The Voice Referendum bill has passed the House скачать в хорошем качестве

The Voice Referendum bill has passed the House

https://linktr.ee/sharonclaydon Sharon Claydon MP speech from the House of Representatives 23rd May 2023. It's an enormous honour to stand in the Australian parliament to speak on this bill tonight. It's been a very, very long time coming, but we're getting close. I want to acknowledge the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples whose country we meet on each and every time this parliament sits, the Ngunnawal and Ngambri peoples. I pay my respects to their continuing culture and leadership of these lands and waters. I also want to pay respect to the traditional owners of the country from which I come from and represent in this Australian parliament, the Awabakal and Worimi peoples who have looked after the most beautiful land around Newcastle and surrounds—the creeks, the wetlands, the skies, the mountains. I also really want to acknowledge a lot of very important people who have played a critical role in my learning and my understanding, much of which took place before I came to this parliament, but there's not a single day I'm still not learning about the weight of our history in this nation and what it means to forge a just relationship with First Nations people. Referendums are momentous occasions. Changing the Constitution is really hard work. Those founding fathers—and they were all men—didn't anticipate that we were going to change it too often, and they made it pretty damn hard to do so. But it's wrong to think that they thought it was never to change, that it was not an organic document. There are some glaring omissions. Australian women know that. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples know that. This is our opportunity to make good on a really grave wrong and a wide gap within our Constitution. This is the birth certificate of this nation. It is a document of great importance, yet it fails to either recognise or, indeed, celebrate the extraordinarily rich and utterly unique part of Australia that is the First Nations peoples of these lands. It makes us different to any other country in the world. It's what we often celebrate, and yet, to date, we have not had the courage to ensure that our Constitution recognises the 65,000 years of prior occupation of these lands. I have had the great privilege in recent months to serve as a member of the Joint Select Committee on the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice Referendum. It was established to help guide this debate this evening, really, and to look at the draft proposed question that is to come before the Australian people. As others before me have said, it's quite a simple question that everyone will be asked in the coming months—that is: 'Do you agree to this proposed law to alter our Constitution to recognise the first peoples of Australia by establishing an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander voice? Do you approve of this proposed alteration?' People will be asked to write the word 'yes' or 'no'. I am personally deeply committed to a 'yes' vote and couldn't imagine anything else. But I also feel the weight of responsibility now to ensure that my community—indeed, all of our communities in this place—are making a very informed choice when they walk into that polling booth in the coming months. It's up to us to all take our journeys now to find the information that we need in order to be satisfied with the vote that we will cast. I mentioned John Maynard, the Aboriginal historian at the University of Newcastle. In fact, it was his grandfather Fred Maynard that headed up the Australian Aboriginal Progressive Association. When Professor Maynard was asked why he supports this Voice to Parliament, he said, 'My grandfather called for this almost a hundred years ago. How could I do otherwise?' That's not to say that people have unlimited trust in government in Australia. Experience would suggest otherwise. But, for some people, there is more than a century of family history of struggle to see this nation face its history squarely, own it and seek a just relationship. That's how I want Australians to think about this question—because once you've been on a journey of learning you have a couple of choices to make. You don't get to undo it, so you can choose to ignore it, I guess, or you can choose to act purposefully. That's my job in this parliament: to act with purpose, to represent the good people of Newcastle and to be their voice in this Australian parliament. But my voice tonight is in the hope that a lot of people who have been voiceless to date get to actually have their voices heard and that we as a nation might stop and take some time to listen and do the only thing that we can do when confronted with all of that history and all of that evidence, and that is to vote yes for a constitutionally enshrined voice when that question comes before us in the Australian parliament and before the nation.