Peter Dutton pledges second referendum on Indigenous recognition if Voice vote fails

A commitment by Liberal Party leader Peter Dutton to hold a second referendum on Indigenous recognition is being criticised by Voice campaigners.

Transcript

00:00 This all came about yesterday when Peter Dutton said while speaking to Sky News that he would

00:07 absolutely commit to holding another referendum on Indigenous recognition should two things

00:12 happen.

00:13 Firstly, that the October 14 vote on a voice to Parliament fails and secondly, that the

00:19 Liberal or the Coalition is elected into government in the next election which we expect will

00:25 be around 2025.

00:27 Now what Peter Dutton is proposing to put forward at this next referendum should it

00:34 happen is a recognition only proposal.

00:37 Now that's about all of the detail that we have on it.

00:41 Peter Dutton hasn't outlined a specific set of words or a policy or pointed us towards

00:47 an example of what he would be looking to do but we do know that two similar recognition

00:52 proposals have actually failed in the past two decades.

00:57 They failed before even reaching a referendum.

00:59 So the first person to put this forward in recent years was John Howard in the early

01:05 2000s.

01:06 His idea was to put a preamble before the Constitution recognising Indigenous Australians

01:12 as the first people of Australia.

01:15 Then in 2012, Julia Gillard put forward a recognise campaign that eventually was pulled

01:25 five years later in 2017, again without reaching a national vote.

01:30 So what Peter Dutton wants to do is insert something into the Constitution that would

01:35 recognise Indigenous Australians as the first peoples of Australia but doesn't go any further

01:41 than that.

01:42 Now how that differs from the voice proposal is that the voice proposal is putting forward

01:49 to recognise Indigenous Australians as the first peoples of Australia so they have common

01:53 ground there but they want to do that through a voice to Parliament and that would be an

01:58 advisory body enshrined in the Constitution that the Federal Parliament would write the

02:04 laws and regulations on.

02:05 So the Federal Parliament would decide how many people are on it, which areas it represents,

02:09 how much public money it gets and what the laws would be around the representations that

02:15 that voice could make to the Parliament.

02:18 It's important to realise that the voice proposal came from the consensus reached at the Auld

02:23 La Rue Dialogues in 2017.

02:26 What has been sort of canvassed among a lot of Indigenous groups and Indigenous leaders

02:31 is the idea of recognition and many people are feeding back that recognition alone is

02:36 not what they want.

02:38 They want structural change alongside recognition because without those changes it would purely

02:44 be symbolic.

02:45 [BLANK_AUDIO]