Tuesday, 17 October 2023

Voice to Parliament

Evan MULHOLLAND (Northern Metropolitan) (22:05): (510) My adjournment is directed towards the Minister for Treaty and First Peoples. The action I seek is for the minister to consult with her federal colleagues to work towards ensuring practical outcomes for Indigenous Victorians and to continue to repair the immense damage they have done to the reconciliation project. In August I rose in this place and called for the Voice referendum to be sensibly abandoned. We knew it would not have support – only eight of 44 proposals for constitutional change have been approved, all with bipartisan support, and the polls had indicated for a long time that this had no chance of success. I will note, for those blaming the Liberal Party for the result, that 80 per cent of Labor seats voted no across the country.

This is because Australians value egalitarianism, which means everyone is equal under the law regardless of where their families come from and regardless of their creed, background, religion or other characteristics. We see that in the way many new Australians in the northern suburbs voted in the referendum on the weekend. My electorate is a very multicultural electorate, yet many booths emphatically rejected the proposal. I note that in the seat of McEwen in my electorate 60 per cent of the community voted no. In the seat of Calwell 55 per cent voted no, and in the seat of Scullin 62 per cent of Victorians voted no. In the seat of Maribyrnong in my electorate it was basically a dead heat but ticking towards a no. I was at a polling booth in Beveridge in my electorate, in the centre of McEwen, a working-class area, where many tradies walked in and said they were voting no. Some of the descriptions of these people in the outer suburbs have been quite unfortunate. I would suggest that someone who goes and gets an apprenticeship and learns a trade and is earning $200,000 a year is much smarter than someone with three university degrees.

It was unfortunate that the Prime Minister proceeded with his ill-fated proposal and left no room for compromise, which is why the referendum was considered so divisive by the community, including Victorians. Although this result does not represent a rejection of Indigenous Australians, I called for this referendum to be pulled because I did believe, and I still do, that it presented a risk to reconciliation. If the proposal had been for constitutional recognition in the preamble to the constitution, I suspect it would have succeeded, and I would have been out there campaigning for it.

The federal government and the Victorian Labor government, which supported this proposal, now must work to undo the damage they have done and which was caused by them putting forward and supporting the referendum. The action I seek of the minister is for her to consult with the federal government, listen to the needs of Indigenous people and work on the ground to achieve practical outcomes and repair the damage they have caused to reconciliation.