1 year ago
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Review part of integrity agenda the Albanese government took to the 2022 election. Follow the day’s news live
Prof Davis stressed that the Voice is “not going to be a top-down mechanism” and stressed that “it’s going to be drawn from communities”.
I made this point to Leeser and Dutton in the meeting - we’re all talking about the same thing. We’re talking about our people in communities, you know, doing the hard yards of keeping our people together and flourishing, and trying to do better for our communities.
The key thing is how do they get that seat at the table? And that’s what the Constitution is about, it’s about not allowing the space for politicians to continually silence our voice. It’s to mandate it so that we do have a seat at the table to make sure that the policies and laws are of a better quality and they actually result in outcomes. Because right now, that’s not the case.
They’re required to listen, hear and consider the Voice, yes, but there’s no entity in the nation that can veto the work of the Australian parliament.”
We’ve always only been focused on the ‘yes’. We’ve spent five years fighting for reform, where straight off the bat a prime minister said no to us. We were disappointed and we woke up the next day and thought to ourselves, “Let’s just turn every ‘no’ into a ‘yes’.”
So, every time a prime minister has said no, every time a minister has said no, we’ve just taken it as a yes and kept working. So, we’re not looking at any negative consequences of a ‘no’ vote because it’s going to be a ‘yes’ vote.
All Australians can see that something has to change. This is not like the 1999 republic referendum, where they said, “It ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” All Australians can see that the status quo isn’t working, that something is broken, and it needs to be fixed.
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