Sitting in the House of Representatives chamber in the old Parliament House in Canberra is a journey back in time.

Indigenous peoples are 5 per cent of the world's population but represent 15 per cent of global poverty. ( ABC News: Stephanie Zillman )

Sinking into the soft, green leather seats surrounded by old wood and the echoes of distant debates, the ghosts of politics past are everywhere.

This was the place of giants: Curtin and Menzies and Whitlam and Fraser; a place of plots and coups and protest; a place of big decisions: declarations of war and economic policy that would shape a nation.

Today different voices are being heard in this chamber; the voices of those dispossessed and marginalised; voices often silenced in our country.

In this house where Australian democracy took shape, they are asking a fundamental question: is democracy big enough to incorporate the rights and aspirations of those originally left out of the idea of democracy — denied citizenship or the vote or simply not counted?

Indigenous experience shared world-wide

Indigenous leaders and thinkers from around the world are in Canberra for the Australian National University's First Nations Governance Forum. They share a history and a journey.

Indigenous peoples are 5 per cent of the world's population but represent 15 per cent of global poverty.

What is true of Australia is true too of Canada, New Zealand, the US: Indigenous lives are marked by chronic illness, crippling unemployment, mass imprisonment, poor housing and social and cultural dislocation.

Each shares also a legacy of colonisation, of legislative discrimination, policies of often enforced assimilation and the struggle to find a legitimate political voice in nation states that have been imposed upon them.

Dancers mark Waitangi Day, which commemorates the signing on February 6, 1840, of the Treaty of Waitangi. ( Flickr/Tony )

We can learn from other countries

The question of Indigenous rights goes to the very heart of liberal democracy; it poses fundamental challenges.

Political scientists Nicolas Peterson and Will Sanders, in their book Citizenship and Indigenous Australians, ask:

"How is it possible for people from different cultural and historical backgrounds to be members of a common society on equal terms?"

They ask what is fair and equitable? Can the citizens of a nation have different rights? And if Indigenous people have distinct rights, they ask, "what will hold the Australian nation and society together?"

Delegates from New Zealand, Scandinavia and North America have spoken of how their nations have grappled with these big questions.

In Norway, Finland and Sweden, the Indigenous Sami people have their own parliament. ( SaamiResources.org )

In New Zealand the treaty of Waitangi in 1840, between the British crown and Maori chiefs, gave rise to the very notion of New Zealand's sovereignty — it was the Big Bang that created the modern New Zealand state.

There are seats reserved in New Zealand parliament specifically for Maori people.

In Canada and the United States, the first peoples were recognised as being the original sovereigns of the land, treaties were signed that remain enforced today (albeit sometimes contested, challenged and inadequate).

Australia remains the only Commonwealth nation not to have signed a treaty with Indigenous people.

In Norway, Finland and Sweden, the Indigenous Sami people have their own parliament; it coexists with the national parliaments and Sami people are fully participating citizens of their countries.

In those countries there is an acknowledgment that the nations are founded on the lands of two peoples — the Sami and the later settlers.

Where do Indigenous people fit in Australia?

The 2007 United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People, specifically sets out a commitment for the rights of self-determination, the rights of Indigenous people to protect culture and assert their own governance and economic development.

Australia — along with New Zealand, the United States and Canada — originally voted against the declaration; Australia subsequently supported it in 2009.

Australia has grappled often uneasily with the question of the place of Indigenous people in the modern nation.

At Federation in 1901 it was widely assumed Aboriginal people would die out; they were not counted among the population of the Commonwealth.

There is a long history of Indigenous activism, calls for parliamentary representation, treaties or constitutional recognition.

There have been significant high points: the 1967 referendum — the most successful in Australian history — to count Indigenous people in the census and allow the Federal Parliament to make laws for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders; the 1992 High Court Mabo decision overturning the doctrine or Terra Nullius (empty land) and acknowledging native title to land; and the 2008 apology to the Stolen Generations.

Celuia Mabo and Bonita Mabo, with grandson Bryan, celebrate the 1992 ruling ( Supplied: Trevor Graham )

In 2017, Indigenous representatives signed the Uluru Statement from the Heart, a document calling for a referendum to give Indigenous people a representative body in the Constitution — what has become known as "voice" — to advise Parliament on policy directed towards Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island communities.

Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull has rejected the proposal, but negotiations continue and a federal parliamentary committee is investigating ways forward.

In Victoria legislation has been passed to establish a treaty with Aboriginal people.

Return to the iron fist?

The question of Indigenous rights comes at a critical time for democracy globally.

Democracy is seen as being in retreat, or in fact in its death throes, fending off a resurgence of authoritarianism and illiberal populism.

Freedom House, which once counted the spread of democracy released a report, Freedom in the World 2015 — Discarding Democracy: the Return of the Iron Fist.

It found an erosion in civil liberties and rule of law, claiming that democracy was "under greater threat than at any point in the last 25 years."

A blowback against globalisation and multilateralism is posing new questions about identity and the role of the nation state.

This is the context for examining the recognition of the rights of Indigenous peoples: are liberal democracies, predicated on the primacy of the rights of the individual, compatible with the collective rights of groups?

Is democracy for individuals or groups?

Canadian philosopher Will Kymlicka acknowledges that groups' rights may appear antithetical to "existing conceptions of representative democracy", but there is also a long-standing practice of drawing the boundaries of local constituencies so as to correspond with "communities of interest'".

In an urban society for instance, rural and agricultural groups may warrant special consideration.

Mr Kymlicka though concedes that this can become "a source of major controversy when it involves racial groups".

Acknowledging the distinct claims of racial or ethnic groups often focuses on issues of separate representation or self-determination which potentially challenges the sovereignty of the state.

As philosopher Duncan Ivison has pointed out:

"The danger with the discourse of self-determination is the extent to which it encourages political mobilisation that fixes rather than pluralises political identities."

Very simply, we are not tied to any particular identity; in a healthy democracy we should be free to explore multiple and over-lapping affiliations.

It brings us back to the crux of recognising the rights of groups over its constituent individuals. It is not a dilemma easily resolved.

Democracy can support both

Mr Ivison has put forward the idea of a "post-colonial liberalism", that holds to fundamental liberal democratic principles while also acknowledging and incorporating the claims of colonised groups.

He calls it a "mutually acceptable coexistence".

That has been the theme of this forum; how to find a way for people to live together.

In this old chamber filled with the voices and the traces of those long gone; this place of Australia's past this week has heard new voices of Australia's future.

Matter of Fact with Stan Grant is on the ABC News Channel at 9pm, Monday to Thursday.