turnbull to receive ultimatum on indigenous ­recog­nition

Malcolm Turnbull will be delivered an ultimatum today on indigenous constitutional recog­nition.

Malcolm Turnbull speaks at Bankstown Sports Club earlier this week. Photo: Christian Gilles

Malcolm Turnbull will be delivered an ultimatum today on indigenous constitutional recog­nition, with the Referendum Council report he and Bill Shorten commissioned 18 months ago making clear that nothing less than an advisory body to parliament and a separate treaty process will be ­acceptable.

The Prime Minister and Opposition Leader will have to decide how much political risk they are prepared to take in their own partyrooms on the proposals, after an outbreak of opposition from both sides to last month’s “Uluru statement from the heart” on which the report is based.

Mr Turnbull and Mr Shorten have consistently said any referendum question must have the support of indigenous Australia, and Referendum Council co-chairman Mark Leibler has said he would not support recommending a course of action “unless it’s got good prospects for success”.

Focus will next turn to the annual Garma cultural festival in northeast Arnhem Land, where key players will spend time in Aug­ust thrashing out details.

The council, comprising six indigenous and eight non-indigenous members, has backed the full Uluru Statement, which was the result of 12 nationwide dialogues leading up to a constitutional convention at Uluru.

The statement’s preamble, which includes the call for a “First Nations Voice enshrined in the Constitution” and the establishment of a “Makarrata commission to supervise agreement-making … and truth-telling about our history”, was the only part publicly released after the Uluru convention last month.

However, the Uluru meeting focused in much more detail on how the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander place in Australian history should be viewed, how the document’s recommendations were ­arrived at and how they could be implemented.

About 250 participants at the Uluru convention helped craft a narrative tracing a seven-part trajectory under the rubric of “our story”, beginning with an explanation of the pre-European system of law that bound together hundreds of language groups or nations. They noted that in many indigenous groups these laws remained strong, such as the Meriam people’s “Malo’s law” — one of the features in the High Court’s Mabo judgment that dispelled terra nullius and led to the creation of native title legislation.

Uluru participants discussed a series of “guiding principles” to inform the council’s report, which included the need to involve “substantive, structural reform”, to “tell the truth of history” and to make sure they provided “a mechanism for First Nations agreement-making”.