Turnbull had no choice on indigenous recognition

Malcolm Turnbull had no choice. The referendum to enshrine an indigenous voice in the Constitution is dead.

Three months after its release, its fate was obvious: this referendum had no prospect of being passed.

Bill Shorten played the most cynical politics with this proposal: offering his strong backing to win indigenous votes and now stranded with no option but retreat.

The Prime Minister’s message brings overdue realism to this issue. He rejects the proposal as a bad idea and something the public would never contemplate. He is right on both counts.

Beware false laments for this idea. No one at any stage offered a credible view of how the public would accept a proposal that amounted to a blank cheque. The Referendum Council, which submitted this idea on a take-it-or-leave-it basis this year, ultimately was responsible for a serious blunder.

There will be no referendum in the life of the current parliament. It will be back to the drawing board to try to salvage the concept of indigenous constitutional ­recognition. But this idea may now be lost to history.

Much of indigenous leadership sentiment is geared to a treaty rather than constitutional recognition. That is a tragedy. Indigenous leaders asked for too much and are left with very little.

There have been two disastrous false starts in this process: ­initial insistence to a constitutional racial non-discrimination clause and, when this was abandoned, insistence on an indigenous advisory council inserted in the Constitution as a “voice” for first people. Despite high hopes, neither has proved viable.

Turnbull has now rejected the second proposal, the final recommendation to his government. He was unnerved by the mid-year switch by the Referendum Council. No details about the advisory body were provided. Incredibly, its advocates expected passage of a referendum before the nature of this body was defined. Such a position had zero prospect of success yet it was maintained in an act of idealistic folly.

This position is now terminated.

In an extraordinary statement yesterday that typifies the scale of Labor’s misjudgements, Bill Shorten and his indigenous affairs spokesman, Pat Dodson, attacked Turnbull for not listening to what the First Nations wanted. Can we get honest? Can we tell the truth?

The problem was that indigenous communities were sanctioned to decide what they wanted on a constitutional change that belonged to the nation and had to be voted on by the entire population.

Turnbull yesterday told some fundamental truths: that constitutional recognition must be based on “equal civic rights” as distinct from separate arrangements for ­indigenous people; that a body representing indigenous people in our Constitution was a false step and never going to be accepted by the nation; and the true course for ­indigenous representation was through indigenous MPs sitting in the national parliament not in ­advisory bodies.

Turnbull wants to keep alive and bipartisan the process of constitutional recognition. It won’t be easy. He has asked Shorten to agree to a joint select committee process that puts on the table the reports of the past five years. This is different from Shorten’s view that a parliamentary committee should assess how to proceed with the ­Referendum Council’s proposal.

The initial view of John Howard and Tony Abbott when they backed this concept was to complete the Constitution. Yet a combination of indigenous leaders and Labor trashed this idea. The process has never recovered — a truth most don’t want to confront.

The final irony is that Labor’s indigenous members were initially deeply sceptical about the Referendum Council proposal.

Dodson said: “This is a bit of a bolt in the dark as it were.”

Linda Burney said: “I think the Australian community would be shocked to hear that we are not going to deal with the archaic race situations (in the Constitution).”

Turnbull’s decision saves the country from a disastrous referendum proposal. What is needed now is genuine, not phony, goodwill, an end to gesture politics and serious efforts to find a proposal the entire nation will accept.