Recognition and Beyond

The following submission to the Joint Select Committee on Constitutional Recognition of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples will form the basis for a seminar to be held in Nowra in early August. We invite comments on the submission and for interested parties to contact either Bill Moyle, (moylelgc@yahoo.com) Gerry Moore (gmoore@habitat.org.au) or Peter Botsman (peter@peterbotsman.com)

Go to Joint Select Committee on Constitutional Recognition of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples

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Mr Ken Wyatt AM, MP, Chair and Senator Nova Peris OAM, Deputy Chair
Joint Select Committee on Constitutional Recognition of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples
PO Box 6100
Parliament House
Canberra ACT 2600
7 April 2014

Dear Mr Wyatt and Senator Peris

In making this submission, we should first comment on the historical significance of your appointments to this important Parliamentary Joint Select Committee,  and congratulate you both and wish you well in this work which has such potential symbolic and real benefit for the future of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples and the unity of the Australian nation.

It is only necessary to compare the composition of this Joint Select Committee with that of the Constitutional Conferences of the 19^th century to see the extent of change in Australia. Those Conferences were attended by delegates who were exclusively white and exclusively male. The great majority of them accepted without question the now thoroughly discredited Social Darwinism which identified Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples as members of an inferior race, doomed to extinction. The vision for the future of the Conferences’ delegates was a White Australia. All but a few hundred Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples who were already on the electoral rolls of mainly South Australia and the Northern Territory at the date of Federation, were deprived by them (Section 41 of the Constitution and the Commonwealth Franchising Act 1902) igh ourt decisinHigh Court decisionof the right to vote at Federal elections. [1] 

The persistence of racial prejudice is demonstrated by the fact that it has taken us over one hundred and twenty years since the Constitution was first debated at those Conferences to get around to proposing the removal from it of the last vestiges of racial prejudice.