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Opinion | Australia’s ‘no’ vote a slap in the face for its indigenous people
- Referendum result shows a country still unreconciled with its brutal colonial history and the legacies of the First Peoples’ disadvantage and prejudice
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Offered an opportunity to do something for Australia’s indigenous people, most Australians have responded with a resounding “no”. The failure of the October 14 referendum to change the constitution to recognise indigenous people and create a representative body speaks volumes about a country that cannot get to grips with its violent settler history.
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With most votes counted, at least 60 per cent have rejected the change. The result is a slap in the face for indigenous Australians. Indigenous leaders have called for a week of silence “to mourn and deeply consider the consequence of this outcome”.
The referendum and its outcome cannot be seen in isolation from Australia’s fraught history with its First Peoples. In neighbouring New Zealand, for example, seats are reserved in parliament for indigenous Māori and an independent tribunal makes recommendations to the government on breaches of the Treaty of Waitangi, the 1840 agreement between the British Crown and the Māori.
But in Australia, there was no treaty with the indigenous people. British settlers took the continent by force, asserting that Australia was terra nullius, “nobody’s land” – negating an indigenous presence estimated to stretch back 65,000 years.
The 1901 federation of Australian colonies into one state was on the basis of a white Australia. Former prime minister Alfred Deakin, one of the federation’s architects, saw Aborigines as “the last remnant of a dying race which in a few years will have passed from the continent we have colonised”.
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Australia’s constitution reflected these sentiments. Until 1967, it banned laws on indigenous people and excluded them from the census.
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