Indigenous Voice to Parliament 2023: Australians reject Indigenous referendum

Australians have voted against proposals to change their constitution to recognise a formal body for Indigenous people which would give advice on laws.

A country's constitution is formed of the principles and rules a nation is governed by.

The outcome of the vote, which took place on Saturday, was met with disappointment by many including Australia's prime minister Anthony Albanese.

"We argued for this change, not out of convenience but out of conviction," he said.

"But when you do the hard things, when you aim high, sometimes you fall short and tonight we acknowledged, understand, and respect that we have.

"As prime minister, I will always accept responsibility for the decisions I've taken and I will do so tonight.

"This moment of disagreement does not define or divide us. We are not Yes or No voters, we are all Australians, and it is as Australians together that we must take our country beyond this debate."

A referendum is a vote in which all adults, eligible to vote, can take part, normally giving a "Yes" or "No" answer to a question.

The vote which took place on Saturday was called Australia's Indigenous Voice to Parliament referendum - also known as The Voice referendum.

The question asked to voters was whether they wanted to recognise their Indigenous people in their constitution, and whether they wanted to introduce an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice to Parliament.

This would be a formal body for Aboriginal Australians (also known as Indigenous people), so they could give advice to the Australian government on issues affecting their communities.

The Yes campaign said the vote was important for many Indigenous Australians who aren't currently recognised in Australia's 122-year-old constitution.

The No campaign said it would "permanently divide" the country and be unfair because it would give some Australians greater rights than others, although legal experts disagreed over whether that would be the case.

Indigenous people make up about 3.2% of Australia's 25.7 million population, and have historically faced many problems.

They did not have the right to vote until the 1960s. They generally have shorter life expectancies, poorer education outcomes and poorer health compared to non-Indigenous Australians.

The Yes campaign argued this is largely down to indigenous people not being asked about what solutions can be put in place to best help their community.

"Non-Indigenous people [are] making decisions about communities they have never visited and people they do not know," wrote one professor who signed an Uluru Statement.

But the No campaign said the Voice would be "a leap into the unknown" and that it hadn't been tested, and there wasn't enough detail about how it would operate.

If the reform had been passed, it would have been up to parliament to design how it would work in practice, the details of which would not be set out in the constitution.

The Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice was first recommended in 2017.

More than 250 Indigenous leaders came together at a summit to discuss how to best recognise the Indigenous people, who were the first to live in Australia.

The leaders called for an official voice in Parliament which would be recognised in the country's constitution. This was recommended in a document called the Uluru Statement from the Heart.

They said the change would give indigenous people in Australia the opportunity to provide advice on Australian laws, policies, and important matters affecting their lives.

However, the body would only be advisory, meaning it wouldn't be able to overrule parliament on decisions around legislation and policies.

The Yes campaign said the Voice would be an important change that would allow Indigenous Australians to take "a rightful place" in their own country.

The Australian Parliament currently has 11 Indigenous lawmakers who represent 4.8% of the total number of MPs, a slightly higher percentage than the Indigenous Australian population nationwide.

However, supporters of the Voice argued that MPs represent specific constituencies, which are different areas of the country, and not necessarily Indigenous interests more generally.

The No campaign said it feared the new body could act like a third part of the Australian Parliament and could potentially prevent certain legislation being passed, but the government ruled out that possibility.

Not all Indigenous people supported the change either.

Some said the Uluru Statement, in which the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice was recommended, doesn't represent all Aboriginal Australians.

Others said the introduction of the Voice would only be symbolic and is unlikely to lead to real change. They thought the campaign money would be better spent on immediate solutions to help the Indigenous population.

Other countries around the world have had similar Indigenous advisory bodies in place for many years.

The Sami people - who have inhabited northern Scandinavia for thousands of years - have had their own parliaments in Finland, Norway, and Sweden since the 1980s and 1990s, and their rights are recognised in the constitutions of all three nations.

In New Zealand the Treaty of Waitangi was signed at the point of colonisation in 1840 and by 1867 it had created dedicated seats for Māori in parliament. An advisory committee - the Waitangi Tribunal - has also been in place since 1975 to make sure Māori have a say in the policies that affect them.

Canada's Indigenous people have constitutionally enshrined treaty rights and the right to self-government. In 1982 an elected First Nations Assembly was created so that chiefs representing their communities could liaise directly with federal lawmakers.