Broken Heart: A True History of the Voice Referendum. By ShireenMorris (La Trobe University Press, in conjunction with Black Inc., 2024), 254 pp. $36.99 (paperback). ISBN 9781760645205
Year: 2024
Type: book-review
Abstract: In 2007, Indigenous leader Noel Pearson urged Indigenous Australians to be sceptical of Left and Right and to find the "radical centre."Broken Heart, a memoir by Shireen Morris (Director of the "Radical Centre Policy Lab" at Macquarie University Law School) of the 2023 Voice referendum, prompts further consideration of the limits of this strategy.When Morris began to advise Pearson on constitutional reform, he was a member of the Expert Panel that in January 2012 recommended constitutional amendments that included a right to racial non-discrimination.Critics labelling themselves "constitutional conservatives" attacked this proposal, predicting that such a right would be litigated in the High Court, enabling judges to tell the legislature and the executive what was lawful and unlawful in Indigenous policy.Believing that neither the Coalition nor Labor was ever going to endorse the Expert Panel's package, Pearson and Morris began dialogue with constitutional conservatives who supported recognising Indigenous Australians in the constitution as long as the amending words did not create such a justiciable right.They were searching for a "radical centre" path to constitutional recognition.As Morris explains, reforms issuing from the "radical centre" are blessed by "conservative co-ownership" (p.25).The resulting draft amendment (published in The Conversation on 20 May 2015) provided for an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander body to advise the Parliament and Executive Government.Through 12 First Nations Regional Dialogues, culminating in the National Constitutional Convention at Uluru in May 2017, Pearson advocated the Voice, constitutionally entrenched, as the form that constitutional recognition should take.The Uluru Statement from the Heart endorsed that call, but it also referred to Indigenous "sovereignty" and called for "truth-telling" leading to agreement-making.The Uluru Statement was thus a "radical centre" document, articulating two political syntheses: one reaching out to the Right, the other to the Left.When the Statement presented the Voice as constitutional recognition, it aligned with the "constitutionally conservative" view that if Indigenous Australians were to be recognised in the Constitution, the amending words should not create "rights."What the authors of the Statement conceded the Left is that Indigenous "sovereignty," never ceded, should be recognised through an agreement (a "Treaty").This combination of conservative and progressive elements reflected what Indigenous Australians had said at the Regional Dialogues.How to sequence the two reforms (Voice and Treaty) animated debate within the Australians Greens in 2002, resulting in the resignation of the sovereignty advocate Senator Lidia Thorpe in February 2023.In the political management of the Uluru Statement by the major parties 2017-2023, the priority of constitutional recognition was never in doubt, though they disagreed about whether that had to be in the form of a Voice to Parliament.Through decisions made by the major parties, the Voice became the "radical centre" proposal that Australians had to deal with first; the politics of
DOI: 10.1111/ajph.13038
Author: Tim Rowse
Institution: Western Sydney University
Language: English
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W4405809602