Australia’s Voice referendum is tearing the country apart

Almost 250 years after European settlement, many of Australia’s Aborigines still face appalling socio-economic disadvantages compared to fellow Australians: lower life expectancy and school completion but high welfare dependency and incarceration rates, domestic violence, and endemic unemployment, truancy, alcohol and substance abuse. These are sad realities in such a prosperous nation as Australia.

Government statistics show overall per capita spending on an Indigenous person – about three per cent of the total population – is higher that for other Australians, funding health, welfare, education and employment programmes in a national effort known as ‘Closing the Gap’. Yet despite the billions spent over decades, that gap remains intractably wide.

Prime minister Anthony Albanese wants to close this gap by changing Australia’s constitution, calling a referendum today requiring a ‘double majority’ of both voters and the six states. He wants to constitutionally entrench a new body through which ‘Aboriginal and Torres Strait islanders can make representations to the parliament and the executive government on matters relating to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples’.