My name is Professor Megan Davis.
I'm Pro Vice-Chancellor Indigenous at the University of New South Wales.
I'm also a Professor of Law and the Balnaves Chair
in Constitutional Law at the Faculty of Law.
I'm a Cobble Cobble woman from the Barrungam nation,
which is in south-west Queensland.
So as an Aboriginal scholar, I have never been someone that
is particularly fluent in theory, so I'm not a theoretical scholar.
I've always been a very practical scholar,
meaning I always roll my sleeves up and get involved
in law reform processes.
So I feel like my job as a scholar is to take what I've learned
and what I'm researching and apply it to the here and now.
The Uluru Statement from the Heart is a First Nations roadmap
for peace in this country.
For a very long time, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people have
been seeking some form of recognition in Australia's Constitution.
They've been seeking this recognition because when we look around the world
at other comparative Indigenous populations,
recognition in the legal structures and framework
of the state has a flow-on effect that benefits not just
Aboriginal peoples but the broader population as well.
Over the past decade or so, we've seen Closing the Gap fail.
So the indicators in terms of life, mortality, early education, employment,
we've seen the gap widen in terms of disadvantage
between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australia, and part of that is because
of the failure of our political elite to really grapple with what
is the problem that is at the heart of that disadvantage in communities.
So growing up we were acutely aware, of course, that we were Aboriginal.
My father was Aboriginal.
My mother is non-Indigenous.
But we always spoke about our family that were still living
on the reserve in Cherbourg, which is three hours north of Brisbane.
They were moved into reserves and missions
to ostensibly protect them, which is why they're called protection laws,
but, in fact, they were really brutal regimes
of oppression and subjugation.
Every aspect of Aboriginal lives were dictated
by these laws - who you could marry, who could you talk to,
whether you could pass down property to family, being able
to speak language.
It wasn't really, I suppose, until we went to a NAIDOC day
at Musgrave Park here in Brisbane, where I grew up,
and the Queensland Archives were asking Aboriginal people to sign up
to get their files from the protection period,
and so that's when we first received the huge bundle of files and papers
and letters on my grandfather, who grew up on Cherbourg.
So I've often thought about that and that moment where your entire
family is crying because the letters are so humiliating
and demeaning and undermine the dignity of who my people were as human beings.
My family history, in terms of that protection era,
absolutely influenced my decision to study law.
I wanted to understand better how the legal system had framed
and influenced the way in which my family had lived and what
they could do and where they could be in Queensland
and how that had an impact upon my life and how history manifests
in decisions that families make over the generations.
And so part of the work that we've been doing
with the Uluru Statement from the Heart is using that same law or the power
of law or the force of law to try and provide some structural equality
for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples.
The process that led to the Uluru Statement
from the Heart was quite complex.
I'd worked on it at UNSW for many, many years.
I'd researched a lot of Constitutions around the world that had
constitutional recognition and I looked at the processes that had led
to that constitutional recognition.
And we designed what we called the First Nation's Dialogues.
So the First Nation Dialogues with the constitutional meetings where
a group of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples were
selected by local land councils.
We capped the numbers at about 100 to ensure that the process was robust
and that everybody went through the same process together
and we had enough staff and enough resources
to manage those numbers.
It also had a historic consensus, meaning everybody endorsed the outcome
of all of the dialogues in 13 regions and that was
to ask the Australian Government for a referendum
on a constitutionally protected voice.
The Voice to Parliament is the reform that the Uluru Statement
from the Heart says is the most meaningful form
of recognition for First Nations peoples.
Many liberal democracies around the world create mechanisms such
as the Voice to Parliament to enhance Indigenous peoples'
participation in the democratic life of the state.
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people were
excluded from the drafting of the Australian Constitution.
In fact, the Constitution, when it came into effect in 1901,
excluded them expressly.
They weren't even counted in the Census.
It wasn't until 1967 that that was fixed.
The 1967 referendum was the highest 'Yes' vote in Australian history.
The work of the Uluru Statement from the Heart is
about moving Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people
within the constitutional framework from a position of neutral, which
is what happened in 1967, to something that
is much more empowering, and that is what constitutional
recognition is about.
There are three major reasons why the constitutionally enshrined Voice
to Parliament referendum is so urgent.
I mean, the first thing really is that the Constitution was passed
in 1901 and it's now 2021.
We still have no form of recognition and this is unusual in the world when
you take a look at Western liberal democracies
with significant Indigenous populations.
The second reason why a constitutionally enshrined voice
is so urgent is that, as the decades go on,
we see that the Commonwealth Parliament and the Commonwealth bureaucracy
and the state bureaucracies are incapable of closing the gap
in terms of disadvantage.
That's really apparent to all Australians.
And one of the reasons that people advocate
for a voice is that it's more likely to lead to quality laws
and policies that can actually change things on the ground.
The third really I think most serious reason why the Voice is urgent: a lot
of our old people who lived through the tail end
of the frontier wars, through the protection era,
through the assimilation and absorption era, a lot
of our old people are dying and what they said in the dialogues was that
they want some peace for their country, and that's a really important point,
I think.
I think now is the time because if we don't run at this
as a nation now, we lose this opportunity forever.
I was one of the first people - I was the first person
to read the Uluru Statement from the Heart.
I read it in the conference room and I read it out at Mutitjulu
at the foot of the Rock at Uluru.
It was a huge, huge honour to read it.
It was a very serious and solemn moment, and at the end
of reading it out, people just stood up and clapped and cried.
So it's one thing for our people - Aboriginal
and Torres Strait Islander people to go through a complex legal process
and then come out the other end and talk to government
about what that might look like but it's another thing
to involve the Australian people.
So we made a decision at the Rock that politicians aren't
going to help here, so we needed to explain to Australians this
is why we say we need this referendum and this amendment to the Constitution.
And so that's what was so powerful about reading it out.
It was this incredible logic, invitation to the Australian people,
and every line and every sentence is drawn from the dialogues.
It's drawn from the words and wisdom of our old people who participated
in those dialogues.
Up until the Uluru Statement, any demands or claims on rights
by Aboriginal people have been handed on a bark petition or a painting
to a Prime Minister but this time we decided no.
This time we decided the only way we will get change in this country is
to invite the Australian people to walk with us, and that's
because the Australian Constitution can only be changed
by the Australian people.
But the Uluru Statement from the Heart is saying to the Australian people,
"Meet with us at the Rock.
We have some grievances to share with you and to work through
and we want you to walk with us like we did in 1967 in a movement
of the Australian people for a better future".
Uluru is one of the most significant law reform
agendas I've been involved in because if we do get a referendum, it's going
to dramatically change our people's lives on the ground.