Why voting Yes to Indigenous voice to parliament is personal for me

Will Saturday’s referendum on the voice be another significant moment in the history of black and white Australians, or a backward step into bigotry and despair?

Half a century before white South Africans introduced Apartheid white Australians introduced, yes, the White Australia Policy. It was pretty much the foundation stone of our shiny bright new nation, and wasn’t finally dismantled until 1973.

Behold our legislative counterpart to Trump’s Wall – not merely across one border but encircling out entire 34,000km coastline. This was pre-emptive ethnic cleansing. We were to be kept as safe as possible from people whose skins were black or brown or, most perilous of all, yellow.

One small problem. The black people who preceded us. By some estimates, up to million when the First Fleet arrived in 1788. The figure would rapidly decline thanks to introduced diseases, massacres and poisoning. Countless blackfellers and their families died in the Frontier Wars. Others were beaten to death or driven off cliffs to save the cost of bullets. Aboriginal men were chained together, used as slave labour, their women raped. And yes, they were driven off their land, the entire continent stolen under the doctrine of Terra nullius. No treaty for our First Nations. Their culture and their languages destroyed. There was a policy to “breed out the blackness” and in due course babies were taken from their arms of their grieving mothers. This was the experience of my Aboriginal wife, Dr Patrice Newell AM.

Indigenous people now represent just 3.8 per cent of Australia’s population. Their life expectancies are dramatically lower. They are vastly overrepresented in the prison system. A Royal Commission was necessary to examine the horrific statistics of “Aboriginal deaths in custody”. Good news? The referendum in 1967. The Mabo decision in 1992. Keating’s Redfern speech the same year. Rudd’s Apology in 2008. Will Saturday’s referendum on the voice be another significant moment in the history of black and white Australians, or a backward step into bigotry and despair? Another triumph for cruelty – that will need another Sorry Day in the future?

My oldest friend Barry Jones sees this as “our Brexit” – a chance for Australia to make a mistake of the same suicidal dimension as the Brits. And as in the Brexit vote, one where the Right are using fear and disinformation.(Talking about the Brits, it seems our new King favours constitutional recognition. Odd that ardent royalists including the former PMs John Howard and Tony Abbott aren’t mentioning this during the campaign.)

It’s true that a small minority of First Nations people will not be voting yes – but no community is monolithic. It’s also true that not every white person voting No is a racist. But it is also true that the No campaign is powered – and largely paid for – by the hard Right of Australian politics.

Which is why I stand with such First Nations friends as Noel Pearson, Marcia Langton and her daughter Ruby, with Lowitja O’Donoghue, Pat Dodson, Linda Burney and, yes, my wife Patrice and our proudly indigenous daughter Aurora.

Dorothea Mackellar loved her sunburnt country but, like the unpoetic Constitution, she failed to mention its original inhabitants in her epic poem. Too late for Dorothea, but not for us.