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