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I’d also thought, until now, that the Uluru Statement from the Heart was just a nice one-pager. But it’s a lot more. Even though our Prime Minister Anthony Albanese denies it, to Parliament. The evidence seems to be that it is indeed. And a lot more detailed, of course.
The relevance? That there’s to be a referendum in Australia, before year’s end, on what’s called “The Voice”. That is for our First Nations peoples to have a Voice in parliament. It specifically says that it’s to implement the Uluru Statement in full. So it very much matters what that Statement contains. Is it just a gentle-sounding one-pager? Or a much more detailed list of demands and grievances? We need to know. In order to decide well how to vote in what’s going to be a very consequential referendum.
So far, the evidence seems to be that the Uluru Statement is indeed the much more detailed document which has claims for Reparations, for the payments to come from a proportion of GDP, for a Treaty, for recognition that the land of Australia always was and always will be the property of Indigenous Australians. How’s that going to work out? What happens to private property? (See “CASE study” below).
John Anderson makes the case for a No Vote, here.
ADDED: WA Premier Roger Cook, repeals the WA Aboriginal Heritage Act, on 8th August 2023, because it was causing problems of exactly the sort that one might reasonably expect from the Voice implementing the Uluru Statement. But the Voice can’t be repealed, as that Heritage Act has been. It’d be embedded in the Constitution. Unrepealable.
CASE study of problems with the Heritage Act, which had been enacted on 1 July. Only to be repealed on 8 August. I wonder, is that some sort of record? Way to go WA! Talk about not talking about! Not talking about the implications, early enough and in detail enough.
"Critics of the new cultural heritage laws claim they were “rammed through” parliament by Labor without proper consultation”.
Which is pretty much what you could say about Albo’s pushing the Voice through without admitting that it’s to implement 26 pages of the Uluru Statement, not just one, potentially as damaging as the WA Heritage Act that’s just been repealed in record time.
ADDED (ii): In the category of “this won’t age well”, is the ABC asking, shortly before the Labor Premier of WA canned the legislation: “Why is everyone scaremongering?”. Heh.
Prepare yourself to be amazed by the magnificence of the Juukan Gorge Sacred Site. It was this which was destroyed by Rio Tinto in its Iron Ore mine expansion of 2020, an act (legal at the time) which precipitated this whole WA Heritage Act debacle.
