Multi-award winning filmmaker Rachel Perkins has a question for her fellow Australians. “Are you ready to acknowledge the first Australians, Indigenous Australians, in our founding document? Are your hearts big enough to do that?”

Perkins, who came to Canberra, the city of her birth, with fellow Indigenous leader Richie Ah Mat to watch the new Liberal senator Andrew Bragg make his first speech to parliament during the last sitting fortnight, tells Guardian Australia’s politics podcast the absence of constitutional recognition and a voice to parliament isn’t an Indigenous problem. “It’s an Australian problem,” she says.

Perkins says she is here to speak to the Australian people. “Will you back us?”

The acclaimed filmmaker says Malcolm Turnbull, by erroneously characterising the voice to parliament – the concept of constitutionally enshrined Indigenous representation outlined in the Uluru statement – as a “third chamber” of parliament, almost cut the recognition project “off at the knees”.

While Scott Morrison in the past has also deployed the same misleading language about third chambers, Perkins believes Morrison’s election victory, and his appointment of Ken Wyatt as minister for Indigenous Australians, has reset the national debate. “This is a new era in the parliament,” Perkins says.

There is a conservative government with a secure mandate, and Perkins believes a conservative government has the best chance of delivering the reform. “This government has to clear a pathway for the Australian people to decide on this issue,” she says. “It is not up to Aboriginal people to do this alone. This is a problem for Australia to resolve”.

“This goes to a very deep question – how do we Indigenous people partner with government to solve this crisis we have in communities? People like us are accused of being elites, about not caring what’s happening on the ground, but that’s not true. We see a partnership with government as a way of solving these problems.”

Wyatt put constitutional recognition back on the national agenda during Naidoc week. The first Indigenous person to hold the portfolio promised to work towards holding a referendum on Indigenous recognition within three years.

The minister has signalled he wants to persist with creating some model of the voice from the Uluru statement, but he indicated a representative body might be legislated, rather than enshrined in the constitution, which was the position outlined in the Uluru process.

Bragg tacitly endorsed constitutional enshrinement in his first speech, referencing recent arguments from the former chief justice Murray Gleeson. Gleeson said “a constitutionally entrenched but legislatively controlled” capacity for Indigenous people to have input into the making of laws about Indigenous people or Indigenous affairs “hardly seems revolutionary”.

But inserting the voice in the constitution looks like a deal-breaker for government conservatives who began a rearguard action against the process from the moment Wyatt flagged it.

Ah Mat, who is the co-chair of the Cape York Partnership, believes the representative body needs to be enshrined in the constitution.

“If it’s just legislated … they can say it’s too hard with the blacks, let’s get rid of it with the stroke of a pen.”

He says he can’t comprehend why this is it all complicated. “I don’t know why this is like Moses parting the Red Sea”. Ah Mat says the Australian experience with marriage equality indicates the country is of a mind to advance on social issues rather than shrink from the prospect of change.

“It’s like governments don’t know what to do with the black fellas. They are going to take over. Well we are not going to takeover, we want to make decisions to help government”.

Perkins says two things need to happen to ensure success. Morrison needs to lead, and people need to be patient while Wyatt goes through a process to co-design the model. Given opponents will mount scare campaigns, she says there needs to be a process of community engagement and education like there was with the equal marriage campaign.

She acknowledges there will be a cohort of Australians who will think resolving the place of the first Australians in the country’s founding document, and developing a new representative model isn’t necessary or relevant in modern Australia. “But I think most Australians have an appreciation that this country is very new and it has a depth that hasn’t been dealt with in our foundational document.”

Perkins says there were visceral fear campaigns mounted during the native title debates in the 1990’s but the lived experience is “native title has enriched our country”. She predicts recognition will run a similar trajectory. “We have to keep open minds and consider the facts. We have to have hope and move forward.”