A Charles Sturt University (CSU) academic warns that a plan to establish a panel of experts to advise the Federal Government on what form constitutional recognition of Indigenous Australians should take is unlikely to yield a result that is either substantive or useful. 

 

“The project is based on a misunderstanding of the function of a constitution, which is to create the institutions of government, to distribute power between them and to define the rights of the citizen,” Senior Lecturer in Law at CSU, Dr Bede Harris said.

 

“A constitution consists of rules of law, not statements of fact.  A statement ‘recognising’ the existence of Indigenous people would be simply to state the obvious, and would be no more useful than adding to the constitution a statement that Australia is in the southern hemisphere or that the sky is blue. 

 

“This is not to denigrate Indigenous Australians, to deny their status as the original inhabitants of Australia or to ignore the many injustices they undoubtedly suffered post-colonisation – it is simply to state that merely recognising the existence of Indigenous people would be of practical benefit to no-one, least of all to Indigenous people themselves.  

 

“An exercise where the end point is simply recognising the existence of Indigenous people is not only useless it is dishonest, because it gives the impression that some positive outcome for Indigenous people is in the offing, whereas its impact will at most be symbolic. 

 

“If the government has a genuine commitment to effecting constitutional change that would be of benefit to Indigenous people, then the initiative it is taking should be modified so as to investigate not just recognition of Indigenous people but constitutional protection of Indigenous rights.

 

“An initiative which invited public debate on a constitutional provision which protected the rights of Indigenous people to land, culture, language and autonomy would have real, rather than symbolic, impact, and would be worth the expense that the government is committing to the endeavour.

 

“It would also be consistent with the principles contained in the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, which the Rudd government ratified in 2009.